netzooid

Seeing that I’m not inclined to write a whole series of entries, I’m going to give a new format a go: summarizing some random thoughts from the week on different topics in one blog entry. Basically I’m lazy and this makes me feel better about writing short snippets because I can combine them and make it one long post. Don’t expect much value add.

Twitter

Seems I’ve given in and become an active twitter user. My ID is dandiep. The conclusion so far is that people seem to enjoy drinking and tweeting about it. I’m drinking a Ale to the Chief right now, I suppose I should go let the world know…

Scalability

I’ve been looking at some of the cool stuff coming out of companies that have big scalability requirements. The first project that I was pointed to recently is Cassandra. I’m guessing I’m way behind the times because I had never heard of it. It’s the P2P storage platform that they use at Facebook. Will someone please add some friggin docs to this thing?

The second comes via Geir. It’s an Amazon Dynamo implementation called Voldemort. It was developed by LinkedIn (primarily/all by Jay Kreps?) and appears to be pretty simple to use. On the flip side it is very simple with just keys and values. Cassandra definitely goes beyond that and allows you to define schemas and indexes of sorts.

Are people using any tools to help them deal with the added code complexity of these non relational databases? Is there an opportunity for a framework to help deal with constraints, eventual consistency, etc on top?

Mule

Did you know Mule has a blog? Of course other people blog about us too. Jerome from Noelios just blogged about our Restlet connector. Restlet is pretty cool and I think the URI template routing insnide Mule can come in pretty handy…

SOA

Is it dead? How can something be dead when I wasn’t sure what it was to begin with?

I would prefer to kill the term. I would group part of what people refer to as SOA as systems design. Thinking about a problem wholistically. This is just part of good software engineering. For instance, the guy who has 6 services which do the same things for different parts of the company. Investing to consolidate these services will pay off. Investment and return. ROI. Why do we need to call this SOA?

Also, you cannot separate this from the technology. How am I going to achieve a shared service which needs to be monstrously scalable? The outcome of this decision probably has big effects on your process.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Random.