Developers discuss ways to program in cloud environments
October 9, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Developers are starting to learn that clouds don’t always mean rain. But as Amazon, Google and eventually Microsoft work to build their stratospheric infrastructures, developers are still trying to figure out just what building applications for the cloud really entails. Are proprietary cloud APIs an anathema, or are they the quickest possible route to fast scalability?
David Intersimone, evangelist for CodeGear at Embarcadero Systems, said the current ecosystem of clouds is relatively tolerant of developer holy wars over protocols and transports. “The nice thing for developers is that you can pick protocols and you can pick transports. To me, it’s what that service provides. They’re making the architectural choices at Amazon, they’re making them at Microsoft, when they start opening up their clouds. From a developer standpoint, it’s right mouse click, get the interfaces and start using them. As long as you have rich support for different protocols and different transports, the tooling should be able to serve up the interfaces in the right way.”
Since a service such as Amazon’s makes architectural choices before development even begins, some of those decisions could tie your application to a specific cloud. That hasn’t stopped some users from building open-source alternatives and knockoffs. John Spurlock’s proof-of-concept baltic-avenue application, for example, brings Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) representational state transfer API into Google’s application engine, letting users mash up two competing cloud hosting services.
Rod Boothby, vice president of platform evangelism at cloud hosting company Joyent, said LinkedIn discovered a number of neat tricks to save itself time and money when building its Bumper Sticker Facebook application, which is hosted in a Joyent cloud. Along the way, the IT team working on the project discovered that a large amount of the hosting job could be offloaded to Facebook by pushing images into Facebook’s caching service. With a few simple tweaks to the code and the load balancers in front of its cloud, LinkedIn managed to push almost 80% of its hosting load to Facebook, saving bandwidth and money.
Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, Amazon, Google, Microsoft
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/32954
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Branching and merging: the heart of version control
Providers hold their own views of the landscape, but the Git SCM system is drawing looks from them all
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Microsoft pivots toward business intelligence
The goal is to make business intelligence accessible "to the masses"
|
|
From the Editors: Node.js is unruly, but that’s where the fun is
The time to get involved with Node.js is now; Hadoop is about to break its own barriers
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
|
Microsoft pivots toward business intelligence
The goal is to make business intelligence accessible "to the masses"
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
|
Facebook claims hacker cred
Facebook's SEC S-1 filing form includes a short essay on the Hacker Way by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
|
|
Ryan Dahl steps down
Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, steps back from his position as gatekeeper for the project.
|
|
Bloomberg opens its API
Bloomberg's APIs could lead to a future standard for accessing market data.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|