Lydia Leong

Cloud forces configuration management discipline.
As we shift more and more towards provisioning from images, rather than building operating systems from scratch, installing packages, and configuring everything, we move towards the holistic build becoming the norm — essentially, the virtual appliance. Tools companies like rPath and Elastra are taking slices of what should probably be part [...]

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Last week, Rackspace made a bunch of announcements about its cloud strategy. I wrote previously about its deal with Limelight; now I want to contemplate its two acquisitions, Jungle Disk and Slicehost. (I have been focused on writing research notes in the last week, or I would have done this sooner…)
Jungle Disk provides online storage, [...]

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I’ve been working on a note about Amazon EC2, and pondering how different the Web operations culture of Silicon Valley is from that of the typical enterprise IT organization.
Silicon Valley’s prevailing Ops culture is about speed. There’s a desperate sense of urgency that seems to prevail there, a relentless expectation that you can be the [...]

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I noted previously that the Microsoft CDN study, titled “Measuring and Evaluating Large-Scale CDNs”, had disappeared. Now its lead author, Microsoft researcher Cheng Huang, has updated his home page to note that the study has been withdrawn.
Also removed from his home page, but still available from one of his collaborators, is a study from earlier [...]

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Amazon made a flurry of EC2 announcements today.
First off, EC2 is now out of beta, which means that there’s now a service-level agreement. It’s a 99.95% SLA, where downtime is defined as two or more Availability Zones within the same region, in which you are running instances, are unavailable (your running instances have no external [...]

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Rackspace announced yesterday, as part of a general unveiling of its cloud strategy, a new partnership with Limelight Networks.
Under the new partnership, customers of Rackspace’s Cloud Files (formerly CloudFS) service — essentially, a competitor to Amazon S3 — will be able to choose to publish and deliver their files via Limelight’s CDN. Essentially, this will [...]

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Akamai made an advertising-related announcement today, introducing something it calls Advertising Decision Solutions, and stating that it has agreed to aquire acerno for $95 million in cash.
acerno (which seems to belong to the e.e. cummings school of brand naming) is a small retailer-focused advertising network, but the reason that Akamai acquired it is that they [...]

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I was recently briefed by MediaMelon, a just-launched CDN offering a “video overlay network”. The implications of their technology are worth considering, even though I think the company itself is going to have a difficult road to travel. (MediaMelon has two customers thus far, and is angel-funded; it is entering an extremely tough, competitive market. [...]

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I’ve been grappling with finding the right balance between blogging and writing actual research notes. I am an all-at-once writer — I’m usually at my best when I sit down and write an entire research note at one go, so it comes out as one coherent whole. A research note is something that has usually [...]

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I’ve been thinking about the way that the economics of cloud computing infrastructure will impact the way people write applications.
Most of the cloud infrastructure providers out there offer virtual servers as a slice of some larger, physical server; Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Joyent, Terremark Enterprise Cloud, etc. all follow this model. This is in contrast [...]

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