Lydia Leong

I had an hour to kill today after a client didn’t show for a call… everyone’s taken off for T-day, I guess.
Since Rackspace has a 30-day money-back guarantee on Mosso at the moment, along with a nice Thanksgiving discount making the first month just $20, I decided to sign up for an actual account, on [...]

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Akamai is a software company. It is not, fundamentally, an infrastructure company. You could blow up their network of servers from orbit, and most of the value of the company would be preserved. It’s a company that runs on its intellectual property, the breadth and depth of its feature set, and, ultimately, its ability to [...]

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My blog here on the Gartner Blog Network represents just a percentage of my posts to my personal blog — i.e., it’s a partial mirror of my personal blog. The only posts that go here but not there are posts of a GBN-administrative nature, like this one.
I try to keep the posts that I mirror [...]

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I had some time to kill on a train today, and I amused myself by trying out the API for Cloud Files.
I decided I’d build something mildly useful: a little shell-like wrapper and accompanying tools for dealing with Cloud Files from the command line. So I cranked out a quick “ls”-like utility and a [...]

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I’m now trialing three different basic CDNs, having each of them deliver exactly one image off the same front page of a website: Amazon’s CloudFront, Rackspace’s Cloud Files CDN (a Limelight Networks partnership), and SimpleCDN.
SimpleCDN has turned out to be the overwhelming winner in terms of initial set-up — you can simply point it at [...]

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It’s official: Rackspace’s Cloud Files can now be distributed via Limelight’s CDN.
The Cloud Files CDN works exactly like announced: drop your files into Cloud Files, push a button, have them served over the Limelight CDN. It’s 22 cents flat-rate, without origin fees. I’ve discussed this deal before, including in the context of Amazon’s CloudFront, and [...]

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Amazon’s previously-announced CDN service is now live. It’s called CloudFront. It was announced on the Amazon Web Services blog, and discussed in a blog post by Amazon’s CTO. The RightScale blog has a deeper look, too.
How CloudFront Works
Basically, to use the CloudFront CDN, you drop your static objects (your static HTML, images, JavaScript libraries, etc.) [...]

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Investors keep gnawing persistently at the issue of data center overcapacity and the colo market, but it doesn’t look like too many people are thinking about potential overcapacity in the cloud infrastructure market and what that means in the medium-term, economic-downturn scenario.
Many of the emerging cloud infrastructure service providers (”cloud hosters”) are building substantial chunks [...]

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Much has been made of the theoretically democratizing effect of electronic marketplaces, like the iPhone store. But it’s worth noting that such marketplaces can be, like the iPhone store, gated communities, not free-for-alls where anyone can hawk their wares.
On Friday, Google was set to launch a voice recognition app on the iPhone. Now we’re being [...]

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Here’s a quick round-up of some of my recently-published research.
Is Amazon EC2 Right For You? This is an introduction to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, written for a mildly technical audience. It summarizes Amazon’s capabilities, the typical business case for using it, and what you’ve got to do to use it. If you’re an engineer looking [...]

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