by Lydia Leong | December 1, 2011 | 1 Comment
All of us are used to going to travel sites, especially for airline tickets, and waiting a while for the appropriate results to be extracted and displayed to us. I recently saw Google Flight Search for the first time and was astonished by its raw speed — essentially completely instant. I frequently talk to customers [...]
Category: Industry Tags: CDN, Google, networking
by Lydia Leong | November 27, 2011 | Comments Off
As many people already know, Google is sunsetting Google Wave. This has led to Google sending an email to people who previously signed up for Wave. The bit in the email that caught my eye was this: If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache [...]
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by Lydia Leong | November 8, 2010 | 3 Comments
Those of you who are Gartner clients know that in the last year, my colleague Joe Skorupa and I have become excited about the emergence of software-based application acceleration via page optimization approaches, as exemplified by vendors like Aptimize and Strangeloop Networks. (Clients: See Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking, 2010.) This approach to acceleration enhances [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: AKAM, CDN, Google
by Lydia Leong | January 12, 2010 | 6 Comments
Google continues to successfully push Gmail into higher education, in an Australian deal with Macquarie University. (Microsoft is its primary competitor in this market, but for Microsoft, most such Live@edu represent cannibalization of their higher ed Exchange base.) That, by itself, isn’t a particularly interesting announcement. Email SaaS is a huge trend, and the low-cost [...]
Category: Industry Tags: Google, regulatory
by Lydia Leong | July 3, 2009 | 1 Comment
This is just a round-up of links that I’ve recently found to be interesting. Barroso and Holzle (Google): Warehouse-Scale Computing. This is a formal lecture-paper covering the design of what these folks from Google refer to as WSCs. They write, “WSCs differ significantly from traditional data centers: they belong to a single organization, use a [...]
by Lydia Leong | May 31, 2009 | Comments Off
While I’ve been out of the office, Google has made some significant announcements. My colleague Ray Valdes has been writing about Google Wave and its secret sauce. I highly encourage you to go read his blog. Google and Salesforce.com continue to build on their partnership. In April, they unveiled Salesforce for Google Apps. Now, they’re [...]
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by Lydia Leong | April 8, 2009 | 1 Comment
As anticipated, Java support on Google App Engine has been announced. To date, GAE has supported only the Python programming language. In keeping with the “phenomenal cosmic power, itty bitty living space” sandboxing that’s become common to cloud execution environments, GAE/Java has all the restrictions of GAE/Python. However, the already containerized nature of Java applications [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: appdev, Cloud, Google, open source
by Lydia Leong | March 13, 2009 | Comments Off
For those of you who haven’t been following Google’s updates to App Engine, I want to call your attention to a number of recent announcements. At the six-month point of the beta, I asked when App Engine would be enterprise-ready; now, as we come to almost the year mark, these announcements show the progress and [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: appdev, Cloud, Google
by Lydia Leong | February 27, 2009 | Comments Off
A few days ago, an unexpected side-effect of some new code caused a major Gmail outage. Last year, a small bug triggered a series of cascading failures that resulted in a major Amazon outage. These are not the first cloud failures, nor will they be the last. Cloud failures are as complex as the underlying [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, complexity, Google, operations
by Lydia Leong | February 3, 2009 | Comments Off
I heard a radio ad today for Google Federal. It sounded like every other “please, government IT purchasing person, buy our stuff” ad that you hear on news radio in Washington DC. It was a far cry from the sort of ad that one expects to hear from Google, and to hear a federal-targeted ad [...]
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