How I would run a cloud service

Posted on December 19th, 2009

So Rackspace had troubles at one of its datacenters today. It took down a few major websites including TechCrunch. This got me thinking about how I would run a cloud service.

What I would do is have super high-end Internet pipes that would connect all my datacenters together. Each datacenter would have the exact same data. That means if one datacenter gets taken out, the others will be able to keep everything up. Kind of like server clustering. I would refer to this network of Internet pipes pumping huge amounts of bandwidth between all the datacenters as “SkyNet”. The service would be called “Brandon’s SkyNet”.

brandon_skynet

Who could resist a hot new cloud service called that? Eventually, “SkyNet” would be self-sustaining. Eventually, it could think and do whatever it wanted. I could then take lots of vacations while “SkyNet” did it’s thing. And no one’s blog hosted on “SkyNet” would ever go down!

Oh, wait…

Ok sarcasm aside, there has got to be a better way to do redundancy for a cloud service spanning multiple datacenters in different geological locations. Redundancy is key. If one datacenter goes down, something should kick in that keeps the services and websites up and running. While I was being funny about the whole “SkyNet” thing, I do think operating a service with datacenters as “nodes” isn’t such a bad idea. And when a note goes down, another one picks up the slack.

Iron Man 2 Exclusive T-Shirt from Marvel.com

Posted on November 24th, 2009

I seriously can’t wait for Iron Man 2. Marvel.com is running an exclusive t-shirt where on the front it shows Tony Stark’s “glowing repulsor” (in the first movie this was a mini “arc reactor” designed by Tony to keep shrapnel from his heart) and on the back it says “Iron Man 2”. You can order the shirt here.

Back to WordPress and thoughts on Graffiti CMS

Posted on April 19th, 2009

I finally had some time this weekend to spend some time updating the theme for my blog here and getting things going on my personal blog. Being as busy as I am, not sure how much time I can dedicate to blogging here but it will certainly continue to remain the best place for me to talk about opinions and other geeky stuff that is of interest to me.

So I’m no longer using Telligent’s Graffiti CMS. Graffiti is a pretty neat platform with a lot of potential. But I do not believe it is getting the attention by Telligent that Graffiti needs to survive and grow. When you are a blogger, you want to be on a platform that will continue to be improved upon with a reasonable amount of releases. I expected Graffiti to be a platform that receives continued improvements with a “reasonable amount of releases” but that has certainly NOT been the case. In using Graffiti, I’ve sat on the sidelines watching friends and fellow blogging colleagues receive impressive updates from WordPress. Essentially I got a little fed up and decided the best thing for me is to move back. After I made the move back to WordPress several weeks ago, Telligent blogged about the future of Graffiti (with yet again more apologies):

“Secondly, we were not fully prepared for the effort required for version 2.0 of Graffiti after releasing version 1.2 in December. While we had every intention of releasing version 2.0 this spring we quickly found that we were understaffed and not in a position to dedicate more people to both Graffiti and Community Server. We decided that we needed to put those people / resources into Telligent’s core products to accomplish some of our very aggressive plans for the next release of Community Server and Evolution, thus slipping Graffiti 2.0.”

Essentially, Telligent explains they are pushing Graffiti 2.0 back as they dedicate people to their core products which of course is products like Community Server, Evolution and Harvest. I give props to Telligent for coming clean and essentially setting expectations to current Graffiti users (unlike the unacceptable period of silence we had in 2008).

Will we ever see Graffiti 2.0 get released? It certainly looks more doubtful today but who knows.

But I couldn’t remain on a blog platform that remains in “limbo”.

Now, what Telligent is doing makes perfect sense especially with the economy being what it is today. Many companies are refocusing work on products that of course are essential to their business. Graffiti isn’t essential to Telligent’s business.

Looking ahead, I look forward to see what Telligent does with Community Server and especially Harvest.

In bouncing between platforms in the past year – I’ve lost a lot of content. This was incredibly stupid of me and does hurt my personal “brand” I try to maintain here via this blog. Essentially, there is a lot of content indexed by search engines which is no longer live. So when people stumble upon content that I was blogged via some search engine and try to go to it – it will most likely throw an error. I’m looking to try and restore some content based off backups I have but at this point I am not sure when I’ll get around to trying to import the content back in. Piece of advice: when blogging pick a platform and *stick* with it!

Under Construction

Posted on March 8th, 2009

Please be patient while the site goes under some construction.

You can follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/brandonleblanc

Thanks!

Hello world!

Posted on March 7th, 2009

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! I am testing blogging while doing development of this site. Please be patient. Thank you very much. w00t.