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Solaris, DTrace and Rails
We committed ourselves to Solaris as our base operating system two years ago as Solaris was becoming OpenSolaris. We needed a solid operating system that was 32/64bit, can manage lots of CPUs and RAM, one that we could contribute to, and we realized that three features would be a competitive advantage if we became experts…
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On Accelerators
Fundamental Philosophy and Origin Accelerators rose from two needs: a standardized stack capable of serving our own growing applications and the appearance last year of large companies and startups needing “enterprise rails”. Our applications, like Strongspace and the Joyent Connector are over 2 years old now, were some of the earliest revenue-generating Rails applications and…
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How to completely ruin a great piece of server kit (regarding the Sun X4200 M2)
Here’s how you do it. First, you take what is considered a pinnacle of x86 server design, the glorious x4200 where every single chip has been selected for maximum reliability and performance. Like, say, the quad on-board Intel Gigabit Ethernet chips. Then, you create a new revision called the x4200 “M2” and replace the first…
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The Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network
Just as a technical aside (from all this “website” talk), the Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network (site) has launched and looks great. It’s our preferred way of getting things like ejabberd and tsung installed on our systems. We contribute the “SunOS” (Solaris) packages to the project, so have fun.
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A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels
Back in August, I posted about a good-sized evaluation I was going to start doing about the horizontal scaling of different proxy engines and load-balancers across lots of mongrels. But in short, we’ve stayed with F5’s BIG-IPs for at least one additional reason beyond their ability to handled gigabits of traffic across many many backend…
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The 10% “rule” for infrastructure costs
I was reading GigaOM the other day, specifically Google’s 2006 Money Shot, $10 billion in revenues, and his quote from Google’s earning release caught my eye: Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $307 million, or 10% of revenues, in…
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Jason Hoffman will be doing a tutorial at RailsConf 2007 in Portland
I’ll be doing a half-day tutorial at RailsConf 2007 Thursday morning titled Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up. The abstract is: Ruby On Rails is an opinionated framework for developing web applications and has a considerable amount of flexibility in the back end. While the framework is quite successful in removing the need…
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Origins of ZFS
Great article on the origins of ZFS by Al Riske. (Found link from Gruber on Daring Fireball.) We’ve written about ZFS many times on this weblog. Oh, and Bill and Jeff aren’t as goofy as they appear in the article. Jeff (on the right) is actually a fine wine expert in addition to roasting his…
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On Grids, the Ambitions of Amazon and Joyent
There’s a lot of talk lately about “grids”. And Amazon. The word “grid” has reappeared in marketing materials and we’ve seen it brought up during the the emergence of companies offering utility computing and storage products (or at least they want you to think that’s what they’re really offering). There’s also definitely been a PR…
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9.5 hours until Java is open-sourced
Sun is releasing the source to Java SE, Java ME, and Glassfish in nine and a half hours, and then releasing the rest of the stuff around the spring of 2007. Most interestingly they’re releasing it under the GPLv2 license. Floyd Marinescu has a great explanation as to ‘Why GPL?’. Once it hit midnight eastern…