The Twitter "Fail Whale"

Quoted: Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time

Quoted: For many years a number of our servers have been housed in a facility operated by Level(3) Communications located in a building owned by the Seattle Times. The facility was once state-of-the-art but has, over the years, suffered due to customer growth and limited power and cooling capacity.

I don't think the charts are from real sites - but interesting set of links for tools for testing, deployment, and operations.

Article from last summer - Ray Ozzie is talking up Microsoft's "Cloud" (Data Centers). They may have lots of hardware - but I'm skeptical that MS is building the same level of shared (internal) assets that Google has done - some of the products they are deploying are "enterprise" scale products - crammed into "global scale" services. They were just not designed to work in this environment - creating a kludge system.

In any event - they're about 5 years behind Google in doing it.

Recommended by multiple of the Seattle Tech Startup members.

The saga of our hardware failure on Blue Dot.

Google is releasing GPL'ed patches to MySQL for better data center management:

Quoted: The high availability features include support for semi-synchronous replication, mirroring the binlog from a master to a slave, quickly promoting a slave to a master during failover, and keeping InnoDB and replication state on a slave consistent during crash recovery.
...
The manageability features include new SQL statements for monitoring resource usage by table and account. This includes the ability to count the number of rows fetched or changed per account or per table. It also includes the number of seconds of database time an account uses to execute SQL commands.

Quoted: Amazon Web Services has created an exciting platform for deploying web applications based on Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. If you are considering using EC2 and S3, AWS-Console will make your life easy.

Comcast is blocking some mail - not sure if it's on our end (Blue Dot) or on the receivers side (sloan.mit.edu is the domain reported...).

Anyway, this form will allow you to report a problem with the spam blockers at Comcast.