Quoted: Current high end relational database management systems provide for different criteria to split the database. They take a partitioning key and assign a partition based on certain criteria. Common criteria are:

Nothing too surprising here...but that's what makes it useful. Helps you understand the free tools that are generally used in operating scalable Web services.

Quoted: Ask Ron - our Systems Engineering Lead - the exact number of servers we have in production and he’ll probably respond with, “I don’t honestly know.” I can say we’ve got dozens of web servers and dozens more DB servers. I can say with certainty it takes six specialized graph database servers to run the Recommendation Engine and we have another six to ten machines that serve files from MogileFS

I have been pretty impressed by this and am seriously considering moving Faves from our own data center to this "cloud" infrastructure.

The nicest feature is the "multi-server" control panel and api that enables you to deploy and manage load-balanced cloud servers. They have categorized their images as "load balancers", "web/app servers", and "database servers" which removes a lot of installation steps (e.g. you don't have to install MySql yourself). They also give you a generous amount of public and private ip addresses.

The sales rep assured me that they will be around for awhile, since the company (ServePath) is financially sound and has been around since 1999. But, I need to confirm that part.

The dealbreaker is that they don't have cloud storage yet. I called the sales team, and the rep said they will be launching that within 6 weeks. The first 100GB will be free, and subsequent storage is $0.15 per gig per month.

This is a nice way to segment the cloud computing industry.

Quoted: This insightful post on the RightScale blog recently got me thinking. The term Cloud Computing is much too vague. People want and need slots or segments

Was curious if there was an elastic computing offering for Windows. Seems like there are a few, and Microsoft is planning to launch its own in October.

Quoted: A few companies have attempted to offer on demand Windows clouds including Terremark's "The Enterprise Cloud" (VMware based) and Gogrid. But both have yet to release an API for programmatic access, so there usefulness in a truly "elastic computing" environment is questionable.

Amazon is down. Outages happen even at the top sites.

Quoted: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

This explains why TwitterSync has not been working the past week.

Quoted: That's the difference. The Twitter app uses the Twitter API while TwitterSync uses IM - if IM is working, TwitterSync is faster and can update more often.

I've been waiting for something like this.

Quoted: Amazon DevPay removes the pain of having to create or manage your own order pipeline or billing system. It allows you to quickly sign up customers, automatically meter their usage of AWS services, have Amazon bill them based on pricing you set, and collect payments.

Quoted: A truly scalable ASP.NET Web site makes optimum use of the thread pool. That means making sure request-processing threads are executing code instead of waiting for I/O to complete. If the thread pool becomes saturated due to all the threads grinding away on the CPU, there's little you can do but add servers.
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However, most Web apps talk to databases, Web services, or other external entities, and limit scalability by forcing thread-pool threads to wait for database queries, Web service calls, and other I/O operations to complete.