For a client I was asked today to run some of our software on S3/Cloudfront. Amazon released Cloudfront as beta a few days ago, but as this client is releasing a new, media rich, platform this week, it seemed only smart to at least test it out.
If Cloudfront wouldn’t work as expected for now (because of it’s beta status), we could always move to using S3 urls until the Cloudfront release.
Starting to use S3 from our own CDN (Infiniscale) seemed quite simple; I simply had to rewrite the file/directory drivers of our frame to support S3/Cloudfront. As I have no idea how to support direct authentication to Amazon urls (if that is even possible), I made a Cloudfront driver instead of an S3 driver, as the client is ok with full access to all files, no authentication.
Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) is one of my favorite gurus. The guy has charisma, vision and is very smart. He was, on many occasions ahead of his time and it proved to be very lucrative on all (as far as I know) of them.
Having said that, I must say I’m an avid hardware and hosting freak. I run more than 200 servers in different locations around the world and a lot of those servers I built with my bare hands (yep, I risk the static electricity stuff; you don’t look quite so cool putting in dimms with a little bracelet on; never went wrong so far. knock-on-wood).
I run mostly Debian on my systems (Etch or Sarge) and it usually runs fine. We don’t have many hardware breakdowns (buy expensive hardware; it really is better) and be nice to your systems; don’t overload them, use monitoring etc. Problem is, small sites sometimes grow big and then the scaling thing starts. Although we don’t sell cheap hosting accounts, we don’t have resources to buy SANs, solid hardware load balancers etc. We do everything with open source software and it works, mostly.
Most business folk have had a common dream for years now; to assemble applications from small building blocks. This idea and that dream, in different forms, has been there for 40-50 years and has succeeded in different forms, but not yet how the business would like to see it (things like COM, DCOM, CORBA and before that a lot of more proprietary attempts by big integrators like Cap Gemini).
A lot of hype surrounding the web 2.5-3.0 and widgets is generated because of exactly this: none technical users being able to compose webpages from building blocks which are simple and easy to use. A bit too simple I think personally. In this article I present an overview of the current portlet niche market and the players. If I am forgetting anyone please let me know and I’ll add them.
As a portlet fan at my company, I was wondering how the current widget hype affects the portlet market. As widgets, in my view, have the same principles as portlets we have been creating for years, I don’t really saw why widgets became such a hyped thing in the blogosphere and beyond. Even Wordpress in which I wrote this has drag & drop widgets!