All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 1, 2006
In the fine grained services approach that we use at Amazon, services do not only represent a software structure but also the organizational structure. The services have a strong ownership model, which combined with the small team size is intended to make it very easy to innovate. In some sense you can see these services as small startups within the walls of a bigger company.
All Things Distributed
JULY 15, 2006
If done well a graph representation of data can reveal a lot of information about the structure of the data. And with particular care graphs can even become art. Sala has achieved this by building a very nice graph representation applet for web pages. If you visit this posting you’ll see some really cool graph representations.
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All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 15, 2006
There will be lots of stories remembering Al Shugart as “Uncle Al”; these stories will be filled with love and fun, and lots of good laughter. They will portrait Al as a good natured loving mentor and an unconventional industry maverick, but there was so much more to this man.
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 23, 2006
I have been easing my way back into Amazon life by visiting the Amazon Development Center Scotland (ADCS), located in the outskirts of Edinburgh. Before joining Amazon I was always skeptical whether distributing development could actually work. The overhead in communication, lack of quality personal contact and handling time-zones always seemed like barriers that were too high to overcome, and I have seen many cases fail.
All Things Distributed
JULY 9, 2006
Zidane is a brilliant player, so it is sad to see his international career end this way. It was a very bizarre moment in an otherwise rather open match. Italy ruled during the first half, but the French had control over the second half and the extra time. Again Henry showed that he is not the cold killer he should be.
All Things Distributed
JUNE 20, 2006
Whenever I end up in Vegas I am continuously amazed by the magnitude of the way things are implemented here and at the same time the superficiality of it all. Normally I take a stroll north or south of the strip to ground me and get back some sense of reality.
All Things Distributed
JUNE 18, 2006
I am on the road this week (I am speaking at Oracle GMM, Garner Enterpise Architecture & Supernova). The first stop is in Las Vegas. This is on the sports board in Vegas: Personally I think the Argentinians look a lot more on fire than the Brasileiros. Of course I am not rooting for either team.
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All Things Distributed
MAY 25, 2006
Another great new store launched today: Amazon.com Grocery An Amazon store filled non-perishable grocery items all eligible for Prime and Super Saver Shipping. An important new feature was launched alongside of it: Shopping Lists. This is like a wish list but you can use it for repeat purchases, different quantities and more.
All Things Distributed
APRIL 1, 2006
In order to get closer to their customers, humanize Amazon, increase sales, and stay modern, Amazon.com has decided to make all Instant Messenger (IM) handles of its employees public. This way Amazon.com customers will get unprecedented access to the talented engineers at Amazon to answer all their questions, or just to have an interesting conversation about a new book or that old sci-fi movie.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 15, 2006
On the A9 Developer weblog there is an article today on he SiteInfo feature that was until now only available when you used the A9 Toolbar. They now have developed a Firefox extension that will give you the same functionality. Normally the siteinfo tab gives you the Alexa information about a site: traffic ranking, reviews, etc.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 30, 2006
Scalability is frequently used as a magic incantation to indicate that something is badly designed or broken. Often you hear in a discussion “but that doesn’t scale” as the magical word to end an argument. This is often an indication that developers are running into situations where the architecture of their system limits their ability to grow their service.
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 14, 2006
I have been off the grid in the old world and will remain so until the end of the month. If you are waiting for responses to emails, postings, approvals or comments; have patience.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 19, 2006
Today is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. There is a world-wide event going on today to remember this master of science. I like to believe every one has stories of how Sagan impacted their lives, at least those in my generation. I remember this guy fascinated me, because he spoke so passionately and caring and full of amazement about science, much more than any teacher I had ever had.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 17, 2006
As you have probably have heard by now Amazon is making Sony Playstation 3 (20 GB & 60 GB models) and Nintendo Wii available to existing Amazon customers who sign up via a special edition of the Amazon Customers Vote. A random draw will then decide who will get the change to buy these ridiculously scarce game machines.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 30, 2006
Zune. I finally got to play with a Zune media player. I am very impressed, I own all the generations of iPod, but this device is clearly a step up in terms of innovation. I can confirm that the enthusiasm in some of the earlier reports have good grounds. I have had many gadgets, but in the past two years except for the PSP nothing could really excite me, the Zune however is different at so many levels.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 26, 2006
As of today one of the technologies developed internally at Amazon is available on sourceforge as an open-source project. From the Carbonado docs: Carbonado is an extensible, high performance persistence abstraction layer for Java applications, providing a relational view to the underlying persistence technology. Persistence can be provided by a JDBC accessible SQL relational database, or it can be a BDB.
All Things Distributed
OCTOBER 4, 2006
Jeremy Zawodny has some interesting calculations on the absolute cost advantage of using S3 for your home backup server. For me however the most compelling argument is later in his posting when he mentions the administrative cost of running a highly available home server. I recently lost 2 disks in my home raid setup rendering the 1 TB data store useless.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 19, 2006
Amazon continues on the path of opening up all of its services for customers and partners to use. One of the services customers repeatedly asked us for was to open up our fulfillment network for them to use. Currently there are over 1 million small and large active sellers on the Amazon platform and most need to do their own fulfillment and shipping.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 8, 2006
Every year the MIT Technology Review publishes a list of technologists and scientist under the age of 35 to honor their ground breaking inventions and research. In the past I have written a number of recommendations in support of these innovators and last year I was particularly happy to see George Candea recognized for his work on recovery oriented computing in general and for micro-reboots in particular.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 8, 2006
One of the coolest features in Unbox, Amazon’s Video Download Service, is the remote delivery. A video you have bought will show up in Your Media Library and from there you can control which PC the movie should be downloaded to. I just bought a Margaret Cho show while at work and asked it to be downloaded to a laptop at home.
All Things Distributed
AUGUST 4, 2006
Last week I gave a keynote at the ACM Principles of Distributed Computing Conference (PODC) on the topic of technology transfer. My choice of topic was triggered by recent presentations by a number of other research luminaries, who had remarked that the distributed computing research community had failed to make its mark; lots of good ideas, little impact.
All Things Distributed
JULY 26, 2006
I promised at Supernova I would give an update on the integration of Amazon.com (through Amazon.com E-Commerce Web Services) into Second Life: Jeff Barr has the scoop and demonstrates it on the Amazon Web Services Weblog. As expected it was a complete grassroots effort with no official Amazon involvement. Go visit the life2life store now (yes that is second life url, you need the program installed to use this as a locator).
All Things Distributed
JULY 16, 2006
I really enjoy spending time at comics.com and gocomics.com. On comics.com there is a category list of all comics and editorial cartoons available on their site. On gocomics there is a separate list for comics and editorial cartoons. Both sites offer interesting subscription models.
All Things Distributed
JULY 14, 2006
Wow! 20.1 inch screen & 20.8 pounds; Introducing the Dell XPS M2010. I have been looking for a new laptop but for some reason I don’t see myself walking around with this one. It will be an interesting challenge to open it up in your economy airplane seat. Base price $3800.
All Things Distributed
JULY 13, 2006
Yesterday the Amazon Simple Queue Service moved from beta to production. SQS provides persistent messaging with the scalability and reliability of Amazon’s infrastructure. As a developer you can create an unlimited number of Queues and store unlimited messages in a Queue. As usual we manage your data in highly reliable fashion, capable of surviving complete data center failures.
All Things Distributed
JULY 11, 2006
Today was a good news day: Geoff Arnold has decided to join the Amazon engineering family. As Geoff mentions in the announcement on his weblog Amazon is all about scale. In recent presentations I have been demonstrating how Amazon Engineers are scalability experts who can take any concept idea and turn it into a service that can serve hundreds of customers and then grow it seamlessly to support hundreds of millions of customers.
All Things Distributed
JUNE 29, 2006
The phone and cable companies will fundamentally alter the Internet in America unless Congress acts to stop them. They have the market power, and regulatory permission to restrict American consumers’ access to broadband Internet content, including music and movies, and have announced their plans to do so. There is a lot of freedom at Gnomedex for the discussion leaders to address the topics that are on their minds.
All Things Distributed
JUNE 23, 2006
The coffee breaks are the best parts of the conference I stole this remark from Harrison Owen. His observation was that the traditional way people come together to discuss issues was not very effective, but that they all thought the coffee breaks were the place where all the action happened.
All Things Distributed
JUNE 3, 2006
The important part about the laptop with 243,000 customer records including credit cards stolen is not the theft itself. It is what the heck these credit card numbers were doing on the laptop in the first place. They should never, ever have been there. There is no reason they should have left the ultra secure location they were kept in.
All Things Distributed
MAY 15, 2006
Earlier this year my good friend and mentor Jim Gray dropped by at Amazon to interview me for ACM Queue magazine. I had real fun with Jim’s questions and I like to believe that the resulting interview is interesting. It appeared in this month’s edition and runs about 8 pages in the print edition.
All Things Distributed
MAY 1, 2006
One more day: Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam(5/2) One more week: Neil Young – Living with War (Free Streaming of the Full Album) (5/8) One more week: Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium (DVD Edition) (5/9) Two more weeks: Hoobastank – Every Man For Himself (5/16) Two more weeks: John Entwistle – Bass Guitar Master Class (5/16) Three weeks: Ridley Scott – Kingdom of Heaven - Directors Cut (5/23) One more month: Soccer World Cup (5/9 - 6/9)
All Things Distributed
APRIL 9, 2006
In the A Word On Scalability posting I tried to write down a more precise definition of scalability than is commeonly used. There were good comments about the definition at the posting as well as in a discussion at The ServerSide.
All Things Distributed
APRIL 4, 2006
I don't want to turn this into a corporate announcement weblog, but I believe some of my new readers may be interested in this. Go check out Amazon Wire, a podcast about books, music, movies and those who create them.
All Things Distributed
APRIL 2, 2006
It is nice that people thought yesterday’s posting was funny. There is however a very serious aspect to it. From the reactions I understand that people think that posting IM handles is too far-out to even consider seriously, which made it a good April’s Fools joke. For me, I do not believe it is ridiculous for a company to engage in real-time interaction.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 30, 2006
Dennis Howlett reminds me that the last paragraph of my Naked Answers post suggests that I think the only way innovation happens is in reaction to customer demand. Customer feedback is an important ingredient, but not of course not the only component. Henri Fords famous quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, "Faster horses.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 13, 2006
Go check out the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is Amazon.com’s Internet scale storage service available through a web service interface. S3 is another example of the Amazon Web Services mission: to expose all of the atomic-level pieces of the Amazon.com platform. Providing scalable, reliable, secure and fast storage is something that Amazon developers have already enjoyed for some time and now it is available to the developer community outside of Amazon.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 20, 2006
Halley Suitt, now CEO of Top Ten Sources, has a way of talking me into doing things where I actually have no time for. This time it was giving her a list of my top ten weblog feeds. This is an impossible task as I don’t think there is such an absolute list, but try and explain that to someone who runs a company called Top Ten Sources.
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