Working with the new Linux file system - ext4

Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem | Thoughts by Ted: "ext3 performs very poorly if applications use fsync a lot; the ordering constraints can mean that if you fsync one file, then large numbers of other files may need to be committed to disk as well." - see first comment

The trick to getting optimum performance seems to be using fsync or fdatasync. We need to implement that, but not before the transition to ext4, otherwise there may be performance penalties.

This article and others on Ted's blog explain the issues well. He is a key architect of these filing systems.

HowTo: EC2 for Poets

HowTo: EC2 for Poets: "EC2 for Poets�

I've been calling this doc, while I was writing it, 'EC2 for Poets.'

The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.

I loved the idea then, and still do. Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security. I prefer to make light of it, so more people will be tempted to give it a try. It was easy for me, why shouldn't it be easy for everyone? :-)"

ongoing � The Sun Cloud

Tim Bray talks about Sun's new cloud services offering, announced this week:

ongoing � The Sun Cloud: "We’re going to be rolling out a Sun Cloud offering later this year. It’s going to have a storage service that’ll offer WebDAV and something S3-flavored. Also, there’ll be a compute service, based partly on the Q-layer technology.��

And it’s got an API."

appscale -

Google Code: "AppScale is an open-source implementation of the Google AppEngine (GAE) cloud computing interface. AppScale enables execution of GAE applications on virtualized cluster systems. In particular, AppScale enables users to execute GAE applications using their own clusters with greater scalability and reliability than the GAE SDK provides. Moreover, AppScale executes automatically and transparently over cloud infrastructures such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Eucalyptus, the open-source implementation of the AWS interfaces"

Above the Clouds

Above the Clouds: This Berkeley whitepaper has more depth than previously written on cloud computing and has valuable insights.