News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use (commercial and government). And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera's CDH3). Using Bryan's guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running in … [Read more...]
Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call "Fanatical Support." We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with. We host several sites at … [Read more...]
Amazon didn't invent cloud computing, but they deserve lots of credit for transforming the business model for providing cloud services through elastic computing (for some history see Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet from Businessweek Nov 2006). They have pushed the economics of cloud computing to be so efficient they are able to offer a 12 months worth of initial compute for free. This is a great opportunity to learn their interface and to test how their computing … [Read more...]