Google App Engine (GAE) vs Amazon Elastic Computing (EC2) vs Microsoft Azure. Almost a year ago, I compared Google App Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure, trying to decide which platform I should write and host my blog (and some other small projects) on. The comparison was about more than hosting - the languages and frameworks used would be influenced by the platform I was hosting on. There were also APIs available only to one platform, or easier to use on one platform compared to the other (such as the App Engine authentication).
Due to the huge differences, I did a little homework on each platform, and ultimately, it came down to price. The difference in pricing between Google App Engine and Windows Azure was so enormous, that there wasn't really a decision to make. App Engine hosts this blog for free. Windows Azure would've cost around $100/month minimum. One Year On Fast forward a year and things have changed a little. Maybe Windows Azure is aimed at The Big Boys? Google App Engine Lock-in Enter, Amazon EC2 Recently, Amazon introduced Micro Instances. Microsoft Acquires Cloud Performance Management Service MetricsHub, Makes It Available For Free On Azure. Microsoft just announced that it has acquired MetricsHub, a service that automates cloud performance management and helps its customers manage their cloud services more efficiently.
MetricsHub participated in the Microsoft Azure Accelerator, a competitive three-month accelerator program the company hosts in collaboration with TechStars. The program provides these companies with $20,000 from TechStars, $60,000 worth of cloud computing services on Azure, office space in Seattle and, it seems, a chance to be acquired by Microsoft. Windows Azure users, Microsoft also today announced, can now use a “pre-release, no charge, version of MetricsHub’s Active Cloud Monitoring,” which is available through the Windows Azure store. All of its paying customers, MetricsHub noted today, will be converted to the free plan. The financial details of the transaction remain under wraps, but the service currently only has 374 users, so chances are the price wasn’t all that high. Learn Web Design, Web Development, and More | Treehouse. The 5 Commandments Of Data And Why Analytics Efforts Are Still A Big Old Mess. The perception that big data is still incredibly complex to understand is right on the money.
There are examples of how the complexity is getting abstracted. But still, even when I talk to data scientists they will say how they are still mastering the tools to simply show data in something besides a spreadsheet. Marck Vaisman, a freelance data scientist, said in an interview that the issue for most everyone is as much about the technology’s complexity as it is about the people who are trying to figure out what to do. Too often, only a few people actually understand how to use the data that they have. And their ability to explain it is limited. Further, there are few organizations that take holistic approaches to doing data analytics, leaving instead a fragmented array of projects that have differing approaches and overlap and do little to provide value. Pitfalls abound but the fundamentals are what matters.
In this confusion, we find vendors who promise great speed and ability. Amazon Web Services Drops Its Pricing On Messaging And Notification Services. Amazon Web Services has once again dropped its pricing. This time the decrease is for two of its services: Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). According to AWS, SQS offers a scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers.
Developers can move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS is designed to make it easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services. SNS is a web service to set up, operate and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a capability to publish messages from an application and deliver them to subscribers or other applications. The price decreases are as follows: The price drops are in line with AWS strategy. Google Launches Zopfli To Compress Data More Densely And Make Web Pages Load Faster.
Google just launched Zopfli, a new open source compression algorithm that can compress web content about 3 to eight 8 more densely (PDF) than the standard zlib library. Because Zopfli is compatible with the decompression algorithms that are already part of all modern web browsers, using Google’s new algorithm and library on a server could lead to faster data transmission speeds and lower web page latencies, which would ultimately make the web a little bit faster. The new algorithm, which Zurich-based Google engineer Lode Vandevenne created as a 20 percent project, is an implementation of the Deflate algorithms – the same algorithm that’s also used for the ZIP and gzip file formats and PNG image format.
Zopfli’s output is compatible with zlib, but uses a different and more effective algorithm to compress data. There is, however, a price that needs to be paid for this: it takes significantly longer to compress files with Zopfli (decompression times are virtually the same, though).
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