InfoQ Homepage Architecture Content on InfoQ
-
Unix Orchestration Roundup: Tools for Programmatic Systems Administration
While system administrators have always written code to automate tasks and many developers run their own systems, the melding of development and operations into devops has really taken hold as sophisticated configuration management and orchestration tools have become available.
-
A Tool for Porting iPhone Apps to Windows Phone 7
Microsoft has released an API mapping tool, guidance and testimonial videos that eases the work of porting iPhone/iOS applications to Windows Phone 7 (WP 7).
-
Amazon EC2 Outage Explained and Lessons Learned
Amazon has published a detailed report on the service failure plaguing one availability zone in the US East Region. The online media is full with analysis, commentaries and lessons to be learned from the event.
-
Ravi Kannan receives ACM SIGACT Knuth Price 2011
Ravi Kannan from Microsoft Research has been appointed winner of the ACM SIGACT's (Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) Knuth Price 2011. According to the press announcement he receives the price for his work on influential algorithic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems.
-
New.NET Async Control Flow Explained
Alan Berman recently explained the details of how the new Async and Await keywords impact the flow of control. Using these keywords allows an asynchronous function's return values to be processed without using explicitly defined callbacks. This allows for more natural code grouping, as calling and processing of an asynchronous function can occur in the same function.
-
Apple Responds to iOS Location Data Concerns
Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper reported that security researchers had discovered a log of locations being locally cached on an iPhone 4, from a report posted at O'Reilly. Apple have now responded to the concerns and promise to resolve some specific issues, but deny they were ever collecting location data from individual devices.
-
Using Messaging and Scheduling for Lock-free Access to Shared State
In a message passing system there may be times when mutable data must be shared amongst many tasks. In traditional programming this would be handled by a read-writer block, which would allow one writer thread to block all other threads while it updates the shared data. With a technique found in frameworks such as TPL Dataflow it is possible to avoid this.
-
Boost Website Performance with the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service
The newly-released Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service stores distributed data in-memory to improve performance on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. It’s highly scalable, will cache any type of data regardless of size, and is secured via the AppFabric Access Control Service.
-
Twilio's Cloud Architecture Principles
While many complained about the AWS outage impacting their business, Twilio explained, in a controversial post, why its Cloud Architecture Principles were key in not being or mildly affected by the AWS issues.
-
Hudson Resurrected as Hudson 2.0
The first significant release of Hudson since the Hudson/Jenkins fork has been released, with a new versioning scheme following OSGi/Semantic Versioning going forward. This includes a new JSR330 dependency injection model to make it easier to run in an OSGi runtime as well as decoupling from specific Hudson annotations.
-
Message Queuing Options for .NET
When building larger scale applications, message queues are often very helpful for both distributing and aggregating workloads. In the .NET ecosystem there are several options available for message queuing. This article highlights some of the more popular and unique offerings as well as the basic terminology needed to evaluate them.
-
Software Engineer best rated Job in 2011
According to careertrack.com the best rated job in 2011 is Software Engineer, at least in the US. 200 professions across various industries, skill levels, and salaries have been surveyed to calculate the ranking which is determined by taking the work environment, physical demands, outlook, income and stress into account.
-
Major Outage on Amazons EC2 US-East Datacenter - Many sites affected
Since April 21, 2011, 1:41 AM PDT Amazon's US-EAST EC2 Datacenter reported major outages (due to failing EBS volumes) affecting many sites like Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite and Heroku which rely on EC2 services. The article links to discussions about reliability of Availability Zones of EC2 datacenters and EC2 SLA's as well as desaster recovery and prevention.
-
Steve Marx Explores Hidden Gems in Windows Azure
Steve Marx, Tactical Strategist at Windows Azure, gave a presentation at MIX11 on “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Windows Azure”, highlighting a list of things that can be done with WA but may not be common knowledge. We got in touch with Steve to ask him more about AppFabric, Startup Tasks, Blob leasing and more -
-
Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service 2.0 Supports New Identity Providers
At the recent MIX 2011 conference, Microsoft announced updates to its existing cloud-based Access Control Service (ACS) that supports new web-friendly and enterprise-grade identity providers, while beefing up its support for standard communication protocols, improving the developer experience and enhancing the online management portal.