Saturday, December 22, 2007

Linqia´s first christmas!

Edwina and Fredi were nominated as our Chief Christmas Officers. One day they surprised us with a wonderfully decorated Christmas office and our corporate Christmas tree – with a star as topping of course!



In the evening, we started off with Cava and traditional Spanish pastries, like Turron, Neulas, Barquillos and the absolutely delicious Turron de Crema Catalana!

Fredi showed us a neat trick about eating habits of Neulas. Being stuffed full with sweets, we went for a walk to the restaurant. We strolled down the illuminated streets of Passeig de Gracia and Barrio Gothico admiring the fantastic array of Christmas lights. Fredi, our local fellow, took us on a few detours leading us to Barcelona´s secret places you wouldn´t normally see: la "Tortuga de Barcelona", la "Fuente del l`ou com balla" and "Placa de San Felipe Neri" next to the charming boutique hotel Neri.

We ended in one of the cosiest restaurants Limbo in Raval. We shared stories about the craziest things we´ve done in our lifes – the leaders definitely are Christian, Christopher and Fredi. Maria was not bad either! Edwina and I are still trying to remember if we´ve ever done anything crazy like these guys;-) We´ll keep that secret! The evening ended with a homemade dice playing for our Kris Kringle presents – also known as Jul Klub (no-one ever knows how this is spelled) or Wichteln!

The Linqia Team wishes a very Merry Christmas to all of you!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Elastic Computing

Sometimes there are new developments out there which concepts makes you tingle. They usually don't come twice from the same company. But thats the case with the S3 and EC2 from Amazon.

We already incoporated S3 into our applications. That makes us very easy on how to store binary data. But here comes EC2.

Grabbing a Debian image and modify it for out purpose and store it on S3 was just a bit of work. The image instance boots within 3 minutes into a full fledged application server with a simple command, and you can boot up as many as you like - figure that - an "unlimited" amount of servers at your fingertips to either hold to the load and serve the spikes. Fantastic. That makes me seriously happy. Forget about managing your machine park. You pay what you get. No need to maintain X machines for daily spikes or slashdotting events. No more idling heat emitters.

Some work has still to be done, of course. First, telling our load balancer that there are a new servers to serve. Second, observe the load of all servers running and deploy/shut-down servers on demand automatically. And if you are on Rails - guys from Thoughtworks wrote handy capistrano recipes interfacing with EC2

Some things have to be taken care of depending on what you want to do. First, data on these servers are transient - you shut it down, you loose the data you might have stored, not a problem in our case, but Amazon just started a limited beta with SimpleDB which addresses this problem. Second - it's still beta and we don't know how it performs real-life, but reports are great so far.

Last but not least there are many other applications for EC2. Think about on demand processing power for computing intensive applications. Computing cost start at 10 cent ($) the hour. That makes roughly $70 a month for a machine. Check the Amazon computing specs. Kind of a re-invention of renting mainframe time :-)

The future is bright - the future is ... elastic.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Share the wealth

Imagine a platform which enabled the "wealth" to be shared....knowledge, human connections, money, opportunities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvTFKpIaQhM