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  • Optimistic work sharing on sparsely distributed systems

    - by Asti
    What would a system like BOINC look like if it were written today? At the time BOINC was written, databases were the primary choice for maintaining a shared state and concurrency among nodes. Since then, many approaches have been developed for tasking with optimistic concurrency (OT, partial synchronization primitives, shared iterators etc.) Is there an optimal paradigm for optimistically distributing units of work on sparsely distributing systems which communicate through message passing? Sorry if this is a bit vague. P.S. The concept of Tuple-spaces is great, but locking is inherent to its definition. Edit: I already have a federation system which works very well. I have a reactive OT system is implemented on top of it. I'm looking to extend it to get clients to do units of work.

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  • Windows Azure Emulators On Your Desktop

    - by BuckWoody
    Many people feel they have to set up a full Azure subscription online to try out and develop on Windows Azure. But you don’t have to do that right away. In fact, you can download the Windows Azure Compute Emulator – a “cloud development environment” – right on your desktop. No, it’s not for production use, and no, you won’t have other people using your system as a cloud provider, and yes, there are some differences with Production Windows Azure, but you’ll be able code, run, test, diagnose, watch, change and configure code without having any connection to the Internet at all. The best thing about this approach is that when you are ready to deploy the code you’ve been testing, a few clicks deploys it to your subscription when you make one.   So what deep-magic does it take to run such a thing right on your laptop or even a Virtual PC? Well, it’s actually not all that difficult. You simply download and install the Windows Azure SDK (you can even get a free version of Visual Studio for it to run on – you’re welcome) from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx   This SDK will also install the Windows Azure Compute Emulator and the Windows Azure Storage Emulator – and then you’re all set. Right-click the icon for Visual Studio and select “Run as Administrator”:    Now open a new “Cloud” type of project:   Add your Web and Worker Roles that you want to code:   And when you’re done with your design, press F5 to start the desktop version of Azure:   Want to learn more about what’s happening underneath? Right-click the tray icon with the Azure logo, and select the two emulators to see what they are doing:          In the configuration files, you’ll see a “Use Development Storage” setting. You can call the BLOB, Table or Queue storage and it will all run on your desktop. When you’re ready to deploy everything to Windows Azure, you simply change the configuration settings and add the storage keys and so on that you need.   Want to learn more about all this?   Overview of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432968.aspx Overview of the Windows Azure Storage Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432983.aspx January 2011 Training Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en      

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  • Design pattern for client/server sessions?

    - by nonot1
    Are there any common patterns or general guidance I can learn from for how to design a client/server system where the both the client and server must maintain some kind per-client session state? I've found any number of libraries that can help with some of the plumbing, but it's the overall design I'm wondering about. Open issues in my mind: How to structure the client/server communication so that bidirectional synchronous and asynchronous requests are possible? The server side needs to spawn a couple of per-connected-client session-long helper process. How to manage that? How to manage the mapping from a given client (and any of it's requests) to server state and helper process instances in the face of multiple clients and intermittent network connectivity. Most communication can be simple blocking request/reply, but some will be long running processing tasks that the client will want to keep tabs on. To the extent that it matters, the platform is Linux/C/C++. Not web based. Just an existing thick-client software app being modified to talk to backend servers for some tasks.

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  • Building a distributed system on Amazon Web Services

    - by Songo
    Would simply using AWS to build an application make this application a distributed system? For example if someone uses RDS for the database server, EC2 for the application itself and S3 for hosting user uploaded media, does that make it a distributed system? If not, then what should it be called and what is this application lacking for it to be distributed? Update Here is my take on the application to clarify my approach to building the system: The application I'm building is a social game for Facebook. I developed the application locally on a LAMP stack using Symfony2. For production I used an a single EC2 Micro instance for hosting the app itself, RDS for hosting my database, S3 for the user uploaded files and CloudFront for hosting static content. I know this may sound like a naive approach, so don't be shy to express your ideas.

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  • Exclusive use of a Jini server during long-running call

    - by Matthew Flint
    I'm trying to use Jini, in a "Masters/Workers" arrangement, but the Worker jobs may be long running. In addition, each worker needs to have exclusive access to a singleton resource on that machine. As it stands, if a Worker receives another request while a previous request is running, then the new request is accepted and executed in a second thread. Are there any best-practices to ensure that a Worker accepts no further jobs until the current job is complete? Things I've considered: synchronize the job on the server, with a lock on the singleton resource. This would work, but is far from ideal. A call from a Master would block until the current Worker thread completes, even if other Workers become free in the meantime unregister the Worker from the registry while the job is running, then re-register when it completes. Might work OK, but something doesn't smell right with this idea... Of course, I'm quite happy to be told that there are more appropriate technologies than Jini... but I wouldn't want anything too heavyweight, like rolling out EJB containers all over the place.

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  • Scalable Architecture for modern Web Development [on hold]

    - by Jhilke Dai
    I am doing research about Scalable architecture for Web Development, the research is solely to support Modern Web Development with flexible architecture which can scale up/down according to the needs without losing any core functionality. By Modern Web I mean to support all the Devices used to access websites, but the loading mechanism for all devices would be different. My quest of architecture is: For PC: Accessing web in PC is faster but it also depends on the Geo-location, so, the application would check by default the capacity of Internet/Browser and load the page according to it. For Mobile: Most of the mobile design these days either hide information or use different version of same application. eg: facebook uses m.facebook.com which is completely different than PC version. Hiding the things from Mobile using JavaScript or CSS is not a solution as it'll consume the bandwidth and make the application slow. So, my architecture research is about Serving one Application, which has different stack. When the application receives the request it'd send the Packaged Stack to the received request. This way the load time for end users would be faster and maintenance of application for developers would be easier. I am researching about for 4-tier(layered) architecture like: Presentation Layer Application Logic Layer -- The main Logic layer which stores the Presentation Stack Business Logic Layer Data Layer Main Question: Have you come across of similar architecture? If so, then can you list the links here, I'm very much interested to learn about those implementations specially in real world scenario. Have you thought about similar architectures and tried your own ideas, or if you have any ideas regarding this, then I urge to share. I am open to any discussions regarding this, so, please feel free to comment/answer.

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  • How to mange big amount users at server side?

    - by Rami
    I built a social android application in which users can see other users around them by gps location. at the beginning thing went well as i had low number of users, But now that I have increasing number of users (about 1500 +100 every day) I revealed a major problem in my design. In my Google App Engine servlet I have static HashMap that holding all the users profiles objects, currenty 1500 and this number will increase as more users register. Why I'm doing it Every user that requesting for the users around him compares his gps with other users and check if they are in his 10km radius, this happens every 5 min on average. That is why I can't get the users from db every time because GAE read/write operation quota will tare me apart. The problem with this desgin is As the number of users increased the Hashmap turns to null every 4-6 hours, I thing that this time is getting shorten but I'm not sure. I'm fixing this by reloading the users from the db every time I detect that it became null, But this causes DOS to my users for 30 sec, So I'm looking for better solution. I'm guessing that it happens because the size of the hashmap, Am I right? I have been advised to use spatial database, but that mean that I can't work with GAE any more and that mean that I need to build my big server all over again and lose my existing DB. Is there something I can do with the existing tools? Thanks.

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  • Interconnect nodes in a Java distributed infrastructure for tweet processing

    - by David Moreno García
    I'm working in a new version of an old project that I used to download and process user statuses from Twitter. The main problem of that project was its infrastructure. I used multiple instances of a java application (trackers) to download from Twitter given an specific task (basically terms to search for), connected with a central node (a web application) that had to process all tweets once per day and generate a new task for each trackers once each 15 minutes. The central node also had to monitor all trackers and enable/disable them under user petition. This, as I said, was too slow because I had multiple bottlenecks, so in this new version I want to improve the infrastructure and isolate all functionalities in specific nodes. I also need a good notification system to receive notifications for any node. So, in the next diagram I show the components that I'll need in this new version: As you can see, there are more nodes. Here are some notes about them: Dashboard: Controls trackers statuses and send a single task to each of them (under user request). The trackers will use this task until replaced with a new one (if done, not each 15 minutes like before). Search engine: I need to store all the tweets. They are firstly stored in a local database for each tracker but after that I'm thinking on using something like Elasticsearch to be able to do fast searches. Tweet processor: Just and isolated component with its own database (maybe something like the search engine to have fast access to info generated by the module). In the future more could be added. Application UI: A web application with a shared database with the Dashboard (mainly to store users information and preferences). Indeed, both could be merged into a single web. The main difference with the previous version of the project is that now they will be isolated and they will only show information and send requests. I will not do any heavy task in them (like process tweets as I did before). So, having this components, my main headache is how to structure all to not have to rewrite a lot of code every time I need to access any new data. Another headache is how can I interconnect nodes. I could use sockets but that is a pain in the ass. Maybe a REST layer? And finally, if all the nodes are isolated, how could I generate notifications for each user which info is only in the database used by the Application UI? I'm programming this using Java and Spring (at least I used them in the last version) but I have no problems with changing the language if I can take advantage of a tool/library/engine to make my life easier and have a better platform. Any comment will be appreciated.

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  • Synchronizing local and remote cache in distributed caching

    - by ltfishie
    With a distributed cache, a subset of the cache is kept locally while the rest is held remotely. In a get operation, if the entry is not available locally, the remote cache will be used and and the entry is added to local cache. In a put operation, both the local cache and remote cache are updated. Other nodes in the cluster also need to be notified to invalidate their local cache as well. What's a simplest way to achieve this if you implemented it yourself, assuming that nodes are not aware of each other. Edit My current implementation goes like this: Each cache entry contains a time stamp. Put operation will update local cache and remote cache Get operation will try local cache then remote cache A background thread on each node will check remote cache periodically for each entry in local cache. If the timestamp on remote is newer overwrite the local. If entry is not found in remote, delete it from local.

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  • Scalable distributed file system for blobs like images and other documents

    - by Pinnacle
    Cassandra & HBase both do not efficiently support storage of blobs like images. Storing directly on HDFS stresses the Namenode because of huge number of files. Facebook uses Haystack for images and attachments storage, but this is not open source. So is Lustre a good choice for distributed blob storage? I have read that Amazon S3 is used by many, but this would cost money and personally, I would not like to rely on third party system. What are other suggestions?

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  • Why do I need two Instances in Windows Azure?

    - by BuckWoody
    Windows Azure as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) means that there are various components you can use in it to solve a problem: Compute “Roles” - Computers running an OS and optionally IIS - you can have more than one "Instance" of a given Role Storage - Blobs, Tables and Queues for Storage Other Services - Things like the Service Bus, Azure Connection Services, SQL Azure and Caching It’s important to understand that some of these services are Stateless and others maintain State. Stateless means (at least in this case) that a system might disappear from one physical location and appear elsewhere. You can think of this as a cashier at the front of a store. If you’re in line, a cashier might take his break, and another person might replace him. As long as the order proceeds, you as the customer aren’t really affected except for the few seconds it takes to change them out. The cashier function in this example is stateless. The Compute Role Instances in Windows Azure are Stateless. To upgrade hardware, because of a fault or many other reasons, a Compute Role's Instance might stop on one physical server, and another will pick it up. This is done through the controlling fabric that Windows Azure uses to manage the systems. It’s important to note that storage in Azure does maintain State. Your data will not simply disappear - it is maintained - in fact, it’s maintained three times in a single datacenter and all those copies are replicated to another for safety. Going back to our example, storage is similar to the cash register itself. Even though a cashier leaves, the record of your payment is maintained. So if a Compute Role Instance can disappear and re-appear, the things running on that first Instance would stop working. If you wrote your code in a Stateless way, then another Role Instance simply re-starts that transaction and keeps working, just like the other cashier in the example. But if you only have one Instance of a Role, then when the Role Instance is re-started, or when you need to upgrade your own code, you can face downtime, since there’s only one. That means you should deploy at least two of each Role Instance not only for scale to handle load, but so that the first “cashier” has someone to replace them when they disappear. It’s not just a good idea - to gain the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our uptime in Azure it’s a requirement. We point this out right in the Management Portal when you deploy the application: (Click to enlarge) When you deploy a Role Instance you can also set the “Upgrade Domain”. Placing Roles on separate Upgrade Domains means that you have a continuous service whenever you upgrade (more on upgrades in another post) - the process looks like this for two Roles. This example covers the scenario for upgrade, so you have four roles total - One Web and one Worker running the "older" code, and one of each running the new code. In all those Roles you want at least two instances, and this example shows that you're covered for High Availability and upgrade paths: The take-away is this - always plan for forward-facing Roles to have at least two copies. For Worker Roles that do background processing, there are ways to architect around this number, but it does affect the SLA if you have only one.

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  • How should I host our scalable worker processes?

    - by Pieter Breed
    We are designing a new architecture for an enterprise business. The principles we've followed so far is not to develop what you can (possible buy and) deploy, ie, don't reinvent any wheels. In this way we've decided on CQRS, RabbitMQ, Riak and a bunch of other things. We still need to write /some/ business code though and these will be in the form of worker processes, which will consume commands from a message queue and after any side-effects, produce events onto another message queue. The idea behind this is that via the competing-consumers design we will have a scalable design right out of the box. One option is of writing a management infrastructure that will know how to: deploy code instantiate processes kill processes update configuration etc IE provide fault tolerance and scalability. Also, this is exactly what something like GAE and Heroku does for you, but in a public setting and in our organization, public is bad. My question is, is there an out-of-the-box solution that we can use to host our consumers in? Like a private cloud or private platform-as-a-service. Private Heroku or GAE. Is there some kind of software or software product with which we can do all of these things and thereby get scalability and fault tolerance over our consumers?

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  • Using EC2 instance as main development platform

    - by David
    My problem I am working as a consultant for various companies. Each company provides me with a laptop with their software on and I also have my own, where I have my development environment. I tend to buy a new laptop every second year and find myself spending lots of time configuring and installing software. I also spend a lot of time waiting for my laptop to process things. To solve all these issues, I am now considering using EC2 (running windows instances) as my main development platform and just access this from any PC I happen to be at. I calculated that running the Large instance (cheapest 64-bit) for 8 hours a day for a year costs me 960$ per year, which is acceptable. I imagine that when I approach the workplace each day, I will make a single tap on my phone to fire up the instance, so it is ready when I get to work. I should have different icons on my phone to fire up the various instance types. The same software should of course automatically be loaded on the various hardware (sometimes I would even need their instance with 68.4 GB of memory). Another advantage is that if I am having a specific problem with my instance, I could fire up another instance and have someone look into the problem and update the image. My question: Does anyone have experience with such a setup on EC2? What kind of problems do you foresee?

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  • Is there a canonical resource on multi-tenancy web applications using ruby + rails

    - by AlexC
    Is there a canonical resource on multi-tenancy web applications using ruby + rails. There are a number of ways to develop rails apps using cloud capabilities with real elastic properties but there seems to be a lack of clarity with how to achieve multitenancy, specifically at the model / data level. Is there a canonical resource on options to developing multitenancy rails applications with the required characteristics of data seperation, security, concurrency and contention required by an enterprise level cloud application.

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  • Erlang node acts like it connects, but doesn't [migrated]

    - by Malfist
    I'm trying to setup a distributed network of nodes across a few firewalls and it's not going so well. My application is structured like this: there is a central server that always running a node ([email protected]) and my co-worker's laptops connect to it on startup. This works if we're all in the office, but if someone is at home, they can connect to the masternode, but they fail to connect to the other nodes in the swarm. I.E., erlang fails to gossip correctly. To correct this, I've change epmd's port number and changed the inet_dist_listen ports to a known open port (1755 and 7070 respectively). However, something fishy is going on. I can run net_adm:world() and it reports that it connects to master node, but when I run nodes() I get an empty array. Same with net_adm:ping('[email protected]'). See: Eshell V5.9 (abort with ^G) ([email protected])1> net_adm:world(). ['[email protected]'] ([email protected])2> nodes(). [] ([email protected])3> net_adm:ping('[email protected]'). pong ([email protected])4> nodes(). [] ([email protected])5> What's going on, and how can I fix it?

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  • Using the @ in SQL Azure Connections

    - by BuckWoody
    The other day I was working with a client on an application they were changing to a hybrid architecture – some data on-premise and other data in SQL Azure and Windows Azure Blob storage. I had them make a couple of corrections - the first was that all communications to SQL Azure need to be encrypted. It’s a simple addition to the connection string, depending on the library you use. Which brought up another interesting point. They had been using something that looked like this, using the .NET provider: Server=tcp:[serverName].database.windows.net;Database=myDataBase; User ID=LoginName;Password=myPassword; Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True; This includes most of the formatting needed for SQL Azure. It specifies TCP as the transport mechanism, the database name is included, Trusted_Connection is off, and encryption is on. But it needed one more change: Server=tcp:[serverName].database.windows.net;Database=myDataBase; User ID=[LoginName]@[serverName];Password=myPassword; Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True; Notice the difference? It’s the User ID parameter. It includes the @ symbol and the name of the server – not the whole DNS name, just the server name itself. The developers were a bit surprised, since it had been working with the first format that just used the user name. Why did both work, and why is one better than the other? It has to do with the connection library you use. For most libraries, the user name is enough. But for some libraries (subject to change so I don’t list them here) the server name parameter isn’t sent in the way the load balancer understands, so you need to include the server name right in the login, so the system can parse it correctly. Keep in mind, the string limit for that is 128 characters – so take the @ symbol and the server name into consideration for user names. The user connection info is detailed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336268.aspx Upshot? Include the @servername on your connection string just to be safe. And plan for that extra space…  

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  • How can i manage my personal notes , code snippets files in one place online [closed]

    - by user1758043
    Whenever i work on any project , then i have so much notes , diagrams files , image s, brainstorming ideas which i want to keep. i want to put them in one place so that i can see the history of my work. Is there any toll whichere i can store this online. my company is using confluence but thats costly for me. I want something for single user but online in clou where i can store Notes Code snippets Diagrams , flowchart Attah files , images Books marks , sites

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  • High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

    - by BuckWoody
    Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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  • How to determine the source of a request in a distributed service system?

    - by Kabumbus
    Map/Reduce is a great concept for sorting large quantities of data at once. What to do if you have small parts of data and you need to reduce it all the time? Simple example - choosing a service for request. Imagine we have 10 services. Each provides services host with sets of request headers and post/get arguments. Each service declares it has 30 unique keys - 10 per set. service A: name id ... Now imagine we have a distributed services host. We have 200 machines with 10 services on each. Each service has 30 unique keys in there sets. but now to find to which service to map the incoming request we make our services post unique values that map to that sets. We can have up to or more than 10 000 such values sets on each machine per each service. service A machine 1 name = Sam id = 13245 ... service A machine 1 name = Ben id = 33232 ... ... service A machine 100 name = Ron id = 777888 ... So we get 200 * 10 * 30 * 30 * 10 000 == 18 000 000 000 and we get 500 requests per second on our gateway each containing 45 items 15 of which are just noise. And our task is to find a service for request (at least a machine it is running on). On all machines all over cluster for same services we have same rules. We can first select to which service came our request via rules filter 10 * 30. and we will have 200 * 30 * 10 000 == 60 000 000. So... 60 mil is definitely a problem... I hope to get on idea of mapping 30 * 10 000 onto some artificial neural network alike Perceptron that outputs 1 if 30 words (some hashes from words) from the request are correct or if less than Perceptron should return 0. And I’ll send each such Perceptron for each service from each machine to gateway. So I would have a map Perceptron <-> machine for each service. Can any one tall me if my Perceptron idea is at least “sane”? Or normal people do it some other way? Or if there are better ANNs for such purposes?

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  • Upcoming Speaking Engagements

    - by gsusx
    This summer, I took a brief break from speaking engagements to focus on shipping our new software in Tellago Studios and not stress my already hectic travel schedule. However, I’ve accepted a few invites to speak at different conferences during the fall and winter. Here is a brief list of the ones that are already confirmed: Software Architect Conference (London) http://www.software-architect.co.uk NodeJS for the .Net Developer I am a .NET developer but I have an iPhone and an Android Oredev (Malmö...(read more)

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  • What is the canonical resource on multi-tenancy web applications using ruby + rails

    - by AlexC
    What is the canonical resource on multi-tenancy web applications using ruby + rails. There are a number of ways to develop rails apps using cloud capabilities with real elastic properties but there seems to be a lack of clarity with how to achieve multitenancy, specifically at the model / data level. Is there a canonical resource on options to developing multitenancy rails applications with the required characteristics of data seperation, security, concurrency and contention required by an enterprise level cloud application.

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  • Creating a Corporate Data Hub

    - by BuckWoody
    The Windows Azure Marketplace has a rich assortment of data and software offerings for you to use – a type of Software as a Service (SaaS) for IT workers, not necessarily for end-users. Among those offerings is the “Data Hub” – a  codename for a project that ironically actually does what the codename says. In many of our organizations, we have multiple data quality issues. Finding data is one problem, but finding it just once is often a bigger problem. Lots of departments and even individuals have stored the same data more than once, and in some cases, made changes to one of the copies. It’s difficult to know which location or version of the data is authoritative. Then there’s the problem of accessing the data. It’s fairly straightforward to publish a database, share or other location internally to store the data. But then you have to figure out who owns it, how it is controlled, and pass out the various connection strings to those who want to use it. And then you need to figure out how to let folks access the internal data externally – bringing up all kinds of security issues. Finally, in many cases our user community wants us to combine data from the internally sources with external data, bringing up the security, strings, and exploration features up all over again. Enter the Data Hub. This is an online offering, where you assign an administrator and data stewards. You import the data into the service, and it’s available to you - and only you and your organization if you wish. The basic steps for this service are to set up the portal for your company, assign administrators and permissions, and then you assign data areas and import data into them. From there you make them discoverable, and then you have multiple options that you or your users can access that data. You’re then able, if you wish, to combine that data with other data in one location. So how does all that work? What about security? Is it really that easy? And can you really move the data definition off to the Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) that know the particular data stack better than the IT team does? Well, nothing good is easy – but using the Data Hub is actually pretty simple. I’ll give you a link in a moment where you can sign up and try this yourself. Once you sign up, you assign an administrator. From there you’ll create data areas, and then use a simple interface to bring the data in. All of this is done in a portal interface – nothing to install, configure, update or manage. After the data is entered in, and you’ve assigned meta-data to describe it, your users have multiple options to access it. They can simply use the portal – which actually has powerful visualizations you can use on any platform, even mobile phones or tablets.     Your users can also hit the data with Excel – which gives them ultimate flexibility for display, all while using an authoritative, single reference for the data. Since the service is online, they can do this wherever they are – given the proper authentication and permissions. You can also hit the service with simple API calls, like this one from C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921924  You can make HTTP calls instead of code, and the data can even be exposed as an OData Feed. As you can see, there are a lot of options. You can check out the offering here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/labs/data-hub.aspx and you can read the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921938

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  • ERP/CRM Systems. Desktop Based ? Web based? [closed]

    - by Parhs
    I have seen 2-3 ERPs in action. I am wondering what is better. Desktop based application or webbased displayed on a browser. My first experience was with a web based ERP when i was 14 years old.. It was web based and terribly slow... For most simple task you had to do lots of clicks... no keyboard support ..... Pages took ages to load. Last year I worked for migrating to a newer computer some old terminal based cobol application. The computer that worked till today and still has no problem was from 1993. The user interface ofcourse was textbased.. The speed that guys placed orders was amazing! just typing the name of the customer , then 5-10 keys to add a product to order.... Comparing to this ERP the page for placing orders Link (click sales orders) seems terribly slow to add a product... No keyboard shortcut works to save what you added and generally I believe you need 4 times more time to place an order compared to the text interface... Having to use both mouse and keyboard for this task is BAD and sadistic... So how can the heck these people ever use a system like that ??? So in the long run desktop application seems the only way... Of course browsers support shortcuts but the way to overide the defaults that browsers uses isn't cross compatible... That is a huge problem. Finnaly, if we MUST/forced use cloud in near future what about keyboard shortcuts?? I feel confused... I have seen converters of desktop applications to browser applications but are SLOW as hell... The question is what about user friendliness? What kind of application would you use?

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  • What makes Erlang suitable for cloud applications?

    - by Duncan
    We are starting a new project and implementing on our corporations's instantiation of an openstack cloud (see http://www.openstack.org/). The project is security tooling for our corporation. We currently run many hundreds of dedicated servers for security tools and are moving them to our corporations instantiation of openstack. Other projects in my company currently use erlang in several distributed server applications, and other Q/A point out erlang is used in several popular cloud services. I am trying to convince others to consider where it might be applicable on our project. What are erlang's strengths for cloud programming? Where are areas it is particularly appropriate to use erlang?

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