Hadoop gets more versatile, but data is still king
Hadoop 2.0’s YARN component doesn’t just make for a better Big Data platform. It makes for a great Big Compute platform.
vArmour comes out of stealth to detail how it makes data centers more secure
After spending three years in stealth mode, vArmour is formally launching and opening up about how its technology protects data centers.
Promising a privacy-friendly successor to today’s internet, the Safe network is about to go into testing
MaidSafe’s project is absurdly ambitious — a serverless network system that offers free storage, repels surveillance and effectively constitutes a distributed supercomputer. But maybe, just maybe, it might work.
What if Netflix switched to P2P for video streaming?
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings suggested tongue-in-cheek this week that the company could switch to P2P video streaming to avoid peering troubles with ISPs. Would that actually be possible?
Deep thinking on complex systems: A devops reading list
GigaOM contributor James Urquhart shares some of the best books, blogs and other information on the concepts of devops and complex IT systems.
Long-shot distributed data center project in Canada like SETI for mobile
A California company is building out a distributed computing operation across connected devices in a small Canadian city, but technical challenges could stand in the way.
Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: Stability and resilience
James Urquhart continues his look into whether companies sacrifice stability by designing systems that value adaptability over strict top-down command and control. This is called the stability-resiliency tradeoff and, he argues, many complex systems benefit from adaptability.
SevOne raises $150M to monitor your network P2P-style
SevOne has raised $150 million for its line of appliances that help companies capture and analyze their streams of operational infrastructure data. Its financial success, even for a relatively quiet company founded in 2005, illustrate how important it is to know your systems data well.
Twitter and Google offer case studies in spanning distributed systems
As our compute infrastructure becomes more distributed it’s much harder to keep everything synced. But with users demanding immediate access to their files, photos and whatnot all around the world, solutions like Google’s Spanner DB and Twitters photo blobstore are a solution.
Researchers using AI to build robotic bees
Building a robotic bee that acts like a real bee is a lot more complicated than programming a robot to fly around from flower to flower. A project called Green Brain aims to build an artificial intelligence system that can actually mimic a bee’s brain.