"At present there are a number of barriers to creating an energy efficient workload scheduler for a Private Cloud based data center. Firstly, the relationship between different workloads and power consumption must be investigated. Secondly, current hardware-based solutions to providing energy usage statistics are unsuitable in warehouse scale data centers where low cost and scalability are desirable properties. In this paper we discuss the effect of different workloads on server power consumption in a Private Cloud platform. We display a noticeable difference in energy consumption when servers are given tasks that dominate various resources (CPU, Memory, Hard Disk and Network). We then use this insight to develop CloudMonitor, a software utility that is capable of >95% accurate power predictions from monitoring resource consumption of workloads, after a "training phase" in which a dynamic power model is developed."

"Node.js is evented I/O for JavaScript, built on top of the blazingly fast V8 engine. It makes handling event-driven I/O incredibly simple, and aligns perfectly with our maniacal focus on simplicity and developer productivity. The Ruby community has quickly adopted node, and with great reason. Complimenting existing apps with node.js for components that require real-time event handling or massive concurrency is both easy and elegant – in part thanks to the availability of frameworks such as express."

"This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. As you're planning your Cloud Architecture, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: Using a Data Center Relocation To Create A Virtual Infrastructure."

"I met a hacker from an antique land
Who said: Two tall and heavy mounts of steel
Lie in a basement. Near them on a stand,
Recessed, a dark CRT lies, whose peel’d
Cracked shell of dullest beige, and blinkenlights,
Tell that its fact’ry well those old specs read
Which yet survive, inked on the lifeless thing,
The die that stamp’d them and the power that fed.
And on the burned-in screen these words appear:
“My name is Awsymandias, king of kings:
Look on my racks, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No bits at all remain. Not far away
A data center waits, its humming air
Host to a boundless cloud by th’hour to pay."

"Ok, so what the crap is Mongo? I find the best way to describe Mongo is the best features of key/values stores, document databases and RDBMS in one. No way, you say. That sounds perfect. Well, Mongo is not perfect, but I think it brings something kind of new to the database table."

"Deploying to Heroku with git push is awesome. I’m running a couple of different environments, though, and there’s extra stuff that I want to do when I deploy. Rake to the rescue!"

"Write performance in Cassandra is excellent. The internals are specifically geared towards a heavy-write system. It writes to a memory table and a serial commit log, and every so often the memory table is flushed to disk in what the Big Table paper describes as a sorted strings table, often called an SSTable — an immutable data structure. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes, but the performance characteristics are clear: there is nothing slow in the write path. The Cassandra wiki page on Architecture Internals provides more details."

"Spot Instances are a new way to purchase and consume Amazon EC2 Instances. They allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another option for obtaining compute capacity."

"The Ruby Development Center contains sample code, documentation, tools, and additional resources to help you build applications on Amazon Web Services."

"It is true. You are. Go try it now. That is an order. I can wait for you to come back and finish reading this post. I could end the post now, but I suppose I’ll go on and tell you a bit about my experience with Heroku yesterday."

"The question should not be, “is Rails a safe choice,” but “[how long] can we justify the expense of traditional development approaches.”"

"The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a member driven organization that:

Supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds;
develops benchmarks for cloud computing;
supports reference implementations for cloud computing, preferably open source reference implementations;
manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed;
sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing."

"OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit. You can get the raw data for roads around the world, set up a server, design a new map style, and have your own personal online interactive maps. In the past, this has been difficult owing to the large volume of data required and the hassles of system administration. Tile Drawer is designed to make this process easy with a custom-configured Amazon EC2 machine image (AMI) that gets you up and running with just two pieces of information: a custom stylesheet that you choose, and the geographical location of a part of the world you'd like rendered."

"Finally, we thank the thousands of engineers who slaved away for millions of hours to bring us the pod components that are either inexpensive or totally free, such as the Intel Processor, Gigabit Ethernet, ridiculously dense hard drives, Linux, Tomcat, JFS, etc. We realize we’re standing on the shoulders of giants."