In a post last week about lessons learned using Amazon Web Services, Netflix's John Ciancutti revealed that the company built something called "Chaos Monkey" to ensure that individual components work independently. Chaos Monkey randomly kills instances and services within Netflix's AWS infrastructure to help developers to make sure each individual component returns something even when system dependencies aren't responding.

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For example, if the recommendation system is down Netflix will display popular titles instead of personalized picks. The quality of the response is degraded, but least there is a response. Ciancutti explains it this way: "If we aren't constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn't likely to work when it matters most - in the event of an unexpected outage."

Here are the lessons Ciancutti writes that Netflix has learned:

Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore ("You need to be prepared to unlearn a lot of what you know")
Co-tenancy is hard
The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly
Learn with real scale, not toy models
Commit yourself

Chaos Monkey fits into number three.

For more advice on migrating to the cloud from Netflix, check out our article Netflix's Advice on Moving to Amazon Web Services.

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Will.i.am is the lead singer for Black Eyed Peas. He wrote a song for Salesforce.com about cloud computing. It debuted on Tuesday during CEO Marc Benioff's keynote at Dreamforce.

During the keynote, Benioff approached Will.i.am and asked the artist about cloud computing. Will.i.am talked about his dream to work in the cloud in real-time, collaborating with his fans as he creates his music.

Will.i.am may have lofty ambitions but this is the age of mixing and matching services with APIs. That's a theme at Dreamforce. The API is taking center stage. We're seeing Salesforce.com reach out to developers. There's a message here: you can achieve your goal by taking aspects of different services to make custom, Web oriented applications.

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Music Makers, Fans and APIs

There are several services that would allow Will.i.am to collaborate on music in the cloud. We picked the following for the completeness of the platforms and the robustness of the APIs.

Indaba

Indaba Music allows musicians network and make music together through online collaboration. It has more than 500,000 musicians part of its network. The platform offers tools and services that helps musicians across all aspects of their work and careers.

Soundcloud

Souncloud allows anyone to upload their music or whatever sounds it may be. They can visualize it and then get feedback from other people. For example, a musician may upload a track and send it to another person. The track may be annotated with comments such as where to add a guitar track. The musician who receives the music may then send it back with additional comments.

Soundcloud also serves as an app platform. More than 100 apps have been built on the Soundcloud. It's this aspect of the service that could allow Will.i.am to collaborate with musicians and then with fans through third-party applications.

Echo Nest

Echo Nest is one of the most interesting companies I've come across in exploring how companies use APIs as a focal part of running a business. The service provides a network of APIs for developers to build music applications.

Echo Nest co-founder Brian Whitman wrote a post with a slideshow that pretty much sums up the state of the music world and the important role developers play.

Will.i.am can collaborate with his fans. He just would have to pick the right services and a smart developer team to make it happen.

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Carlos Ble is a developer out of Spain. His company decided to use Google App Engine (GAE) but dropped it after what he said were months of delays.

Earlier this week, Ble outlined in a blog post the 13 reasons why his company decided to drop Google App Engine. The post had 89,000 views and 158 comments in one day. Some commenters were sympathetic, others chided Ble for blaming Google when the company should have done more research to see if the platform was right for what he and his team wanted to do.

One comment came from Patrick Chanezon, Google Developer Relations Manager for Cloud & Tools. In respect to Chanezon and to clarify his concerns, Ble updated his post but still felt there were enough problems to stick with his criticisms.

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Here are five issues Ble lists that give a sense of the problems his team encountered.

It requires Python 2.5, which is really old. Using Ubuntu that means that you need a virtualenv or chroot with a separate environment in order to work with the SDK properly: Ok, just a small frustration.
You can't use HTTPS with your own domain (naked domain as they called) so secure connections should go though yourname.appspot.com: This just sucks.
No request can take more than 30 seconds to run, otherwise it is stopped: Oh my god, this has been a pain in the ass all the time. When we were uploading data to the database (called datastore a no-sql engine) the upload was broken after 30 seconds so we have to split the files and do all kind of difficult stuff to manage the situation. Running background tasks (cron) have to be very very well engineered too, because the same rule applies. There are many many tasks that need to take more than 30 seconds in website administration operations. Can you imagine?
Every GET or POST from the server to other site, is aborted if it has not finished within 5 seconds. You can configure it to wait till 10 seconds max. This makes impossible to work with Twitter and Facebook many times so you need intermediate servers. Again, this duplicates the time you need to accomplish what seemed to be a simple task
You can't use python libraries that are build on C, just libraries written in python: Forget about those great libraries you wanted to use.

Ble writes that in September, Google App Engine repeatedly failed. He says they faced 500 error codes that some days had the site down 60% of the time. Six times out of 10, users visiting the site couldn't register or use the site.

Ble admits that he should have been more careful but he had confidence in Google.

"For us, GAE has been a failure like Wave or Buzz were but this time, we have paid it with our money. I've been too stubborn just because this great company was behind the platform but I've learned an important lesson: good companies make mistakes too. I didn't do enough spikes before developing actual features. I should have performed more proofs of concept before investing so much money. I was blind."

Several commenters were not so sympathetic with Ble's plight. They said he should have done more research or that he had a design problem.

But then comes this comment from Eugene Ciurana, who literally wrote the book about Google App Engine:

"Carlos, I wrote the first book about Google App Engine programming a couple of years ago. Ever since publication I had several opportunities to speak about App Engine for Python and Java at various conferences; I realized early on that my presentation "Google App Engine HOWTO" had become a "things to watch out in App Engine" and ultimately recommended folks to NOT use it for anything serious.
I enjoyed your post and have tweeted because I think it's an important cautionary tale. Most of the work I do has to do with scalability and high availability. While I'd like App Engine to become part of my arsenal, it's now only a marginal part of it, relegated to providing stateless RESTful web services instead of full blown apps. The real app continues to sit in a regular data centre or we put it on Amazon/Rackspace/etc.
About NoSQL systems: Datastore is hardly a good example of a good one. It's good enough for App Engine, but you now know its caveats. Right tool, right job. I'd suggest that, should you identify document- or column-based data storage and retrieval needs, that you take a look at mongoDB and HBase. We're using both in production with large enterprise clients without issues. Take care and cheers! Eugene Ciurana"

In his comment, Chanezon said that many of the points that Ble makes are known by Google. He said the company is working to correct the problems.

Chanezon stressed that it is critical that people read the Google App Engine documentation. He said limits have been lifted. The service is designed for highly scalable applications that need to scale rapidly to large volume of users and/or data. He refers to Gri.pe as an example.

What do you think? Does Ble have legitimate concerns?

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German authorities have recently expressed skepticism about cloud computing and the potential it has for breaking data protection laws.

According to the Information Law Group, there is no imminent danger of a European crackdown but legal experts are advising international companies to address the potential concerns in their planning and operations.

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The controversy stems from Dr. Thilo Weichert, head of the data protection commission in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Weichert is calling for the abolition of the Safe Harbor framework and doubts the ability of companies to protect the rights of Europeans, who enjoy some of the strongest personal privacy laws in the world.

According to the Information Law Group, the Safe Harbor Framework was "developed jointly by the European Commission and the US Department of Commerce, under which American companies can publicly certify compliance with a standard set of Safe Harbor Privacy Principles approved by the European Commission and enforced by American regulators, predominantly the Federal Trade Commission."

The concerns about data privacy are also felt across Europe. Most of the tension arise from how personal data is stored in the Untied States, where privacy laws are less comprehensive.

European law is fairly meticulous on the matter of data privacy. There are a number of ways that a customer needs to be notified about how their information is being processed. The belief is that on many occasions, customers are not informed at all when using SaaS services and cloud computing services. Still, there have been no formal complaints issued against cloud computing providers.

The concerns from Germany do come at a time when Europe is beginning to review data protection laws that have been on the books for the past 15 years. Comments have been submitted to the European Commission, which has decided to push back any ruling until mid-2011 due to the varying approaches European countries have been taking about data privacy enforcement. According to the Information Law Group, the commission also want to examine how best to apply the general principles of the law in an "increasingly global, networked, and distributed computing environment."

The law group advises companies to make sure they are compliant by "handling European employee data in centralized enterprise resource management systems or outsourced applications."

Outsourced applications could be any variety of services. But due to the general tone in Europe right now, companies need to make sure cloud computing providers can prove they are compliant. This can be difficult at times as providers are sometimes hesitant about disclosing locations or sub-contractors. If they can't, then it's time to start looking at other options.

Further, the Information Law Group says it's important that customers check to see if United States vendors, including cloud service providers, "are Safe Harbor certified, or alternatively use EU-approved standard contract clauses."

This issue shows again why transparency and standardized policies will be increasingly important to develop in the cloud computing market. European authorities have a reputation for strict data protection requirements. That's not going to change. It's a just a question what effect the law will have on the technology itself as privacy takes center stage.

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It's services like Put.io that are behind why Google executives argue desktops will be irrelevant in three years, why Steve Ballmer says Microsoft is betting the bank on the cloud, and why storage stats for the newest gadget are becoming less and less important.Everything is going to the cloud.

Does it often feel like a waste of time to download something just to watch it once and then delete it? Then Don't. Use Put.io. Put simply, Put.io fetches files from the Internet and allows you to either store them there or immediately stream them.

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Put.io can get files from bittorrent, FTP, direct download and rapidshare, as well as from standard websites. It can even automatically keep up with downloads, pulling links from an RSS feed.

While the immediate question is one of legality, we do want to mention that, aside from pirated movies and television shows, there actually are a lot of videos out there available for download by bittorrent and other means. Beyond that, Put.io addresses the issue of legality and the DMCA, saying that "It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and other applicable intellectual property laws. Responses may include disabling access for all users to the material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating submitters of the material ability to use the Put.io service at all."

We gave the service a shot and it downloaded a 750 megabyte torrent in less then a minute. Although the service wasn't able to stream the MKV format directly on the site (and we had the wrong DiVX player version), we gave it another shot with an AVI torrent and we had streaming video in under a minute. And Put.io stores the files so you can come back and access them again and again.

Currently, beta testers get 50 gigs of storage with 150 gigs of bandwidth. The bandwidth is not counted when downloading the files to the service, but instead when you access them - so repeated watching of a large file could surely reach that limit.

In addition to the basic functionality, you can share files and folders with friends and access files from anything that supports a browser, from your iPhone to your PS3. In addition to a mobile version, the service is planning to release an API as well as a Boxee plugin. The site is still in public beta, but Put.io is offering 300 invites to our readers. Simply visit this site and get an invite.

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