Facebook apps on Heroku: 34,000 in 24 hours
september 2011 by doffm
Salesforce.com GM of Platforms (and former Heroku CEO) Byron Sebastian
Last week, Facebook and Heroku announced a partnership through which Facebook developers could easily launch applications on Heroku’s cloud Platform-as a Service via the Facebook development portal. That appears to have been a smart partnership for Heroku, which reports it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference.
On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 [applications] a minute. Facebook has again innovated and captured the excitement of the developer community.”
However, in the comments to both Heroku’s post and on Hacker News, there’s some debate over whether these are “fake apps” launched to get access to the new Timeline feature. It’s difficult to tell, especially because developers don’t need to launch on Heroku to access those features, some commenters claim.
Assuming at least a good portion are actual applications, though, such a large number is also a ringing endorsement for PaaS, in general, which increasingly appears to ideal for developers wanting to build and launch lightweight applications. For individual developers, PaaS is a way to host an application without getting caught up in systems management or other low-level concerns. Enterprise developers get the same benefits, even if they only utilize right now for non-mission-critical Facebook or mobile applications.
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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightInfrastructure Overview, Q2 2010Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
@CNN
application_development
Cloud_Computing
Facebook
Heroku
Mobile_Apps
PaaS
Salesforce.com
from google
Last week, Facebook and Heroku announced a partnership through which Facebook developers could easily launch applications on Heroku’s cloud Platform-as a Service via the Facebook development portal. That appears to have been a smart partnership for Heroku, which reports it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference.
On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 [applications] a minute. Facebook has again innovated and captured the excitement of the developer community.”
However, in the comments to both Heroku’s post and on Hacker News, there’s some debate over whether these are “fake apps” launched to get access to the new Timeline feature. It’s difficult to tell, especially because developers don’t need to launch on Heroku to access those features, some commenters claim.
Assuming at least a good portion are actual applications, though, such a large number is also a ringing endorsement for PaaS, in general, which increasingly appears to ideal for developers wanting to build and launch lightweight applications. For individual developers, PaaS is a way to host an application without getting caught up in systems management or other low-level concerns. Enterprise developers get the same benefits, even if they only utilize right now for non-mission-critical Facebook or mobile applications.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightInfrastructure Overview, Q2 2010Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
september 2011 by doffm
Load testing? Try to take down your app for $1 with blitz.io
august 2011 by doffm
Step right up to test your app!
No, this isn’t some kind of carnival pitch. It’s a new product offering from Mu Dynamics called blitz.io that allows developers building in the cloud to load test their apps for as little as a buck. With blitz.io Mu Dynamics, which has a product for ISPs that shows them how 1 million people downloading Netflix or playing FarmVille might affect their networks, is branching out into the cloud sector.
Kowsik Guruswamy, the CTO of Mu Dynamics, said today that the company realized there was an opportunity to take what it calls its blitz infrastructure used to test how apps will affect ISPs’ networks and offer load testing for developers building in the cloud. For a detailed look at how Mu built the blitz platform, check out Guruswamy’s post here. Friday, Mu said it could offer developers an hour of testing time on the Heroku platform for just $1. (It has other pricing plans as well.)
So now, developers using the Heroku or Red Hat Platforms-as-a-Service can deploy their apps and use Blitz.io to terrorize them with hits to see how well they scale. Developers get back results that tell them how many hits their app can handle. And because this is a simple and cheap test to run, they can do it as often as they want, trying it out after they upload new code or just running it over and over again as the develop tries to optimize an aspect of the application.
Calling the current way of building apps for the web or mobile devices one of “continuous deployment, Guruswamy says the iterative (and cheap) approach offered by the Blitz platform works with the way people are building out apps. It used to take six months to build an app and a month to test it, but that’s not as relevant to an entirely new crop of developers that are building on various clouds. It’s a point emphasized by the emergence of several startups such as Parse or Kinvey that are offering a variety of back-end or development services to speed up the process of building out new mobile apps or web services.
And for those thinking how it might be awesome to prank your fellow Y Combinator buddies by spending a buck to test out their app on the sly, Guruswamy says the company makes you prove the app you want to load test belongs to you. He expects to launch service for new platforms on an ongoing basis, so if your PaaS isn’t there yet, it may be soon.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Loozrboy.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightInfrastructure Overview, Q2 2010Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
@CNN
Amazoin
App_Fog
Applicaitons
Cloud
Heroku
iaas
load_testing
Makara
Mu_Dynamics
PaaS
PHP_Fog
Red_Hat
webscale
from google
No, this isn’t some kind of carnival pitch. It’s a new product offering from Mu Dynamics called blitz.io that allows developers building in the cloud to load test their apps for as little as a buck. With blitz.io Mu Dynamics, which has a product for ISPs that shows them how 1 million people downloading Netflix or playing FarmVille might affect their networks, is branching out into the cloud sector.
Kowsik Guruswamy, the CTO of Mu Dynamics, said today that the company realized there was an opportunity to take what it calls its blitz infrastructure used to test how apps will affect ISPs’ networks and offer load testing for developers building in the cloud. For a detailed look at how Mu built the blitz platform, check out Guruswamy’s post here. Friday, Mu said it could offer developers an hour of testing time on the Heroku platform for just $1. (It has other pricing plans as well.)
So now, developers using the Heroku or Red Hat Platforms-as-a-Service can deploy their apps and use Blitz.io to terrorize them with hits to see how well they scale. Developers get back results that tell them how many hits their app can handle. And because this is a simple and cheap test to run, they can do it as often as they want, trying it out after they upload new code or just running it over and over again as the develop tries to optimize an aspect of the application.
Calling the current way of building apps for the web or mobile devices one of “continuous deployment, Guruswamy says the iterative (and cheap) approach offered by the Blitz platform works with the way people are building out apps. It used to take six months to build an app and a month to test it, but that’s not as relevant to an entirely new crop of developers that are building on various clouds. It’s a point emphasized by the emergence of several startups such as Parse or Kinvey that are offering a variety of back-end or development services to speed up the process of building out new mobile apps or web services.
And for those thinking how it might be awesome to prank your fellow Y Combinator buddies by spending a buck to test out their app on the sly, Guruswamy says the company makes you prove the app you want to load test belongs to you. He expects to launch service for new platforms on an ongoing basis, so if your PaaS isn’t there yet, it may be soon.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Loozrboy.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightInfrastructure Overview, Q2 2010Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
august 2011 by doffm
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