InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Amazon EC2 Outage Explained and Lessons Learned
Amazon has published a detailed report on the service failure plaguing one availability zone in the US East Region. The online media is full with analysis, commentaries and lessons to be learned from the event.
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Ravi Kannan receives ACM SIGACT Knuth Price 2011
Ravi Kannan from Microsoft Research has been appointed winner of the ACM SIGACT's (Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) Knuth Price 2011. According to the press announcement he receives the price for his work on influential algorithic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems.
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SQL Server 2008 SP1 and Feature Pack CTP Bring New Features and Tools
Microsoft has announced the availability for download of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CTP, including all cumulative updates, and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Feature Pack CTP1, containing a number of stand alone tools adding more value to SQL Server 2008.
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New.NET Async Control Flow Explained
Alan Berman recently explained the details of how the new Async and Await keywords impact the flow of control. Using these keywords allows an asynchronous function's return values to be processed without using explicitly defined callbacks. This allows for more natural code grouping, as calling and processing of an asynchronous function can occur in the same function.
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Graph Database Neo4j Updates Licensing and Enhances Usability
Neo Technology has released version 1.3 GA (General Availability) of Neo4j. This release updates Neo4j's licensing and adds a number of features. The Community edition is now licensed under GPLv3, the same license as MySQL.
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Rubinius Comes To EngineYard's AppCloud, Work on 1.9 and GIL Removal Continues
EngineYard now offers Rubinius on its AppCloud PaaS service. InfoQ talked to Evan Phoenix about the state of Rubinius, the new performance tools and the status of the GIL removal.
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Apple Responds to iOS Location Data Concerns
Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper reported that security researchers had discovered a log of locations being locally cached on an iPhone 4, from a report posted at O'Reilly. Apple have now responded to the concerns and promise to resolve some specific issues, but deny they were ever collecting location data from individual devices.
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Using Messaging and Scheduling for Lock-free Access to Shared State
In a message passing system there may be times when mutable data must be shared amongst many tasks. In traditional programming this would be handled by a read-writer block, which would allow one writer thread to block all other threads while it updates the shared data. With a technique found in frameworks such as TPL Dataflow it is possible to avoid this.
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Cloud Foundry Experiences Storage Failure
VMware’s Cloud Foundry yesterday experienced a widespread failure of their storage infrastructure that left some users wondering why they couldn’t log into their control panels and issue vmc commands.
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Feedback, Non-Feedback and Uncalled Feedback
The importance of feedback in Agile development is paramount. Feedback is built into every aspect of the methodology ranging from unit tests, continuous integration, daily standup, retrospectives to end of sprint demos. In-spite of all this, are there still some feedback loops which remain incomplete?
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Boost Website Performance with the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service
The newly-released Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service stores distributed data in-memory to improve performance on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. It’s highly scalable, will cache any type of data regardless of size, and is secured via the AppFabric Access Control Service.
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Representing Agile Testing
Several members of the Agile community describe different styles for expressing user story tests and the testing of an entire theme.
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Twilio's Cloud Architecture Principles
While many complained about the AWS outage impacting their business, Twilio explained, in a controversial post, why its Cloud Architecture Principles were key in not being or mildly affected by the AWS issues.
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OpenStack Discusses Cactus, Previews Diablo
The OpenStack project gathered late last week, and amidst the Amazon EBS debacle, held a Webinar to both elaborate on new features introduced in Cactus and describe anticipated elements of the upcoming Diablo release.
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Asynchronous Message Processing using Task Parallel Library and Reactive Extensions
A new preview of TPL Dataflow has recently been released along with Visual Studio Async. Along with performance enhancements and stronger ties with the Reactive Framework, it is being positioned as a foundation for building actor/agent style frameworks as opposed to a complete solution.