oTeam of 11

Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch

Brajeshwar — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:48:58 +0000

The load balancing, auto scaling, and cloud monitoring features are now available for Amazon AWS. The features work together to help you to build highly scalable and highly available applications. Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon EC2 capacity, Auto Scaling dynamically scales it based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing distributes load across multiple instances in one or more Availability Zones.

The measurements collected by Amazon CloudWatch provide Auto Scaling with the information needed to run enough Amazon EC2 instances to deal with the traffic load. Auto Scaling updates the Elastic Load Balancing service when new instances are launched or terminated to automatically scale the load-balanced capacity. You can instantiate, configure, and deploy these important system architecture components in seconds.

Django Best Practices

Brajeshwar — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:44:45 +0000

“This is a living document of best practices in developing and deploying with the Django Web framework. These should not be seen as the right way or the only way to work with Django, but instead best practices we’ve honed after years of working with the framework.”

Read the article in full – Django Best Practices.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Brajeshwar — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:24:49 +0000

Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop – you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are loaded in to S3 before firing off the job.

Check out Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Real World Django

Brajeshwar — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:15:50 +0000

There’s plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that’ll help you write a site using Django… but then what? You’ve still got to test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means all your beautiful code is for naught.

Read Read World Django as it unfolds the tutorial which examines how best to cope when the Real World intrudes on your carefully designed website.

Washington Times releases open source projects

Brajeshwar — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:16:30 +0000

The Washington Times has released few open source projects. Visit Washington Times Open Source for more.

The Washington Times has used open source projects for some time now. All of our servers run Ubuntu linux. Our database servers use PostgreSQL. Our web servers use lighttpd and Apache httpd, and memcached. We develop entirely in python, using the django framework. We are obviously strong believers in open source.

Rails versus Django

Brajeshwar — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:01:53 +0000

“These are the sorts of differences seen in both stacks. They are common, and commonly pivotal to arguments comparing the two frameworks. Proponents of one framework typically argue one way ‘because it is the way decreed by our language authors’. So really you’re looking at which language you prefer.”

(Via: SuperJared)

Amazon opens up its Flexible Payments Service

Atif — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:27:17 +0000

TechFlash report a good news of Amazon opening up its Flexible Payment Service to everyone.Amazon charges fees for use of Flexible Payments Service. As part of today’s rollout, however, Amazon is offering developers who sign up for Flexible Payments by March 15 — and launch their application by June 1 — free payment processing for the first 90 days, until their transaction volume reaches $500,000.

Managers’ Deadlines vs. Developers’ Estimates

Brajeshwar — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:06:25 +0000

Deadlines come from external sources, for example, “Feature X needs to be ready for the summer trade show”.
Estimates come from internal sources, for example, “Feature X will take me N weeks to complete”.Hackification hints to few steps to ease the situation where the deadline is shorter than the estimate;

Managers

Let the person doing the work create the estimate.
Don’t override an estimate with a deadline.

Developers

Respect for your estimates only flows from accurate estimates.
Accurate estimates come from tiny tasks.
Review your estimates after the event.

Marketing

Explain the reason for the deadline

Read the article in full at Hackification.

Typogrify: easily produce web typography that doesn’t suck

Brajeshwar — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:25:01 +0000

Typogrify is a collection of Django template filters that help prettify your web typography by preventing ugly quotes and widows and providing CSS hooks to style some special cases. Read more about Typogrify from Jeff Croft.

100% on Amazon Web Services: Soocial.com

Brajeshwar — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:04:44 +0000

Soocial Web application: Nginx running behind an Elastic IP, proxying the request to an HAProxy on every “webapp” instance, each of which has its own memcache server (they don’t need to explicitly expire the cache). The reason they use Nginx is to supply SSL support, if HAproxy would do SSL they probably wouldn’t be using Nginx.

Via AWS Blog.

Python 3.0 released

Harsh — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:20:36 +0000

Python 3.0 (a.k.a. “Python 3000″ or “Py3k”) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places.