Rants 'N Musings is back, now running on a completely new platform. Formerly, Rants 'N Musings was based on Drupal 6 running on a Linux platform based on Amazon's EC2. The instance was costing me about $80 per month, and required quite a bit of attention.

A couple of days ago I was asked the question "When does a Waterfall development approach make more sense than Agile/Scrum?"  My first reaction was "never," because based upon my experiences in utilizing Agile/Scrum, it can be applied to nearly any development project.  Upon a few seconds of reflection upon the precise words of the question, however, I decided to provide a more detailed answer.  Waterfall certainly makes more sense to many people in situations where the early sprints of an Agile/Scrum project would not yield any runnable product.   The key is that it "makes more sense."

Eucalyptus vs Amazon EC2

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 » Cloud, Cloud Services, IaaS

Recently I read an article in which the author claimed that Amazon EC2 was seeing competition from Eucalyptus, a partially open-sourced clone of Amazon's EC2.  Eucalyptus, available in a free open source version and an enterprise edition, provides a framework for creating and managing a cloud using the same syntax and semantics as Amazon EC2 and S3.  While several of my colleagues have called this "competition" for Amazon, i think the existence of Eucalyptus is actually a tremendous benefit for Amazon.  In essence, I believe it to be a highly complimentary product.

One of my clients asked me today "Why do we need IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service)?  Isn't one clearly better than the other and hence the 'right' model?  Which one will win?" The question of which model is "best" really differs according to use case.  Each model having its advantages for particular use cases.  Overall, the models are not necessarily in competition with each other, but a complimentary set of tools for solving various problems.

Google Storage for Developers, which is Google's new beta of a Cloud storage service similar to Amazon S3, announced a new feature intended to make team-based development easier.  They've added the concept of "groups" to their ACL (access control lists).  The announcement uses both the terminology "groups" and "projects."