ClearScale Blog

I was playing around with Amazon RDS today. It’s a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. In other words, Amazon manages MySQL on the server level and you can connect to it via your application or a MySQL command line. You are also able to perform various database administration tasks via an Amazon API or using something like a RightScale management platform. Here are some of the

I have been setting up CloudFront CDN to serve static content for client websites. CloudFront is a CDN service provided by Amazon and is very easy to set up. Most CDN providers like Akamai, Limelight, and Edgecast require you to sign a contract, but CloudFront is pay-as-you-go. In order to use CloudFront, you need to create a “distribution,” which in basic terms is an association of an S3 bucket containing your static files to an Amazon generated domain name like

I just got through reading The Art of Capacity Planning by John Allspaw. He is one of the guys that designs and maintains systems for Flickr. This is someone who designed geographically dispersed systems and faced real capacity problems at Flickr. Just to give you an idea: Flickr gets 4 billion database queries per day, stores over 500 million images, and has over 20 million users worldwide. All this experience makes for a great book for anyone who wants to

I just finished reading Cloud Application Architectures by George Reese. It’s good reading for folks that are just getting into cloud computing but are already somewhat technically savvy around systems engineering. The book is focused on AWS, as it's the prevalent and most feature-rich public cloud out there. It’s a good primer for folks getting started with AWS and has some cool AWS command line tool examples and goes over some of the AWS services and concepts. The