Dented Reality

Monthly Archives: August 2008

Redundancy, Performance and Geo-Optimization with S3 and CDNs

Aug 27 2008
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Disclaimer: This is a theory, I haven’t tried this out (anyone at EdgeCast want to confirm/give me a free account to try it out? :-) )

I was looking at ways to store large volumes of user-uploaded resources (images) in a web environment tonight and had a bit of an epiphany. I had defaulted to Amazon’s S3 web service as the storage platform, since I’ve worked with it before and love the idea of an “unlimited”, fully-redundant storage device. The main problem with S3 however, is that it’s got less than stellar performance as far as latency and geographically-optimized delivery. That, and the bandwidth is relatively expensive.

So — what happens if you combine S3 with a Content Delivery Network of some sort? Read the rest of this post…

Michael Phelps: Changing the façade of the Olympics

Aug 23 2008
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In the wake of Michael Phelps’ historic performance at the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the question on every-one’s mind is (or should be) “how far are we willing to go?” Beating out the Gladiatorially-named and carbon-fiber-spring-blade-loaded Oscar Pistorius as the first hyper-human athlete to compete in the so called “games”, Phelps officially marks the beginning of a spiral into artificially modified “humans” performing for crowds of unengineered, imperfect pure-bloods such as you and me. Read the rest of this post…