Doug Grismore provides a very useful S3 performance tip; monotonically increasing keys will hurt performance, and describes a clean-enough way to avoid the problem

Amazing stuff from Adrian Cockroft at last week's QCon. Faceted object model, lots of Cassandra automation

something Chris Horn sent on -- using Puppet to build stacks and deploy to AWS using a simple point-and-click interface. looks cool

NetFlix' benchmarks -- impressively detailed. '48, 96, 144 and 288 instances', across 3 EC2 AZs in us-east, successfully scaling linearly

hey, I know a few of those! 'I need more help on a project I’m driving at Amazon where we continue to make big changes in our datacenter network to improve customer experience and drive down costs while, at the same time, deploying more gear into production each day than all of Amazon.com used back in 2000. It’s an exciting time and we have big changes happening in networking. If you enjoy and have experience in operating systems, networking protocol stacks, or embedded systems and you would like to work on one of the biggest networks in the world, [get in touch].' -- James Hamilton

Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: 'One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn't really make a difference).'

Rightscale CTO on last week's outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too

comme il faut

massively detailed critique of Google's corporate culture -- lots of internals exposed

Python, Nginx, Tornado for COMET stuff, MySQL as a data store, memcached, Thrift, haproxy, AWS, Pylons.  fantastic, very detailed post (via Nelson)

extensive details on the innards of Netflix' move to AWS, from the legendary Adrian Cockcroft