Update: Thorsten has followed-up with some interesting comments regarding the current state of the virtualized industry, the problems he’s seeing a lot of companies facing, and various obstacles they’re running into along the way. Interesting stuff!

A word of advice, easy to give, hard to follow: design your system so you can relaunch any critical instance!

Amazon has thousands of instances available, just waiting for you to hit the launch button. If a current instance smells bad and your own troubleshooting doesn’t resolve it, launch a new one and bring your service up on it. Actually, if it’s critical, you should have two running so you’d be left with one while you replace the failing one.

All this should be motherhood and apple pie on EC2 or any other hosting facility, or also in your own datacenter for that matter. Systems fail.

Thorsten von Eicken, Posted: Feb 2, 2008 10:53 AM PST

BTW: Thorsten is one of the smartest individuals I have ever had the fortune of coming to know. *GREAT* guy, and someone in whom if you need help with Amazon Web Services-related consulting, in particular EC2, I would *HIGHLY* recommend getting in contact with his company, RightScale. Just the right combination of open source, open minds, and openly giving more than he/they receive in return, so I believe it’s certainly both fair and in-line with the ideals of O’Reilly, and therefore this blog to provide promotion.

Merger-mania is in full swing of late, which is rather astonishing given the current credit market problems. Oracle finally managed after months of trying to snare business services provider BEA, and Sun’s purchase of mySQL was both hailed as a master-stroke and derided as a last gasp hope by a fading giant to bolster its database claims. Today the announcement hit the fan that Microsoft had made a $45 billion dollar bid for Yahoo, something that’s made Wall Street happy but that has people in Silicon Valley scratching their heads.

I am not a CEO, nor am I a big investor … and I’m generally not a big fan of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), because, especially when the mergers involve two reasonably large, well-established companies, the results in terms of performance seldom justify the costs involved. This is especially true of tech sector companies, where so many of the assets of the companies are not tied up in physical capital but rather in abstract ideas carried around in smart people’s heads.

The overtures that Microsoft has been making to Yahoo have been obvious for some time. The integration of Yahoo and Microsoft’s IM formats, for instance, hinted that the two were playing footsies under the table, and certainly the announcements that Yahoo would be utilizing Microsoft technology (and Microsoft’s subsequent PR blitz to that effect) at least indicated that the relationship was serious. Thus, the signs have been around for a while, and both the tech and Wall Street press have generally been playing the role of matchmakers. Yet there are more than a few signs that this particular marriage, if consumated, may end up in divorce court nonetheless.

Bruce Byfield has a nice article A Field Guide to Free Software Supporters. On his typology I’d be in between 4) Softcore advocate and 5) Mainstream advocate.

What struck me when reading it was whether pretty well the same categories could also describe people’s attibutes to Standards (and Open Standards, Open APIs, Open Systems)? Not a bad fit, with different names sometimes. In that category I guess I would be somewhere between 6) Hardcore (see All Interface Technologies by Market Dominators should be QA-ed, ZRAND Standards!) and 3) the participating idealist (because the standards issues I participate in are the ones involved in my day-to-day jobs in the markup/industrial publishing industry).