Web 2.0 and the massive growth of mobile clients changed the way we have to think about application architectures. Node.js was one of the first technologies that tried to address this challenge by making use of a non-blocking, asynchronous runtime environment for server-side software based on JavaScript. Last year, vert.x was introduced - a similar runtime realized within the Java virtual machine. In contrast to Node.js, vert.x follows a true polyglot approach and allows developers to build their systems with JavaScript, Groovy, Java, and other languages. Even mixed within one application.

Gareth Rushgrove emphasized the importance of cloud portability in a world of Infrastructure and Platform as a Service, offering examples taken from the development of GOV.UK.

Stephen Nelson-Smith discusses the idea of financial intermediation in cloud computing and explores how to use the Chef cloud automation framework to make it easy to move between cloud providers.

"As engineers we strive for perfection; to obtain perfect code running on perfect hardware, all perfectly operated." This is the opening from Adrian Cockroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix in his recent Keynote Address at Collaboration Summit 2013. Cockroft continues that the Utopia of perfection takes too long, that time to market trumps quality and so we compromise. But rather than lamenting the loss of "static, better, cheaper" perfection, Cockroft describes how the Netflix "Cloud Native" architecture embraces the Dystopia of "broken and inefficient" to deliver "sooner" and "dynamic". Cockroft says that "the new engineering challenge is not to construct perfection but to construct highly agile and highly available services from ephemeral and often broken components."

jvmtop is a lightweight console application to monitor all accessible, running jvms on a machine. It's like top but is able to provide jvm internals (e.g. memory information) of running JVMs / java processes. It can also drill down cpu-usage to the thread-level, showing you the most cpu-intensive threads in a live view.

This article explain basic difference between Primary Key and Unique Key

This Book aims to provide solutions to the most common problems encountered by the inexperienced (accidental) DBA. How does it fare?

This is the most common requirement on most of the Exchange servers hosted on IIS. The server admins configure an http to https redirect. Today I will be discussing few ways of doing this. I will keep updating this document as I find more ways to do so. I am considering OWA as a sub application under IIS for all the below examples. Here is the structuring of the Web Site:

Node.js developers: add some Windows Azure authentication and access control to your Node app with the newly MS Open Tech’s released open source library for Windows Azure Active Directory service.