As Cloudant's ops guy and "utility infielder" I (@williamsjoe) will be speaking at the Surge conference in September. Surge is a conference presented by OmitTI that focuses on infrastructure and web operations. As such I will be discussing how we have built Cloudant's database platform on top of Amazon's EC2. The conference will include keynotes from the always excellent John Allspaw (of Flickr and Etsy fame) and Theo Schlossnagle (OmniTI).

 

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Going to OSCON?  SETI needs your help! 

Cloudant is teaming up with the SETI Institute to help engage citizen-scientists in the search for intelligent life elswhere in the universe.  With some help from Amazon, we've built a 'croudsourced data analytics platform' where ordinary citizens can search and analyze data from the Allen telescope array.  Are you a citizen-scientist?  Do you know about signal processing?  Are  you interested in helping in the search?  Come find out how!

Thursday, July 22nd at OSCON, our own Dr. Dave Hardtke will be demonstrating SETICloud.  He'll be describing the Cloudant platform and how we're bringing the wisdom of the crowds to SETI's search.

Time: 12:20 - 1:20 pm

Place: Room E143/144

SETI is hacking on CouchDB!  Come find out how you can help.

And don't miss Dr. Jill Tarter's keynote talk on "Open SEITQuest" Thursday morning at OSCON:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13425

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Over the weekend I traveled to Chicago to give a talk on 'CouchDB for Beginners' at the WindyCityDB conference.  You can read the slides above.  The conference exceeded my expectations and many of the talks, both long and short, were stellar.  Big thanks to Ray Hightower and all the people who helped put WindyCityDB together.  I very much appreciate the opportunity to give this talk and I hope everyone enjoyed it. 

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It turns out that next week (the week of June 21st) is a big week for tech conferences.  A bunch of the Cloudant people will be hitting up various conferences and giving a couple talks.  If anyone is interested in meeting up over beers to talk Cloudant, CouchDB, NoSQL, Startups, etc. get in touch (info at cloudant dot com is a good place to start.)  Here are the tour dates:

• Structure Conference.  June 23 - 24. San Francisco, CA:   Both Adam Kocoloski (CTO) and David Hardtke (Search) will be milling about this conference, whose tagline is "Put Cloud Computing To Work."  On the 23rd in the afternoon, Cloudant will be taking part in the Launchpad! event.  Adam will be working the crowd, drumming up some love for Cloudant, giving a short pitch about our service.  Check it out.
• Velocity Conference.  June 22 - 24. Santa Clara, CA:  No Cloudant talk at this conference but Joe Williams (Operations and Utility Infeilding) will be in attendence.  No one I know gets more pumped up about server uptime, configuration management, and monitoring than Joe.  If you're the same way, say hi.
• Momentum Summit.  June 23. Cambridge, MA: This one day conference focuses on how to turn a startup into big business.  CEO Alan Hoffman (that's me) will be in attendence.  Looking forward to hearing from Boston startup gurus like Steve Kaufer and Scott Griffith.  I'm always eager to talk with other local startup types so come find me.
• Windy City DB.  June 26.  Chicago, IL:  I'm lucky enough to be heading back to my hometown to attend and speak at this one day event on the south side of Chicago.  My talk is entitiled "Learning to Relax: CouchDB for Beginners" and it is about, uh, CouchDB for beginners.  It's my first long-format NoSQL talk so if you're in attendance, please no heckling.  I'm happy to meet up after the conference; if you're looking for me on Friday afternoon, I'll be at U.S. Cellular Field watching the White Sox.

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Today we released two open source projects that have been in use internally at Cloudant for some time now, Gaff and Deckard.

All of our infrastructure is in the cloud and as such we need a way for disperate systems to all request resources, this is where Gaff comes in. Gaff is a pubsub daemon for asynchronously talking to cloud APIs using AMQP. Currently it supports a subset of the Dynect (DNS), Slicehost and EC2 APIs and uses geemus' awesome fog Ruby library. The basic workflow for Gaff is to send JSON-RPC formated messages to an AMQP exchange with a routing key corresponding to the API you are talking to, you could be sending these messages from a web application or another service.  Each message gets routed to an API specific queue and is picked up by Gaff and turned into the appropriate API call, starting, stopping, modifying your servers on EC2 or elsewhere.

We have a lot of CouchDB instances to keep tabs on to do this we wrote Deckard. Deckard is a HTTP check monitoring system based on CouchDB. Yo dawg! What better than to monitor CouchDB with CouchDB (and some Ruby)? Deckard supports basic HTTP content checks, email alerts, SMS alerts (via email) for on-call rotations, basic maintenance scheduling, replication latency alerts (between two Couches) and even has EC2 Elastic IP support for failover between two EC2 instances. Best of all since it's based on Couch you get an API for free, just PUT a doc in the HTTP checks database and you get a new HTTP check the next time Deckard runs.

Checkout these and my other projects on GitHub and follow Cloudant and myself on Twitter.

 

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