SEO / SEM SWOT

Since most of my friends here have asked me questions on SEO. I thought i'd share this presentation that I posted on SlideShare. This was a pre-engagement presentation. It contains over a 100 slides and covers many dimensions of SEO. Enjoy!

SEO / SEM SWOT Presentation

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Disaster @ Tumblr

Tumblr has been down for more than 12 hours due to an issue with their database cluster. Here is the comment I left on GigaOm.com

This is the freshest lesson for entrepreneurs and startups:
- Learn to value your data
- Implement a high availability plan
- Plan a disaster recovery strategy

“Tumblr likely has the resources to recover…”

I really hope that holds out true but remember, data is the only irreplaceable asset of an organization. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

When I was handling the disaster at Fotolog (massive database corruption when our SAN crashed), I couldn’t find any company or consulting firm ready to handle the situation and help with data recovery. It was a miracle that I came across the concept of DUDE (Data Unloading by Data Extraction) and started writing InnoDB data recovery programs in sheer desperation. In case of Fotolog, we had all basic infrastructure in place for redundancy and high availability. The component that caused the disaster was the one we relied most upon: “the financial grade strength SAN.”

The point I am trying to make is having access to cash in the bank + large userbase + really smart engineers doesn’t provide any guarantee that your data will be safe in case of a disaster.

Times like these can be of incredible stress on those handling the situation. I feel for folks at Tumblr and hoping for a speedy recovery.

Good luck Tumblr guys! You’re in my thoughts.

Frank

Sequoia backs MongoDB with $6.5M investment

Some exciting news coming from 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB. It announced today that Seqouia is investing $6.5M in it's high performance, document-oriented (BSON), key-value based NoSQL solution that supports automatic sharding and dynamic queries. Foursquare, Disqus, Etsy, Sourceforge, eVite, EventBrite and New York Times are all users of 10Gen. The features this young NoSQL solution offers is truly impressive. See MongoDB page on my Big Data Low Latency site for quick review of MongoDB.

I had the opportunity to meet with Roelof Botha few months ago as Sequoia was looking to invest in the NoSQL space and was evaluating both hardware and software solutions to solving big data challenge. Since then I was eager to hear which of the many startups in the NoSQL space will receive Sequoia's blessing. Now we know :)

Video: Netflix's migration to AWS cloud

Found this video regarding Netflix's migration to Amazon's AWS cloud very informative. Enjoy!

Cloud Migration Whitepapers

Amazon's AWS team has published a series of whitepapers covering various scenarios for migrating into AWS cloud infrastructure. Links to these whitepapers are provided below for your convenience:

- Migrating applications to the AWS cloud
- Migrating web application
- Migrating batch processing applications
- Migrating backend processing pipelines

Big Data: Freedom or Something Else?

Googling around, I came across Bradford Cross' article, Big Data Is Less About Size, And More About Freedom. Bradford writes, " The scale of data and computations is an important issue, but the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do with it."

Even though the article makes some good points, I'm not sure I can agree with Bradford's point of view here. As an architect, when I think in terms of Big Data, the ability to do "cool stuff" is probably the last thing that crosses my mind. Big Data, to me, is about ensuring constant response time as the data grows in size without sacrificing functionality.

What do you think Big Data is about? Is it merely about being able to do 'cool stuff' with your data? Is it about ensuring constant access/response times? Or is it about something else? I'm eager to hear your thoughts.