Running a production application in the cloud can be great because it’s possible to add and remove servers from a cluster dynamically using a provisioning API. These automatic additions and removals can be triggered by system utilization levels that you measure, such as concurrent network connections, memory utilization, or CPU utilization. When you need more [...]

You might think that if you want faster internet performance, you can simply get a connection to the internet that has higher bandwidth. When you get a “faster” internet connection you may observe faster downloads. But it’s less frequently the additional bandwidth, and more frequently reduced latency that actually produces increased interactive web performance. This [...]

I have been writing a 10-part series on the Rackspace Cloud Blog. I’ll be keeping a running list of the posts here as they are published. Rule 1 – Cache is Your Friend Rule 2 – Don’t write to the database in real time Rule 3 – Use a “Stateless” design whenever possible Rule 4 [...]