Thursday, November 6, 2008

Notes on Networking

I maintain several mindmaps on various subjects. This particular one contains my notes on networking and more specifically on the fundamental aspects of communications.

(Click on the bottom right-hand link to see full map)


Comments are appreciated.

Friday, October 31, 2008

MySQL load balancing



1) The traditional way of handling a two-tiered WEB architecture:


2) The software load-balancing approach:

3) The hardware load-balancing way:



With a versatile (i.e. scriptable) hardware load-balancer (e.g. F5's BIG-IP), one could scale the traditional architecture (see 1) without having to change the application. In this situation, one is trading software development effort against the cost of additional equipment.


Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Green Software: From Garbage Collection (GC) to Resource Recycling

I confess: I am a recycling freak.  When it comes to better our environment, I am all ears. 


I would like to offer a suggestion to the software community: in the green spirit, why couldn't we use the term Resource Recycling instead of referring to Garbage Collection?  That would help (albeit just a tad) setting the green reflex throughout the younger generations.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Python's __underscore__ operators

Cloud VPN service

With the advent of Microsoft's Azure service, I can see network operators have yet another good reason to ponder a Cloud VPN service. 


Example: Operator X offers Customer Y a service to connect all the customer's locations (with Ethernet Access and E-LAN for example) to Data-Centre(s) from Google/Amazon/Microsoft etc.

Why? The Internet is a great transport vehicule but still lacks QOS. As companies are migrating their applications to Web based ones, QOS might be a concern in some cases.