Cloudant

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

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. 

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.

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.

Today marks the one year anniversary of Joe Williams (@williamsjoe) becoming a member of Team Cloudant.  Those of us who are married will recall that one year is the paper anniversary so it's fitting that Joe will be receiving paper (in the form of vested stock options) from Cloudant today.  I thought I would take a moment on this occasion to thank Joe for his work over the past year.

We first hired Joe on a contract basis to help us build an internal infrastructure tool we call The Deployer.  This is the tool that allows us to quickly provision and configure resources from a number of different cloud providers.  We can, with the push of one button, 'inflate' an X-node Cloudant database cluster, and have it configured and available in a matter of minutes, all because of Joe's ongoing efforts.

Since joining full-time, Joe has acted as our 'utility infielder.'  All the problems in the operations and infrastructure realm fell to Joe.  He built and mantains our monitoring system, our logging system, and our build system.  That alarm system we have where we get a text message in the middle of the night when something goes wrong, Joe did that (thanks Joe!).  Joe, margarita in hand, has pushed hot code updates to live systems from a Mexican karaoke bar.

Needless to say Joe has been and continues to be a staggering presence at Cloudant.  We feel privileged to work with him on a daily basis.  I only hope I'm able to write a similar post on his 5 year anniversary.  Plus, the man has excellent mutton chops.

Thanks Joe!  Here's to the big things (and fewer alarms) coming in the next year.

We're very excited to be joinin up with our friends at 10gen to sponsor the NoSQL Live conference right here in Boston, our backyard.  The official press release can be found here.

The event will take place on March 11th at the John Hancock hotel.  A number of us from Cloudant will be at the conference in both official (panel discussions, lightning talks) and unofficial (milling about, drinking) capacities.  If you are in the New England area or plan on coming to the New England area, you should register and attend the conference.  You can register here.

From the 10gen events site

The Cloudant team is growing! 

We're excited to welcome Dr. Dave Hardtke who has joined Cloudant as Director of Search.  Like many of us here at Cloudant, Dave began his career as an experimental particle physicist.  In over a decade of experience Dave illuminated the secrets of the universe at various experiments such as STAR (Brookhaven National Lab), ICECUBE (Antarctica), and NA44 (CERN).  Dave's seminal work lead to the discovery of the Quark Gluon Plasma, the 2005 physics story of the year.  More recently Dave has turned his talents in algorithms and analyses to search, where he has built his own startup stinkyteddy.com, a general purpose search engine combining multiple keyword-driven search feeds and intelligent semantic analysis to deliver the most timely search results regardless of source and content types.  Prior to that Dave served as Chief Scientist at Surf Canyon, a startup focusing on personalization of real-time search.

Dave is accelerating Cloudant Search.  As we add customers it has become clear that they are hungry not just for a flexible way to store thier data, but a powerful way to "discover" their data. Search is a critical component in nearly all data driven applications.  We are therefore expanding our efforts to integrate a robust search platform into our CouchDB-based, cloud database service.  Dave brings his expertise in internet and enterpise search technology to the project.

Please join me in welcoming Dave to the team.

After looking into the problems from last night, we believe we've found the cause. In the database cluster, we tried a new version of dynamic code loading in a distributed erlang environment.  We learned that this introduced a single point of failure in the database and we've since reverted the system to eliminate this problem.  We were running the test to improve performance for customers and with today's update we have resolved the issue.

Again, we're sorry to all those affected.  We appreciate your patience as we work to improve Cloudant's performance and service.

Our new front page just went live on Cloudant.com. The main goal of this redesign is to give more information about the service we are currently rolling out. While we are still in private beta, we are starting to accept more people onto our platform and therefore we are ready to tell you more about what we are doing. We are currently aiming at existing CouchDB users, and to them we are offering professional hosting of CouchDB in the cloud. 

The new design follows the AIDA principle, according to which a succesful marketing flow involves four main phases: attention (A), interest (I), desire (D), and action (A).