DigitalOcean—a new cloud VPS hosting—being pretty cheap and easy to use can become one of the solutions that may interest startups, small and fast-growing projects.
The service provides a comparatively affordable pricing, starting from 5$/month, and bills hourly. This combines with ease of use: all you need is to get a dedicated IP and root access to your server, and you can start working; the control panel is plain and simple. DigitalOcean uses SSD hard drives and fast network that provide speed to servers’ work. Moreover, the service boldly promises a 99.99% uptime around network, power and virtual server availability.
Combine this all, and you’ll get an interesting solution to think about. But are there any pitfalls? For more detail, please, read the wide DigitalOcean overview by our Ruby Developer Eugene Melnikov: http://altoros.github.io/2013/digitalocean-new-amazing-cloud-vps-hosting
The three-day conference included a number of sessions on real-time data analytics, development of prediction services, data science algorithms, cutting-edge tools for dealing with big data, methods of Hadoop optimization, etc. In this post, Kirill Grigorchuk, an R&D Engineer at Altoros Systems, will share his impressions about the event.
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1. AWS is affordable
Over the last couple of years, the cost of AWS has been plummeting. You need to understand that the price you pay for a cloud consists of multiple components. Users often try to multiply the cost of instances by the number of hours used. Unfortunately, doing this does not give you an idea of how much the service costs. To understand, how much you will be paying for your cloud, you should calculate not only the price of cloud computing itself but also the cost of internet traffic and storage. You should also determine, if you need a certain guaranteed bandwidth and an amount of memory larger than that installed on standard instances, etc. In total, throughout the seven years from the moment the cloud service had been launched, its price has fallen by over 2500%.
2. You can pay ten times less for the same AWS resources
If used correctly, AWS can provide considerable computing resources at a much lower cost than it may seem at first glance. For example, if you buy a Reserved Instance as a base node (or a base set of nodes) and use the right type of architecture that will enable your application to process tasks using Spot Instances, the cost of cloud ownership can be reduced drastically. At the same time, 71% of users still use the Instance On-demand model.
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Altoros is proud to be certified as a Gold Microsoft Partner. The company has demonstrated excellent expertise in delivering software solutions using MS technologies, which was proved by the highest customer satisfaction rate. Based on the survey that was conducted by Microsoft, 100% of the interviewed Altoros customers are satisfied with the service and are ready to recommend the company to their partners. 87% of respondents reported that they are ready to work with us again.
In addition, such Altoros’s customers as ePocket Solutions AS, Watch & Trade ltd., Io Genetic AS, IT4you AS, and Locus Logistics AS provided positive feedback and confirmed great quality of the projects delivered by the company.
Extensive expertise of the employees is one of the key requirements to a gold partnership applicant. Altoros’s engineers have proved their skills by successfully passing a number of Microsoft exams, including Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD), Microsoft Certified Applications Developer (MCAD), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD), and many other.
On February 21, L.A. Ruby conference started with a two-day workshop. What is extremely good about this event is that here the participants could not only get some theoretical knowledge but practice new tools under the mentoring of more experienced colleagues. Juan Pablo Genovese, a Ruby developer at Altoros Argentina, arrived to the Holiday Inn Media Center in Burbank, California, where the workshop took place on Thursday morning. As a mentor, he helped the attendees to try A/B testing methods, as well as such tools as Goliath, Httperf and JMeter. As Juan Pablo commented everything that was going on “We were learning how to test your Web app to death”.
On February 22, the participants could attend a free workshop organized by RailsBridge, a non-for-profit organization that contributes into diversity of Ruby community. This organization helps groups of people that are underrepresented in the community to master Ruby to build a well-balanced Ruby world. Juan Pablo was invited as a mentor to share his rich experience.
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February 21-23, 2013 California became a residence for hundreds of Ruby enthusiasts who came to attend Los Angeles Ruby Conference. Marconi Automotive Museum in Tustin was selected as the venue for the conference, so drive, beauty, and technology of this place permeated the air and created a special vibe. As usually, the participants could network to discuss the latest frameworks and exciting real cases, as well as learn how to increase productivity of Ruby-based apps with Ruby-compatible tools. During the lightning talks, the speakers also covered refactoring of large apps that feature complicated business logic and demonstrated how to build recommendation systems using Ruby.
Altoros could not stand aside and joined the Ruby wave. Juan Pablo Genovese, a passionate Ruby developer who has been working with this language since 2006, left Altoros’s office in Argentina and rushed to the City of Angels. He had a rather intense schedule, since he was in on all the three days, contributing as a coach and a speaker.
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In September, two new offices opened in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, Argentina, extending Altoros’s broad geographical coverage. Being just two hours ahead of New York, the development centers in Argentina provide efficient communication with the US customers.
Nicolas Rotta
For three months, the offices grew from two senior developers to 11 highly-qualified senior and mid-level Ruby specialists.
The Argentinian development center focuses mainly on Ruby-based projects. Ruby simplicity and elegance, along with the well-established traditions of Ruby development and the mature community in this country, guarantee extensive expertise in project implementation using this language.
Nicolas Rotta is the Director of Operations at Altoros’s office in Buenos Aires. He holds a Master Degree in Information Technology of Carnegie Mellon University and is certified as a systems security and a business-oriented specialist.
Manuel Garcia
Manuel Garcia Manuel Garcia is the Director of Operations at Altoros’s office in Santa Fe. He got his Engineering Degree at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional and is a certified SCRUM Master. Being a Product and Project Manager with +15 years of Software Development experience, Manuel also is an agile methodologies evangelist.
Nicolas and Manuel cooperate closely with the customers throughout the full product lifecycle and help to:
- gather and prioritize requirements
- draw up the product vision and main features
- manage and distribute development tasks
- control project milestones and deadline
- coordinate work of software development, marketing, quality assurance, etc. specialists
To discuss how your project can be implemented with Ruby, call our offices in Argentina:
Buenos Aires: + 54 (11) 32209675
Santa Fe: +54 (911) 63527080
Previously, companies used to run Hadoop on their own premises. However, a possibility to use resources on demand and pay for the capacities that are actually used seemed rather attractive to many customers. Joyent and SkyTap joined Amazon, a leader in public infrastructure as a service (Iaas), and rolled out cloud-based Hadoop clusters.
When preparing its Hadoop offering, Joyent turned to Altoros to get independent evaluation of their system. The results showed that virtual Hadoop clusters can provide mare-metal performance with nearly a three times faster disk input/output speed compared to similarly-sized infrastructure.
As for SkyTap, they assume that companies that already use Hadoop in their private data centers may require scaling out for a certain period of time to solve some particular tasks. In this case, it would be easy to do with extra capacities of a virtualized Hadoop cluster.
Read more about other providers of cloud-based Hadoop clusters in the full version of the article in Network World.
January 28, 2013, Santa Clara, CA—Renat Khasanshyn presented a session “Evaluating NoSQL Performance: Which Database is Right for Your Data?” at the Global Big Data Conference.
The event was dedicated to new approaches, opinions, and ideas on how to deal with ever growing amounts of data. The sessions presented by the speakers covered different aspect of the problem. In the morning, the attendees focused on the future of the big data concept, discussed perspectives, and dwelled on the issue of “How Big Data will “Cross the Chasm” from experimentation to mainstream.”
After a short break the event continued with a panel discussion about big data analytics, its advantages, bottlenecks, ways of implementation, and real-life examples.
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For a long time, Apple used to restrict employing third-party tools for building iOS apps, therefore, thousands of apps were pending approval and couldn’t reach end users. However, in September 2010 the company softened its policy and declared that they “have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.” That was a milestone that started a new chapter of cross-platform development.
However, skeptics argued that it would be hardly possible to create a Flash-based app that would be competitive to native Objective-C apps. And even though it would be developed one day, it will not be accepted by the Apple App Store. In this post, I’ll show an example of an entertainment app that I developed in my spare time using Adobe AIR 3.5. It is already published in iTunes, Google play, and on Facebook. You can download the application to test its performance, usability, and, eventually, get pleasure:
The application allows users to play with pics that were already uploaded to a device or have been just taken with its camera. With a tap of their finger, users can smudge images to make them look funny. After that, the amusing “masterpieces” can be shared with everybody on Facebook.
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