A friend pointed me to a blog in which Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink, asserts that the term "private cloud" is nothing more than empty marketing hype. Ironically, he proposes that we instead use the term "service-oriented cloud computing." Maybe I'm being obtuse, but "service-oriented" anything is about the...
One challenge that we've faced at Electric Cloud is how to verify that our makefile parser correctly emulates GNU Make. We started by generating test cases based on a close reading of the gmake manual. Then we turned to real-world examples: makefiles from dozens of open source projects and from...
One of the problems facing cloud computing is the difficulty in getting data from your local servers to the cloud. My home Internet connection offers me maybe 768 Kbps upstream, on a good day, if I'm standing in the right place and nobody else in my neighborhood is home. Even...
In my last blog, I presented some higher level criteria for deciding what kind of machines to pick and how to set them up. This time I will offer some additional concrete tips for machine setup. This is a pretty loose collection of things I have found useful. (more…)...
Due to the nature of Electric Cloud products, we frequently field questions about how to best configure a large number of machines. I'll touch on a few points that we have found particularly interesting, both when helping customers or setting up our own internal machines. (more…)...
Like any system that has evolved over many years, GNU Make is rife with appendages of questionable utility. One area this is especially noticeable is the collection of built-in rules in gmake. These rules make it possible to do things like compile a C source file to an executable without...
Nobody would ever claim that GNU Make is a general purpose programming language, but with a little work, we can coerce it into generating Fibonacci numbers for us. Why bother? Because we can. (more…)...
I happened across a blog today that made the claim that accelerating builds by distributing to a cluster of computers is "a dying technology." Instead, they said, you should take advantage of increasing CPU density to enable increasing levels of parallelism in your builds — a single system with eight...
You’ll know from my previous blog posts that we have an extensive virtual machine infrastructure here at Electric Cloud (the Continuous Delivery company) to support our build and test process (as many of our customers do). Thought I’d share a neat trick I picked up while rolling out our system....
I recently wrote an article for CM Crossroads exploring various strategies for handling rules that generate multiple output files in GNU make. If you've ever struggled with this problem, you should check out the article. I don't want to spoil the exciting conclusion, but it turns out that the only...
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