Jason Ishibashi

This org chart made me LOL. It’s so true. Too bad they didn’t do one for RIM.

11 August 2011 ·

Amazon Cloud Player collapses under demand for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way 1

Amazon Cloud Player collapses under demand for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way

In a probable attempt to promote Amazon Cloud Player, Amazon MP3 is selling Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album for 99 cents, but it seems that the back end servers can’t handle the load.

Most customers have only received a portion of the album and a significant number have received less than half the album causing a number of 1-star ratings on Amazon.com.

23 May 2011 ·

Netflix Has A Chaos Monkey… and it is Awesome.

The Chaos Monkey has one job - to run around the Netflix servers and services and create chaos. The Chaos Monkey has one job: to run around and randomly kill services within what Netflix calls their Rambo architecture.

Why would a company create chaos within their own working network? Netflix needs each system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems upon which the first system depends. In other words, using the Rambo metaphor, each system needs to be able to succeed, no matter what, even when all alone, in the jungle (okay, no jungle).

For example, if the recommendations system goes down, the entire website should still work showing popular titles rather than personalized picks. For another example, if search becomes slow and bogged down with queries, the streaming systems should still operate perfectly.

This mantra, “If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most - in the event of an unexpected outage.”

Netflix really nailed it with their preparation this past weekend. The massive Amazon EC2 server outage took down many websites including Formspring, Hootsuite, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, Ow.ly, Zynga and about.me among many others.

Depending on the robustness of each architecture, each website went down to a greater or lesser degree. Some went down altogether, some (like Reddit) were able to keep serving their information but commenting and social functions stopped working.

Despite relying on Amazon EC2, Netflix’s architecture hardly seemed to miss a beat. And that’s because they have a Monkey running around causing chaos.

26 April 2011 ·

Get 20 GB Free Storage For One Year From Amazon 1

Get 20 GB Free Storage For One Year From Amazon

We just told you about Amazon’s new Cloud Player music streaming service. To sweaten the deal Amazon is running a promotion. If you buy an MP3 album from the Amazon MP3 Store, you get 20 GB of stroage free for one year from the date of purchase. After one year is up, you will drop down to the free 5 GB plan, and you will never be charged.

Get the full details here.

29 March 2011 ·

Jason Ishibashi 5

Amazon Launches Online Music Streaming Service

Simply upload your music to Amazon’s servers and play them via the web or via Android. The new service dubbed Cloud Player works with the current Cloud Drive service which allows users to store any data up to 5 GB for free.

Google and Apple are rumored to be working on their own cloud-based players, but with the launch of Cloud Player, Amazon is the first to market.

Cloud Player works extremely well with the Amazon MP3 store, but can also handle music from post-DRM iTunes as well as other unencrypted music sources.

Cloud Player does not blow your mind, but rather gets the job done simply. Hopefully, this is an early release with more features to come.

Learn more about Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.

29 March 2011 ·

Jason Ishibashi 7

Change Your Amazon.com Password Today

Lifehacker and The Consumerist are reporting a flaw in Amazon’s login authentication system. Now is a good opportunity to change your password.

Whether or not the flaw actually affects you, it’s a good opportunity to think about how easy it is to break into your accounts. While most well known companies have security experts that make it extremely difficult for someone (even an employee) to figure out your password, many companies do very little to protect your personal data.

This being said, unless you’re using different passwords for every account you have, it’s a really good idea to change your password on occasion (more often is better). This way, if someone manages to grab your username and password, the timetable where he/she can do damage to your other accounts is minimized.

Of course, using different passwords for every site eliminates this security risk altogether, but most people do not. If you are interested in a Password Manager to track the different passwords you are using for every site, check outLifehacker’s Five Best Password Managers. I use KeePass.

via Lifehacker and The Consumerist

27 January 2011 ·