The NetCircle

Being in a very sporty mood these days, we decided to host the Big Post Olympic Pool Tournament (BPOPT). The exact date will be announced soon. So if you happen to be in Shanghai and feel like hanging out at our office at Suzhou Creek, have a beer or two and challenge us in the pool tournament drop me a line. I’ll keep you informed about the details.

8-BALL Standardized World Rules

1. OBJECT OF THE GAME. Eight Ball is a call shot game played with a cue ball and fifteen object balls, numbered 1 through 15. One player must pocket balls of the group numbered 1 through 7 (solid colors), while the other player has 9 thru 15 (stripes). THE PLAYER POCKETING HIS GROUP FIRST AND THEN LEGALLY POCKETING THE 8-BALL WINS THE GAME.

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This week’s “out of Office Day” became a “in the Office day” which was a wise decision. Here in Shanghai it was raining like hell. Rain in Shanghai limits your radius of action to how far you are willing to walk in the rain, because it gets really hard to find a taxi.

oooday

Turned out to be a classical Beer, Pizza und Computergames evening.

The NetCircle Team at Teppanyaki. The place is called Gintei. It offers All you can eat/ All you can drink. Which is a good start for a funny evening. It was also a Goodbye for our Chinese and English Teacher Luca who is about to conquer North America with her endless patience. Thanks for everything!!!

I personally stuffed myself with sashimi and the steak with fried garlic. I also recommend the honey chicken or the ginger pork. Alas I not sure what the guys are doing. Maybe drinking a imaginary Sakebomb.

Despite the vague suspicion that sakebombs were involved the evening was all about having fun …and maybe drinking …but mostly having fun.

See you in two weeks for the next theNetCircle Out Of Office Day.

There has been quite a big discussion in the blogosphere about the recent downtime of Amazon S3. As we are going to use S3 and EC2 in some of our upcoming projects we ‘re paying close attention to what’s going on with Amazon Webservices (AWS). Of course it also helps to keep an eye on the overall development in the web service/cloud computing space. Some thoughts.

Instant return on (no) investment
AWS does not require any upfront payments. This allows us to develop our project while exploring Amazon’s systems without any investment in hardware, traffic packages etc. Everything is pay per use so there is no financial overhead from servers standing around and waiting to be used.

Out of the box scalability
AWS works by exposing Amazons infrastructure trough web services and thus making it easily accessible for 3rd party use. Due to Amazons massive architecture and computing power we don’t need to worry about storage space and scaling issues. This was one of the key points for us when we decided to go with AWS.

Uptime vs. Price
AWS is pretty cheap. Prices for storage, traffic and computing time are reasonable and seem to be a good deal overall. However, when you are looking for high availability, you might want to look somewhere else. By the time we chose to go with Amazon, none of their web services did have an SLA, which basically means that they could be down anytime leaving us with no chance for compensation. To our pleasant surprise, Amazon introduced an SLA. As we already decided to use AWS without SLA, the 99.9 percent uptime was/is good enough for us (some might argue that it’s not enough).
There are several other providers of similar services and some actually offer 100 percent uptime (e.g. content delivery networks) but the bill and the end of the month might look a little bit different.

The recent AWS downtime reminded us that even Amazon is not impeccable.

Therefore, our basic rules for AWS usage are:

• Do not use AWS as core of your application so that your base services still run if AWS is down.
• If your system relies on AWS, always have a backup solution in place so that you can keep your basic service up.