https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Every software architects should remind himself of this once in a while! If we cannot make a direct and straightforward link between the functional documentation and the technical documentation, we are doing it wrong. If it takes more than 5 min. to find where a business rule is implemented in the code, we are doing it wrong. It’s easy to lose sight of the forest, but that is part of our duty and responsibility.

Imagine that you are looking at the blueprints of a building. This document, prepared by an architect, tells you the plans for the building. What do these plans tell you? [...]

Just as the plans for a house or a library scream about the use cases of those buildings, so should the architecture of a software application scream about the use cases of the application.

Architectures are not (or should not) be about frameworks. [...]

Joking aside, we are far far far from the Pit of Success:

In stark contrast to a summit, a peak, or a journey across a desert to find victory through many trials and surprises, we want our customers to simply fall into winning practices by using our platform and frameworks. To the extent that we make it easy to get into trouble we fail.

True productivity comes from being able to easily create great products—not from being able to easily create junk. Build a pit of success.

Rico Mariani, Chief Architect of Visual Studio

The original article from Compute Cycle can be found here. It has more details on how the cluster was built. They used the Condor scheduler and Opscode‘s Chef project for monitoring the instances.

In a related article, James Hamilton (Vice President on the Amazon Web Services team) discusses how spot instances in Amazon are a win/win trade-off for both Amazon and customers.

For more information, you can read the announcement made by Somasegar yesterday.

Below is a slideshow demonstrating the effect of layout. In the last step, he is applying the golden ratio to font sizes. The net effect is subtle, but does give the impression that the layout is more balanced when you compare before & after side by side.