I've been absent about a week. It was time for a short vacation to attend a family wedding. Congratulations Lilian and Michael! To get my brain back in gear here are some recent interesting news bites that were waiting for me when I returned from afar.

High Performance Networking Option for Amazon EC2 to S3 communication

You might be able to improve AMI to Storage networking performance by enabling TCP window scaling and selective acknowledgements. It's not really for the faint of heart but it's not that bad! I'm sure there will be loads up updated AMI's coming out that take advantage of this new configuration. To make sure this is right for you be sure and read the documentation. Mileage may vary.

Elastra Infinite Database

I find what is promised intriguing but long to see it in action. "Elastra enables standard RDBMS cluster solutions (MySQL, EnterpriseDB (Postgres + Oracle), PostgreSQL) to run as a cluster on Amazon EC2 while storing their data live on Amazon S3 mounted as an infinite disk drive. This is not a periodic backup solution, but a real, infinitely scalable RDBMS system for applications deployed on EC2. Standard administrative, ETL, and analytic tools can be used to manage the database instances."

This obviously has some degree of relevance to the above information about High Performance Networking.

Yahoo Performance Group

This one has been floating around for a while now but it bears repeating because I still see SO MANY developers and systems launch without even a glance at these tips. Folks, these tips can save you a lot of heartache down the road! So, download Firebug and YSlow and read this 14 things you can do to increase your website performance write-up! Increasing your performance will also increase your scalability in some cases as well you know.