Bay Area Startups and Technologies Marina's Web Scale Coral Reef

There is an interesting article on Olio toolkit on High Scalability site that brings up a very good point about evaluating different technologies before deciding which one is most suitable for your application needs. There is a common trend that I see among new gen startups, where PHP developers starting their new companies and using Ruby on Rails over PHP due to its performance, ease of use, and rich functionality set. With every application there are different factors that need to be accounted for. How do you select technology, database, underlying deployment environment, and how do you know that it is indeed the stack you can reliably deploy your application on? Olio allows you to validate these questions. Interestingly Apache's Olio evolved from Sun's Web2.0kit, and now there are three implementation of it in Java, Ruby, and PHP. When it comes to optimized Web2.0 stack, the OpenSolaris community use the Webstack which embraces multitude of components such as Apache, MySQL, PHP, Drupal, and allows developers to leverage performant components of a traditionla Web 2.0 applications on OpenSolaris. You can learn more about Webstack and become a community contributor.

While I'm evangelizing Sun's technology and our Sun Startup Essential program across the Bay Area communities, there is often a question on "Why as a developer or a technology startup I should pick Sun". So, put aside all the great offers from the SSE program like free technical assistance, VC connect, and discounted infrastrucutre, here are a few reasons to consider:

- Every startup's ultimate goal is to grow and sustain the volume. Sun has a proven record of enabling companies to scale. With applications like BumperSticker, which is deployed on Sun Joyent Accelerator and scales up to 1 bln page hits a month, we're helping startups to grow and scale at their pace.

Sun's technology stack includes a couple key components like MySQL and OpenSolaris that are essential to the business:

- MySQL is a de factor database in the Web 2.0 space. Sun allows you to leverage our in house expertise to architect your back end solution with reliability, fail over, and other critical systemic qualities in mind. Today nearly every startup has a question on how to effectively deploy and optimize MySQL, the best company to answer those questions is Sun.

- Why deploy on Sun? OpenSolaris offers unique value add characteristics such as
-- DTrace (dynamic tracing) that allows startups monitor their applications run time and determine the bottleneck to prevent the application performance issues, also with DTrace companies can optimize the application. This is a unique feature of OpenSolaris.
-- ZFS is a file system that can store large volume of data. With growing number of the social media applications, it's important to pick the right file system that enables to store large files, and ZFS provides you exactly that.
-- Containers. Out of the box, zero cost, negligible overhead virtualizaiton that comes with OpenSolaris allows companies to deploy their application in a more effective way. Whether companies utilize Containers for Dev/QA/Staging environment or if they utilizing servers with Containers for Web/App/DB tiers, Containers provide a key value add to the businesses that deploy applications on a dedicated set of servers.

And of course you can learn more about the program by visiting Sun Startup Essentials. We've just launched an infrastructure clearance program that you may take advantage of.

I'm at Startonomics in San Francisco, where you can see the live streaming of all sessions and live blog. The session content will also be available afterwords. Great event, I got a chance to meet old buddies from other SF events, meet new people like Scott Rafer, as well as meet local startups and talk to them about technologies. Don't know if it's just my opinion, but Ruby seem to be a very popular and enjoyable language to use, fast to learn, fast to deploy, and fun all around. The great foodies of SF are now in the startup business including TastyR - SF restaurants review, TCHO - a new delicious chocolate startup, try it out while at the event.. yammy and I'm not even a chocoholic. And of course we're here to educate startups on the Sun's Startup Essential program. A few offerings like VC Connect and discounted storage for those who're storing large media file are getting a lot of momentum.

Guess where the SF startups and bloggers are going next.. Amsterdam Blog 08 Rockstar of the Web

Any innovator got inspired after attending Cybera event that took place at the picturesque Fall setting in Banff, Canada. The summit gathered Alberta's researchers across national institutions, startups, and entrepreneurs to discuss innovation, trends, challenges, and the future of the Cloud Computing. Among topics we've covered were Grid, Cloud, Open Social and Social Networking, scientific computing and its evolution, how today's technology help us to be more productive, be more social, and nevertheless be aware of the privacy and other risks that are still being addressed as we speak. We had an interesting panel, that I was part of, discussing trends of Cloud Computing, whether it's relevant to us and how startups, end users, corporations and researches view and participate in the trend. A few times, the discussion turned into an open forum with the audience expressing their opinion and impact of modern technology on society as well as the role of the government, particularly in Canada. Interestingly, in Canada, unlike in the US, government plays a significant role in connecting with startups, helping with funding, and jointly working on innovation. I think it is a great way to boost the technology advancement in the local community.