I had the honour to team with a group of web developers from Thimphu, Bhutan and will be running a mobile development training session for a couple of weeks in Thimphu this coming September.
This project has included setting up a cloud based Dzongkha PHP server in Tokyo (out of the AWS EC2 infrastructure) that will allow hosting Android apps content on a relatively low latency link into Bhutan, course participants will create a Dzongkha capable Android mobile solutions helping mobile users to access Dzongkha enabled content over Wi-Fi.
Bhutan is a landlocked kingdom on the foothills of the Himalayas where satellite IP is a primary upstream link option so the selected architecture has been centered around mobile dev with Wi-Fi and 3G link on an efficient data connectivity utilization.
Content elements will include medical, agricultural and technological items tagged against keywords and locations (coordinates).
Karma and I will post more details and dates in the following months, participants welcome, no cost, requires an android (2.2 onwards) device, Win7 or Mac machine PHP and some Java background)
OpenDNS is now ensuring content delivery to come from the closest provider (CDN)
Goooooogle and OpenDNS has extended name server capabilities to support serving of content while ensuring minimized latency on web resources, the latest announcement (see here) basically means the internet will be faster for sites that have CDN, Geo Location and latency awareness even at the IP/DNS level as well.
This new improvement will have significant advantage in the near future for NZ based IT companies delivering content into AU.
The new Pacific Fibre will allow pages viewed in Sydney and served out of an Amazon EC2 cluster to be faster and cheaper by serving its static images from a South Auckland Apache/SharePoint server!!!
A dynamic page served out of amazon will stream its media that joined into the wire in NZ, transparently optimizing load time (and reducing delivery costs as the LA->AKL leg has been minimized to HTML5 content only)
The illustrating image above has been served of a Geo Location aware DNS server and will be served dependent of the requesting client (i.e. the actual location of the viewer)
the New Zealand Internet Industry will get a major boost in its potential growth.
The existing Southern Cross cable architecture introduces a significant latency factor due to the commercial decision to terminate all legs at Maui (Hawaii).
This doesn’t have a major effect on data speed and bandwidth (with powerful routers in Hawaii) although introduces major challenges for VoIP communication where the call quality is determined by latency (number of hops and carrier distance).
With a direct link from California to Auckland and a straight cross over the Tasman either to Sydney or Melbourne (see below):
(source: http://www.pacificfibre.net)
and the rapid growth in VoIP usage across the pacific, Australian VoIP providers and voice operators such as CRM and call centres will find NZ a very attractive environment, located close enough to Australia and right on one of the Pacific’s best communication hubs.
We are currently experimenting in SIP packets routing thorough Asia(Singapore) and US (Virginia) for optimizing global voice link to Europe. stats soon.
Thanks to Vladimir Verlinsky for the TCP/IP BGP4 routing leads.
I have worked on this one this one: Australian / New Zealand a while back and starting to really like SharePoint 2007 (SP2 onwards), excellent .NET application container that allows you to define your cache policies and content types (BLOB, Output and Object Caching) and fine tune expiry periods accordingly (IIS will set the relevant HTTP headers)
a Nice feature is when you really need to go spatial (GIS queries and mapping UI) you can use native SQL Server as your data store and still have content and media resources caching managed by IIS/Load-balancer.
When dealing with Australian and New Zealand mash-ups I believe the best way is maintaining a data store with well defined expiry periods (e.g. traffic vs. weather vs. external providers cached content) and later distributing its static elements into the cloud.
I have been experimenting with Amazons EC2 services for a real estate related research project (heat mapping commercial property stats) and Amazon has excellent .NET hooks allowing you to push content out to the cloud and later reference it within .net applications (or any other content blocks), this methods significantly reduce bandwidth costs/server maintenance overhead and improves response and serving time by reducing latency.
The architecture illustrated below will provide a SharePoint managed CDN for $0.15 USD per GB of traffic (based on Amazon’s current data transfer price plan):
This page has been constructed out of content distributed from three different continents, so the bottom line is:
“use out of the box content management tools and distribute its product using cloud services”.
Last year while chopping some wood down the garage I found this old newspaper (the other side of this page was about Ronald Reagan campaign for the 1981 US elections, not sure how this one managed to stay there all these years…
my Coromandel mates told me this summer its up on the agenda again (see: Coromandel WatchDog).
We lived in the Coromandel for over two years and had great two weeks in this beautiful green bush on Xmas, will be back as every summer next year!!
a cool Coromandel itinerary I have recommended for several of my overseas mates could be seen here.
