For the longest time I would have said that the right way to design a cloud application or service is as multi-tenant. But yesterday I was having a conversation with Peter Soderling from NY-based Stratus Security, which provides a secure managed API proxy (in closed beta). Peter said they had chosen to architect their service from day one as a multi-instance solution for added security and performance. If you are unfamiliar with the terms, a multi-tenant architecture commingles the data and p...

Our portfolio company 10gen has released the core of its MongoDB database under the GNU Affero General Public License (the drivers are licensed under Apache). Some people react to the Affero GPL by saying something along the lines of “that’s a new license which I don’t want to understand or bother with." I have some sympathy for that initial reaction (who wants to figure out legal stuff), but most of the same people would happily use GPL licensed code without checking whether it is v2 or v3. ...

When we invested in 10gen last year, the team was working on a very ambitious approach to deliver an integrated cloud platform a la Google App Engine. While they made amazing progress on that, it turned out that developer interest was focused around the MongoDB datastore. Instead of having to buy into a complete stack, most folks (at least for now) want to continue using a broad choice of technologies and combine elements as they see fit. This appears to be one of the key factors in the treme...

In preparing for my Web 2.0 Expo presentation “Forecast: Partly Cloudy,” I have been looking at how existing code can be reused in the cloud. There are several big challenges to reusing existing code in the cloud:Many cloud platforms support only one specific language (e.g. Python for Google App Engine, Ruby for EngineYard). That excludes a lot of code written in PHP, Perl, Java and other languages. Almost all cloud platforms have a non-SQL data access model. This matters for code that has ex...