Adrian Cockroft of Netflix (and a former eBay colleague) recently described his journey to run Netflix services off of a public cloud, effectively and efficiently.

Along with Alex Stamos’ security talk that I profiled in the previous same-title blog, Adrian’s talk is easily the best public account of Cloud enterprise “pathfinding” that I have come across in a long long while. From different angles, both talks reach the conclusion that it’s better to re-architect the whole thing rather than tinkering with it. Both talks bear no hype, frills, or inflated expectations.

Adrian goes on to list the “undifferentiated lifting” that is left for Netflix to do and should come instead off-the-shelf from the Cloud portfolio of services:

• middle-tier load balancing
• caching
• encryption services (I’d imagine he means key management services in general)
• distributed application management (a tough nut to crack, this one!)

which we will hopefully see soon in Clouds near us. Thank you for sharing, Adrian!!

eBay has recently launched a tech blog to give voice to the many technical leaders that are hard at work to advance the world’s largest marketplace. Hugh Williams kicked it off with the first post on Site Speed for eBay Search Results.

While I’m at it, I single out four presentations that my colleagues recently gave at JavaONE 2010. They touch on some recent (or recent-1) interests of mine.

Login Failed, Try Again: 10 Best Practices for Authentication in the Cloud, Farhang Kassaei. Farhang does a really good job at delineating the functional roles of Secure Token Service (STS), Identity Providers (IdP), Relaying Party (RP), Guards, policy elements, etc. that enable eBay’s secure scale-out operations like Cloud. I’m number one fan of this architecture and actively championed it to make it a pillar of eBay Mobile architecture.

More Best Practices for Large-Scale Websites: Lessons from eBay, Randy Shoup. A small set of principles underpins some massive scale-out and extensibility stories. I’ve had the pleasure to co-keynote with Randy at LADIS08. That presentation had the first installment of Randy’s renowned best practices.

Concurrency Grab Bag: More Gotchas, Patterns, and Tips on Practical Concurrency, Sangjin Lee. As he did at Java ONE 2009, Sangjin continues to contribute nuances and new results to the Java Concurrency body of work (like Brian Goetz’s et al.)

7 Deadly Sins of Enterprise Java Programming and Deployment in the Multicore Era, Mahesh Somani co-presented with Intel. This presentation marries valuable lessons in concurrency with some handy tutorial material on Intel’s published roadmap (e.g., need to re-sync on Tick Tock, Nehalem vs. SandyBridge, 45 vs. 32 nm, etc.). I’m still looking for a public URL to this presentation.