Eye on the Cloud: Recent News, Tools, and Tutorials

It’s 2012 now, and I’m finally back from a longish vacation during which I did some relaxing and ate too much sweets. Here’s a collection of links that Brian and I saved up over the holidays, hopefully they’re not too out of date.

• Node Tuts - A series of video tutorials on Node.js by Pedro Teixeira. Currently it’s up to 30 episodes, covering a variety of topics related to Node.
• Write Logs for Machines, use JSON - Paul Querna discusses why we should switch to logging that is easier for computers to understand rather than users. I generally agree with him, especially for large scale cloud deployments where you need to make sense of diagnostic information from 30 different instances of the application.
• Fault tolerant applications in Node.js - Good article on developing large scale, fault tolerant applications in Node.js using Hook.io. There’s some good general information here, so you don’t have to be a Node developer to benefit from a read.
• Nginx Surpasses IIS in Usage - According to NetCraft, Nginx is now the second most used web server. Congratulations Nginx!
• Nginx on Windows Azure - Speaking of Nginx, K. Taguchi has a short blog post on deploying Nginx to a Windows Azure worker role. It’s in Japanese, however the page is pretty comprehensive without translation.
• HTML5 Game Dev news - I just recently found this site in my quest for information on developing web based games. If you’re looking for information on building HTML 5 games, check it out.
• HTML5 Game Development Resources - Chris Bowen has a list of even more game development resources. This is a list culled from the HTML5 Game Camps back in December.
• 9 reasons you must install Sublime Text 2 - I discovered Sublime Text 2 a while back, and it’s now my go-to editor for Ruby and Node.js projects. Included in the 9 reasons to use it that this article puts forth, it also tells you how to install Package Control and points you to some useful packages.
• CTP of Apache Hadoop-based Services for Windows Azure Now Available - The community technology preview (CTP) of Apache Hadoop-based Services for Windows Azure (or Hadoop on Azure) is now available.
• Windows Azure & PHP (for nubs) - Part 2 of 4 - Brent Stineman posts part 2 of his adventures in running PHP in Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure Trial Account Spending Limit - Jim O’Neil describes the new Azure trial account spending limit feature.
• A Holiday.js Gift for Windows Azure Node.js Developers - A December update to the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js was released just before the new year.
• How do you synchronize a million to-do lists? - Maarten Balliauw looks at how you could use Windows Azure Service Bus to synchronize a million to-do lists.
• Node on Azure - A new blog about running Node.js on Windows Azure. Most recent post is about running Wheat Git-based blog engine on Windows Azure.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/silverlining/archive/2012/01/06/pie-in-the-sky-january-6-2012.aspx