The iPhone 3.0 update is almost here now. One of the features that we and many others have been looking forward to the most is the new push notification service from Apple. We are also curious about how reliable push notifications will be.

Why do we wonder about reliability? Because push notifications are sent from third-party servers to Apple’s servers, and then on to your iPhone.

In short: Apple becomes a single point of failure since it acts as a go-between for all push notifications.

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The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed some information about its hardware setup on their team blog. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha, it’s a soon-to-be launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, for example on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

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IPv6 adoption is going so slow that it has become a crisis in the making for the entire Internet. Three years from now there will be no IPv4 address space left. IPv6 needs to be fully adopted by then, but currently only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6.

This for a process that was expected to be done by 2007.

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CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are becoming increasingly popular. The obvious benefit is that they can help websites to give end users a speedier web surfing experience, but there is also another very positive side effect for the entire Internet, and it will become more noticeable the more common CDNs become.

The positive side effect is this: More CDN usage means less load on the Internet backbone.

Why? It all comes down to how most CDNs work.

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We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.

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When you think about outsourcing (especially offshore outsourcing), usually India comes foremost to mind. The country has been the premier outsourcing destination for years, providing services such as software development and call centers to companies in the West. Though there are other countries gunning for the profitable outsourcing contracts as well, for example the Philippines, India is considered a dominant player.

Now it seems like a new threat to India’s dominance is rising on the African east coast. Kenya is about to get a significant boost to its Internet infrastructure, and since most people there speak English they have a good opportunity to set up for example call center operations. (Most of the population in Kenya is bilingual, the official languages being English and Swahili.)

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CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be producing roughly 15 petabytes of data each year (15,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). In other words, the LHC is not only huge in physical size (filling a 17-mile long underground path), but it will produce enormous amounts of data for researchers to bite into.

CERN seems to be well-equipped to handle the data from the gigantic particle accelerator when you take a look at their data center.

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Jesse Robbins has a nice post over at O´Reilly Radar called “Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)”. It’s an interesting piece on how to plan effectively for operations when launching a startup. His basic thesis is that most startups think of operations as something boring and because of this spend too little [...]

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Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube, Myspace and so on? There is a very interesting website called High Scalability that is dedicated to, as they put it themselves, “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.” They collect information about the architecture of high-traffic websites [...]

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It’s been a week since we published our website infrastructure survey (covering TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo and Alexaholic). The survey has been in the news over at WebProNews, InfoWorld, Internetworld (Swedish IDG), PHP Magazine, as well as a very large number of blogs (CenterNetworks, Ensight, CrunchNotes, TheOpenForce, just to name a few). We’re [...]

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