For years enterprises have tried to make OpenStack work and failed miserably. Considering how many heads have broken against OpenStack, maybe they should have called it OpenBrick.

Before I dive into the details, I’ll cut to the chase. You don’t have to break your heads on cloud anymore. Joyent have open sourced (as in get it on Github) their cloud management platform.

It’s free if you want (install it on your laptop, install it on a server). It’s supported if you want. Best of all, it actually works outside of a lab or CI test suite. It’s what Joyent runs in production for all their public cloud customers (I admit to being one of the satisfied ones). It’s also something they have been licensing out to other cloud providers for years.

Now for the deep dive.

Here are five things that make Couchbase a go-to service in any architecture.

Couchbase is simple to setup.

Keep It Simple. It’s one of the axioms of system administration. Couchbase, though complicated under the hood, makes it very simple to setup even complicated clusters spanning multiple data centers.

Every node comes with a very user friendly web interface including the ability to monitor performance across all the nodes in the same machine’s cluster.

Adding nodes to a cluster is as simple as plugging in the address of the new node after which, all the data in the cluster is automatically rebalanced between the nodes. The same is true when removing nodes.

Couchbase is built to never require downtime which makes it a pleasure to work with.

You know those really annoying popup messages you get on your phone when you’re browsing? They aren’t easy to ignore like popups on your desktop. They are really, get in your face, make it hard to see the site you wanted to see, annoying. Well, I confess. I helped make those and I’m really sorry.

It was maybe two years ago and someone came to me with a new gimmick (That’s really all of AdTech summarized in one word: Gimmick ). It wasn’t the first time. I’d done a lot of work building affiliate marketing programs and ad servers. It was, however, possibly the most evil thing I have ever done and I apologize.

You know the elephant in the room, the one no one wants to talk about. Well it turns out there was a whole herd of them hiding in my cloud. There’s a herd of them hiding in your cloud too. I’m sure of it. Here is my story and how I learned to wrangle the elephants in the cloud.

Like many of you, my boss walked into my office about three years ago and said “We need to move everything to the cloud.” At the time, I wasn’t convinced that moving to the cloud had technical merit. The business, on the other hand, had decided that, for whatever reason, it was absolutely necessary.

As I began planning the move, selecting a cloud provider, picking tools with which to manage the deployment, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to provide the same quality of service in a cloud as I had in our server farm. There were too many unknowns.

SSL support in your site, and therefore, in your CDN is critical but it is also incredibly expensive. In this article, I’ll show you how to save a fortune while improving the performance and security of your site.

It used to be that sites only encrypted the most sensitive traffic with their customers, i.e. registration, login, checkout, etc. In 2010, the Firesheep extension made it very clear that this is not enough.

Since then, many other attacks on partially encrypted sites have been devised and so major sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others have all switched to HTTPS by default, aka Always On SSL. Last year, Google called for HTTPS everywhere and later, announced that secured sites will get boosts in PageRank.