free ebook: Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture

Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture - O'Reilly Media
By Mark Richards
Publisher: O'Reilly
Released: April 2016

"Right now, the microservices architecture pattern is a rising star in the IT industry. For many, these small, highly decoupled services are a welcome alternative to the big, expensive, complicated Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) style that came to prominence a decade ago. But just how different are microservices from SOA?"


The Evolution of Services with Juval Lowy @ .NET Rocks! vNext

The biggest cloud VM instances

AWS Launches Massive X1 Instances Targeting High Memory Workloads @ InfoQ
"AWS recently added a new instance type with nearly 2 terabytes of memory and 128 virtual CPUs. This is the largest virtual server available today in the public cloud, and is a target for memory-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA.
The instance specifications are:

• 128 vCPU via four Intel Xeon E7-8880 v3 processors
• 1,952 GiB of DDR4-based RAM
• 3.84 TB of local SSD storage, capable of up to 126,000 random-read IOPS
• 10Gbps of network bandwidth"

The x1 starts at $13.338 per hour for an on-demand instance. Customers can get that down to $3.732 per hour with a three year commitment (“reserved instance”), and a $98,072 upfront payment

Cloud Provider	Number of Instance Types	Maximum RAM Available
AWS EC2	40 (current generation) / 55 (overall)	1,952 GB
Microsoft Azure	40	448 GB
Google Compute Engine	18	208 GB
Digital Ocean	9	64 GB
CenturyLink Cloud	configurable	128 GB
IBM Softlayer	configurable	64 GB
Joyent	25	110 GB
Rackspace	19	240 GB

SAP Solutions | Microsoft Azure
"...with purpose-built hardware that is specifically tuned for SAP HANA, you can scale your SAP HANA workloads up to 32 TB on multimode configurations."