In the increasingly crowded software consultancy space, we've noticed a common trend. Too often, organizations believe that hiring more affordable and more inexpensive resources for their project will save them considerable money on their bottom line, but in fact, the opposite is true. Though it's easy to look at the hourly rate or the quoted estimate for a project and make decisions based on those factors alone, there are many other aspects of software implementations...

This last week I've had the fortune to have some spare time to play around with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I'm pretty interested in the potential for scaling the LAMP stack by having a programmable cluster at the service of your box. A lot of the documentation I find seems to be by people either scaling via dynamic DNS additions when they add more nodes, or by using EC2 nodes as application servers used...