I love to invest in plumbing. Not toilet plumbing, but Internet software plumbing. At Foundry Group we call it Glue and – among a variety of investments – have helped start up a conference with Eric Norlin (the creator of Defrag) called the Glue Conference.
One of our investments in our Glue theme is Gnip. I had a meeting yesterday with Jud Valeski (the CTO / co-founder) and a few other folks, including the two founders of a new seed investment (in the Glue theme) we are planning on closing in early January. We covered a bunch of stuff, including debating whether 99.95 is now “good enough” for cloud computing, and also talked about some of the architectural issues that Gnip has dealt with as they put together their service.
As part of our discussion, I encouraged Jud to toss a blog post up talking about the stack Gnip is using, the architecture, and the volume of data that is currently flowing through Gnip on a daily basis.
That post just went up – it’s titled Numbers + Architecture. Jud and the team he’s put together are some of the best cloud architects I’ve met to date (yes – they travel in packs.)
Gnip is less than 9 months old – it’s hard to believe I first blogged about it in July when I wrote Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards given the progress they’ve made. We recently led a new $3.5m financing (that follows the seed round we did earlier this year) that funds Gnip through the end of 2010.
I’m excited about watching the daily traffic through Gnip increase by 10x over the new few months and expect them to be able to do it without missing a beat.
And don’t forget – everyone appreciates a courtesy flush when you are in a public bathroom.