Read this, then try to convince them not to re-build from scratch: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1235624&seqN...

Be sure to read the speaker notes. Also see http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/20/its-not-just-hp-and-autonom....

Sure, but then your app needs to communicate across the Internet if you share data across regions. This can be expensive and/or slow and/or unreliable. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#how_will_I_be_charged_for_da...

Or not as much: http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/

skip ahead to 10:00 for the cameo. Also see http://www.youtube.com/user/ChiTechAcademy#p/a/u/0/EMZ9eVKsF...

Looks like a DNS issue.

Word from inside is that it is not, but they can't reveal what it actually is.

I suspect that he forgot to add the speedup option for pb:

option optimize_for = SPEED;

Although I'm not a pb user, reading around its been said that this flag doesn't work for Python bindings to PB.

It's hard for me not to read "pb" in a Python serialization context as anything other than Perspective Broker.