I was discussing a server outage with a colleague recently. AWS had done some confusing things, and the team was rallying to troubleshoot & fix it. He made an offhand comment that caught my attention…AWS is too complex for small dev teams. I’d recommend we host in a traditional data center. AWS to Small Dev…
Can RDS worsen an outage ?? That’s another way to think about this question. In my experience, it very clearly increases outages, by tying one or both hands behind your back. Believe me, when I say, that is terribly frustrating when you’re putting out fires! Downsides of Upgrading RDS There are several downsides to upgrading RDS….
It seems like all I hear these days is Redshift, Redshift, Redshift! I met up with a recruiter today. We talked about this & that. The usual. Then when he came to the topic of technology he said, “Yeah, it seems as though suddenly everybody is looking for Redshift & Snowflake” As I blogged about…
AWS SQL and Azure SQL server are excellent cloud services, with more than 99.9% availability, competitive pay-as-you-go pricing strategies, and more. Yet, they have certain limitations in scalability, integration, and security. So, choosing one can be tough if you’re just starting out. A comparison of SQL server on AWS vs Azure When comparing SQL servers…
Autoscaling your webserver tier is typically straightforward. Image your Apache server with source code or without, then sync down files from S3 upon spinup. Roll that image into the autoscale configuration and you’re all set.With the database tier though, things can be a bit tricky. The typical configuration we see is to have a single…
Today part of Amazon Web Services failed, taking down with it a slew of startups that all run on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure. Airbnb was one of the biggest, but also Heroku, Reddit, Minecraft, Flipboard & Coursera were down with it. As it’s, you might think what the heck happened, and why should we care? Well, this…
If you’re headhunting a cloud computing expert, specifically someone who knows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, you’ll want to have a battery of questions to ask them to assess their knowledge. As with any technical interview focus on concepts and the big picture. As the 37Signals folks like to say “hire for attitude, train for skill”. Absolutely!…
In a recent buzzfeed piece, NYPD goes to the mat with Palantir over their data. It seems the NYPD has recently gotten cold feet. As they explored options, they found an alternative that might save them a boatload of money. They considered switching to an IBM alternative called Cobalt. And I mean this is Silicon Valley, what…
We already know that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a widely used cloud computing service that offers scalable and flexible virtual server resources. But do you know how to deploy on Amazon EC2 with Vagrant? While deploying on Amazon EC2 traditionally, it requires manual configuration and setup. You can streamline this process by…
