Corey Quinn

Before These Unprecedented Times struck, my business partner and I hosted two Q&A sessions. We were asked all kinds of questions about AWS’s multitude of services, which we also answer below, lightly edited to make us sound way more intelligent than we already did. How does RDS pricing compare to other managed database service providers […]

This week marks the first of my eight weeks of parental leave so I can attend to the birth of my second child. Men (and really by extension non-mothers) taking parental leave isn’t something that gets a lot of attention, so I wanted to take advantage of my platform to talk about it today. I’m […]

At the start of These Unprecedented Times, my business partner and I hosted two Q&A sessions, fielding all sorts of questions from the audience about the world of AWS. Here are the questions that are filed under the general billing category, with a bit more nuance in the responses. 1. Why is my bill so […]

Is the AWS Free Tier really free? No. No! Oh my god no. It absolutely is not. The AWS Free Tier is free in the same way that a table saw is childproof. If you blindly rush in to use an AWS service with the expectation that you won’t be charged, you’re likely to lose […]

In February (before these Unprecedented Times), I decided it was time to play Explore That Cloud with DigitalOcean. They’d be sponsoring some of my nonsense in the near future, but this is why I have sponsorship folks on my end—to serve as an editorial firewall. Unfortunately, that investment won’t save them. But it does get […]

Recently, an anonymous individual told me that their company was planning to migrate to AWS and they were looking for someone to help with the project management side. This anonymous person was hoping to be that project manager. There was one caveat: The right individual would be “familiar with AWS.” The inquiring mind was not, […]

I’ve long been a fan of Amazon’s premier database, Route 53, but its analytics have had something of a flaw. You’ve been able to see query logs for hosted zones for a while, but what about when you access other DNS “databases”? Today, Amazon has released a new query logging functionality that helps you understand […]

Every so often, we see a blog post surface proclaiming that “cloud repatriation” or “moving workloads out of public clouds and back into data centers”is a trend that’s poised to take off. The idea’s compelling; there absolutely are workloads that aren’t economically viable in the public cloud, and it sparks a ray of hope for […]

If you take a look somewhere in an engineering VP or Director’s office, you’ll find a binder that hasn’t been touched in a while labeled “DR / BCM Plan.” Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Management planning are important things to take into consideration. But the clowns you work for have almost certainly screwed it up […]

Multi-cloud (that is, running the same workload across multiple cloud providers in a completely agnostic way) is absolutely something you need to be focusing on—at least, according to two constituencies: Declining vendors that realize that if you don’t go multi-cloud, they’ll have nothing left to sell you. AWS isn’t going to build a multi-cloud dashboard, […]

Earlier this month, AWS released its Amazon Interactive Video Service, which purports to embed live-streamed video directly into your own apps and websites. As AWS stated in its release announcement, a prepared statement for the press, and an exuberant tweet from their CEO, Amazon IVS “uses the same video technology Twitch uses for its live […]

I’ve periodically made reference in a bunch of places to Route 53 being my preferred database. But I’ve only really told the story in podcast and tweet thread form. I’ve never gone in depth as to how this terrible, terrible antipattern came to be in a blog post—which is far easier to cite. Today is […]