Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner

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 […]

Cloud lock-in is pernicious. It's dangerous. And it's already here.

The past couple of months at AWS have been consumed with “OP1.” You would be forgiven for thinking this is some form of disease. But because Amazon is a beautiful bespoke place with a language all its own, this is what they call their annual planning cycle. Big Ideas are proposed from teams and, in […]

After watching enough of his talks to recite them by heart, The Duckbill Group says "happy birthday" to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in our own special way.