A Day in the Life of Server #47B-2: An AWS Data Center Memoir

In the run-up to re:Invent (where as you might imagine I had a whole mess of other things on my mind) AWS significantly expanded their free tier offering for outbound data transfer. TechRadar called it “a major expansion,” The Register likewise sang its praises, and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince claimed he was “doing a dance […]

AWS published its analysis of last week’s us-east-1 outage, and it raises more questions than it answers. I understand that they wanted to get it out when they did (late on a Friday during one of the worst cybersecurity flaps in years), to avoid excessive attention. But I’m unconvinced in reading it that the outage […]

The cloud may seem a nebulous concept, but it’s a place where a huge and increasing amount of IT takes place. And it has been a boon for startups.

The latest Amazon Linux adds SELinux security by default, an improvement that will convince many people to abandon it.

Counting AWS “customers” can mean wildly different things; best to give up on tracking sign-ons and user accounts and look for better ways to measure growth.

I’ve given so much grief to the AWS Managed NAT Gateway over the last few years that if I were to pass all of that grief through one of the gateways themselves it would bankrupt my company. It occurred to me that while I’ve talked about my problems with the service in bits and pieces […]

AWS offers its usual re:Invent justification letter to get your boss to let you attend re:Invent. As per my annual re:Quinnvent tradition, I’ve modified it slightly and sent it to my business partner: Dearest Mike Julian, I’d like your blessing and permission to attend AWS re:Invent 2021, Nov. 29 – Dec. 3 in Las Vegas. […]

I suggest that serverless computing, or “serverless” has hype that at this point has outpaced what the technology / philosophy / religion has been promising. Serverless computing arrived (debatably; please do not email me about this whatever you do, fans of Google App Engine / CGI scripts / managed SaaS offerings / pedants) with something […]

Lambda is growing rapidly in popularity as a compute platform. After delegating a whole range of operational decisions to AWS, we are free, we’re told, to focus on our application logic while AWS tries to make the supporting machinery as transparent as possible. Until that all goes away because the execution role was deleted and […]

Let’s talk about the dumbest dollars a cloud provider can possibly make. No, I’m not talking about data egress or the Managed NAT Gateway data processing fee; those are rent-seeking behaviors that embody Day 2 thinking. I’m talking about the dumbest money — the kind where cloud providers step over dollars to pick up pennies. […]

Today, I want to talk about TurboTax. Yes, while Intuit is a longstanding AWS reference customer, I’m not here to talk about its cloud bills. Instead, I’m going to apply its consumer tax product to how I think about AWS bill savings. For readers who aren’t in the United States or familiar with the way […]

Object storage is a form of cloud storage designed to keep huge amounts of data, which is split into a pool of objects and uses metadata for organization.