The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by examining an all-too-common problem: having to scale a database when it’s too late. In this episode, I touch upon the underlying reason many developers don’t think about their database until they’re forced to, what some of the primary drivers of latency are, the easiest (and priciest) way to scale a database, what you can do to avoid this whole problem altogether from the outset, Corey’s advice on how to save months of work down the road, how often this problem rears its ugly head in applications, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 2, 2020.

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional with a deep dive into Cluster SSH, how I landed my first role in a production-style environment at a university, how engineering work is much different in academia than in the for-profit world, the journey that led me to find Cluster SSH and how the tool works, how Unix admins generally get interested in backups right after they really need to have backups that are working, why restores are harder than backups, why systems that are doing configuration management need to understand the concept of idempotence, tools to use instead of Cluster SSH, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of February 24, 2020.

Join me as I launch a new series called Whiteboard Confessional that explores how whiteboard architecture diagrams might look pretty but rarely work as designed in production. To kick off the series, we’re taking a look at everyone’s favorite database, AWS Route 53, while touching upon a number of topics, including what data centers used to look like, the emergence of virtualization and the impact it had, configuration management databases and how they differ from configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet, why using DNS as a configuration management database is inherently an awful idea, how there’s almost always a better solution than whatever you built in your own isolated environment, how just because someone built something doesn’t mean they knew what they were doing, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of February 17, 2020.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of February 10, 2020.

Join me as I conclude my series on cloud fundamentals by reexamining border gateway protocol (BGP) with Ivan Pepelnjak, Chief Technology Advisor at NIL Data Communications. This episode features a discussion about what Ivan believes Corey got wrong about BGP in a previous episode of this podcast; Ivan’s telling of the history of BGP and how it has evolved over time; why Ivan thinks that, when something goes wrong, it’s not fair to blame the tool itself, and that the misuse of the tool is what deserves the blame; why regulators may have to think about driver’s licenses for the internet; the year modern BGP emerged; and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of February 3, 2020.

Join me as continue my series on cloud fundamentals by examining the last mile of the cloud, including how exciting it was to move away from Comcast, how a distribution of Linux with a potentially offensive name solved my home connectivity issues, why I chose to use a region I never otherwise use when setting up my home network, the real reason why latency affects applications (hint: it’s not latency from a DNS server or latency that stems from geographical distances), the party that’s really responsible for network performance, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of January 27th, 2020.

Join me as continue my series on cloud fundamentals with a look at connectivity issues in EC2, including how to troubleshoot said issues, why DNS is often the cause of connectivity issues and how to get around that, security groups and why they’re fascinating, how IPv6 might be the cause of connectivity issues in certain instances, VPC considerations to keep in mind when troubleshooting issues, when you should try to replicate your issue by spinning up a new server and when you absolutely shouldn’t, why connectivity issues should be resolved relatively quickly in the cloud era, what I believe the most transformative feature of the cloud is, and more.