The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 6, 2020.

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by exploring a time in a previous life when Amazon ElastiCache for Redis caused an outage that led to drama, what it was like to work for someone who can be described as a “metaphor-spewing poet,” how every event and issue makes sense in retrospect, why you should never schedule important maintenance on a weekend, how Amazon ElastiCache for Redis works, the four contributing factors that led to the outage in question, why blameless post mortems are only blameless if you have that kind of culture driven from the top, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 30, 2020.

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by examining the monstrosity that is Console Recorder. In this episode, I discuss why Ian Mckay is a code terrorist, the four tiers of building something in AWS, the ins and outs of Console Recorder, why there are always two versions of a Google project, the story behind Console Recorder, including who built it and why that’s impressive, how GCP has a bit of an advantage over AWS in this arena, why you should give Console Recorder a try, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 23, 2020.

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by examining the dark underbelly of configuration management: configuration mismanagement. In this episode, I discuss what it was like to be a very early developer on the SaltStack project, the secret to giving exceptional public talks, how tools like Docker have essentially rendered configuration management obsolete, one of my most common career tips, why I no longer talk about configuration management with most people, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 16, 2020.

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional with a look at the awesomeness that is SQLite, including how it wasn’t designed to work in a client-server fashion, when you should use it and when you absolutely shouldn’t, how deciding to use SQLite as a database invariably shifts businesses away from their core competencies, how your life will turn completely into edge cases if you choose this as an architecture, how SQLite as a database means you’ll run into dead-ends and be stuck on your own when you try to figure out the way forward, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 9, 2020.

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.