RDS for Teams without a DBA sounds like a sales pitch. It is not. It is a field note. Right now a lot of small teams are spinning up EC2, pushing code, and then staring at a MySQL prompt at 3am when something strange happens. If that sounds familiar, this…
Year: 2013
S3 as the New Fileserver
A quick story At two in the morning our office file box started beeping like a smoke alarm. The cheap NAS that held design files, exports, and a decade of random PDFs decided it had lived a full life. We did the usual dance with spare disks and prayers. I…
Networking in the Cloud: Latency as a Feature
We moved our apps to the cloud for elastic compute and forgot that the wire is not free. Today the network is product territory and latency is a knob you can design with. Compute keeps getting cheaper and closer to on demand, but the real story is between the servers,…
Retry, Backoff, and Bounces: Making Email Reliable
The inbox looked quiet which is never a good sign on a launch night. We had queued a tidy welcome batch and watched connections spin up to Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. Then the logs started to sing. 421 temp fails. Connection timeouts. A sprinkle of greylisting from a few small…
Virtual Machines for Repeatable Environments
Virtual Machines for repeatable environments sound like a mouthful, but the idea is simple. I want my app to run the same on my laptop, your laptop, the staging server, and that demo box in a conference room that still has Flash. Last week a gem update worked on my…
-Factor Thinking for Hosted Apps
Cloud hosting is the new shared office for our apps. You bring your laptop, plug into power, and get to work. Git push to Heroku feels normal now. AWS is the data center you rent by the hour. Google App Engine, Cloud Foundry, AppFog, Azure Websites, they all promise less…
Omniture for Large Sites: Governance Matters
Omniture for Large Sites: Governance Matters. If you run a big site and you bought Adobe SiteCatalyst because someone said it will answer everything, this is for you. The tool is powerful. The mess starts when there is no clear way to run it. At scale the biggest problem is…
Elastic Load Balancing: First Steps
“Start small. Make it boring. Let the graph tell you when to add the next piece.” Notes from last night’s pager session Elastic Load Balancing is the first AWS service I reach for when a single server starts to sweat. Think of it as a smart doorman that spreads incoming…