Foggy Software

Or how to make the conversation be about $200 mistakes rather than $20,000 mistakes. It appears that the common wisdom about cloud has finally caught up - the main benefit in leveraging the cloud is all about agility and other factors (e.g. cost) are secondary. The ability to go to market quickly, with new prototypes or actual solutions, is critical for competitiveness. The evidence supporting these statements is most visible in the movement of large enterprise organizations into the cloud, and the growing ecosystem of MSPs and supporting businesses. However, agility, while ignoring costs, is sometimes risky and.. pricy. Here are some horror stories I have heard (and committed), while enjoying the benefits of agility in the cloud: Volumes of Couch Potatoes: To support overnight backend processing in an economical fashion and leverage the dynamic nature of the cloud, we setup an Auto Scaling Group - we automatically provisioned instances & storage to process 100’s of GB’s o...

AND, hard to read to boot. The short answer: intentionally. The rumor: because I can't create a decent UX even if my life depended on it. (Dont believe it). So why so ugly and hard to read? Stats and Tracking, and selective user targeting. Lots of people will read the site with the catchy headline, picture rich and attractive looking pages. I do that while waiting in the checkout line, and looking for something to pass the time with.  The marketing industry got a name for it - ClickBait . I however am not looking for clicks. I'm looking to find which ideas resonate with people. I'm looking to see which entries get passed hand to hand and have an escalated readership. So, I keep it ugly intentionally. If you tend to judge books by their cover, please move on. Ugly cover here. Please move off this page in < 5 seconds as to not skew my stats. If on the other hand, you find the ideas intriguing, by all means, drop me a note, sing me a song or just enjoy and c...

Or, Should you abandon old wisdom In the world of Public Cloud little is stable, especially Common Wisdom. Following accepted Common Wisdom blindly leads to lost opportunities to capitalize on these enhanced offerings. Case in point - databases on EC2. Databases are demanding beasts, which  presents a few challenges: Databases tend to be mission critical. Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives(RPO) are very stringent These demands are somewhat in conflict with the fickle nature of public cloud - your servers might disappear or fail with little notice. In the datacenter this implied highly redundant hardware and expensive and scale up architectures.You have more data, you get a forklift to deliver a bunch more disks for your SAN (or whatever your storage solution is) , and a few more blades/chassis to increase the number of cores in your Oracle RAC cluster. The first generation mapping of the old datacenter architecture into the public cloud had ...