kondro

Melbourne has a population of 5.5m

That's true for the base S3 product, but there are a lot more storage tiers than there used to be with cheaper pricing. All the way to $0.99/TB for Deep Archive.

Oil-based ballpoint inks tend to last a really long time, especially if sealed.

People that care about the time it takes to boil water just have an instant hot water boiler on (or under) their bench.

On price, you could definitely do better than $8/million steps, $0.25/GB written and $0.15/GB-month for state storage, but if you were designing something generic on S3/DynamoDB (state + status) to support all use cases at all scales, you'd probably end up spending something around the same order or magnitude.

But if you did that, you'd also have to implement it all yourself. This is a relatively simple checkpointing workflow orchestrator across standard Lambda functions, but with some really nice touch surfaces in the Lambda API itself.

What's only a footnote in the announcement is that this is only us-east-2 (Ohio) and TypeScript/JS + Python at the moment. Basically a public preview release. I look forward to seeing where they take this.

This basically is just a an application with steps that are checkpointed when they progress in a shared database (that's abstracted away from you).

It's considerably simpler, less magical and cheaper than the equivalent Step Function-style implementation would be.

Still $0.20/million requests, but all Lambda functions run on provisioned EC2 instances (taking into account savings plans & reservations) with a 15% premium.

You can dial up/down the vCPU:RAM ratio so that if you have a lot of functions that just, for example, wait on IO, you can use a very high ratio to run many more functions in parallel on a single instance.

This looks like it will provide an interesting middle-cost option for services at scale with a more predictable load or usage pattern better suited to higher (or lower I guess) ratios without having to sacrifice any effort already put into Lambda and lets you still use it with other AWS services (Cognito auth, IoT Events, simplified Kinesis/DynamoDB Streams client that doesn't require Java, etc).

It will be interesting to experiment with.

You might need to increase your connection timeout to at least 172800 seconds.

Running your own AuthN/AuthZ with an off-the-shelf OSS is very straight-forward (as a SaaS product at least) and isn't any more burdensome from a security perspective than what you're already doing for your core service.

This isn't email.

One feature failing like this should probably log the error and fail closed. It shouldn't take down everything else in your big proxy that sits in front of your entire business.

While there appears to be some us-east-1 SPoF for Route 53 updates (as shown recently), the actual health checks themselves occur in up to 8 different regions [1] with an 18%[2] agreement of failure required to initiate a failover.

AWS has very good isolation between regions and, while it relies on us-east-1 for control plane updates to Route 53, health checks and failovers are data plane operations[3] and aren't affected by a us-east-1 outage.

Relying on a single provider always seems like a risk, but the increased complexity of designing systems for multi-cloud will usually result in an increased risk of failure, not a decrease.

1. us-east-1, us-west-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, ap-southeast-1, ap-southeast-2, ap-northeast-1 and sa-east-1 which defaults to all of them.

2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dn...

3. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...

Thunderbolt 5 supports up to 120Gbps one-way.

Sorry, 158: https://baxtel.com/data-center/aws-us-east-n-virginia

us-east-1 is unimaginably large. The last public info I saw said it had 159 datacenters. I wouldn't be surprised if many millions of accounts are primarily located there.

While this could possibly be related to the downtime, I think this is probably an unfortunate case of coincidence.

Enterprise support agreements are organization-wide.

Although, you can gamify Business support (which is priced as a percentage of your bill) to not include things like your CloudTrail account, which probably never require support, but can get expensive across a large enough organization.

I was using browser-based auth via Google.

100ms isn’t going to make a difference to email-based OTP.

Also, who’s using email-based OTP?

Route53 was still resolving DNS entries just fine. But it looked like someone/something removed the entries for DynamoDB.

The most recent public count of datacenters for AWS in us-east-1 is 159. I suspect that’s even an unwieldy number for NSA to spy on.

Sure it was, you just needed to login to the console via a different regional endpoint. No problems accessing systems from ap-southeast-2 for us during this entire event, just couldn’t access the management planes that are hosted exclusively in us-east-1.

One of those still isn’t us-east-1 though and email isn’t latency-bound.

I can authenticate my devices just fine.

That just says the homepage and knowledge base are down and that admin access specifically isn’t effected.

This link works fine from Australia for me.

That doesn’t make much sense to me, there are literally billions of phones that people are using all the time.

Apple has over 2.3 billion active devices of which a small percentage are Macs (an estimated 24 million were sold in 2024 and around twice that in iPads).

The most difficult to scale part of a cell network is number of devices connected, not bandwidth used anyway and cellular Macs aren’t going to add significantly more load to a network. And that assumes that Apple even cares what a carrier thinks.

I’m in Australia, not the USA, and for all people like to complain about internet here, we have excellent mobile coverage and it’s relatively affordable, but it’s all priced by usage.

I have 4 devices on my plan with shared 210GB of 4G usage between them for around AUD$200 (USD$130) a month on Australia’s best network (Telstra). I work remotely from cafes a lot (probably around 20-30 hours a week) as a developer and get nowhere close to that usage. I update all my apps, download all my podcasts, listen to lossless music and stream video whenever I want during breaks (although I’m not a huge out-of-home video consumer). I do literally nothing to limit my bandwidth usage and am lucky to use 30-40GB a month across all my devices.

I want my computer to have an always on cell modem just like my phone does.

The Apple Silicon chips all run in a version of always on these days because the efficiency cores are so, well, efficient.

Additionally, while you may want to burn the battery in multiple devices and deal with having to manage that, I don’t want to.

Apple has been selling cellular iPads since the beginning and I love never having to worry about pairing mine.

Tethering to an iPhone or iPad Is much better than it used to be, but it’s still not perfect.

Apple makes their own modems these days and even with Qualcomm had a capped per device license fee more than covered by the premium they charge for cellular in, say, the iPad.

I know so many people who want this convenience and are willing to pay for it that it just seems like stubbornness at this point that they’re willing to put modems in iPads and not MacBooks.

Just give me cellular in a MacBook Air already Apple if you want me to insta-buy! Bonus points for OLED.

Air’s don’t have to be just cheap. I want a thin and light premium laptop for walking around and a second Mac (of any type) for my desk.

Me too, and it's quite a common technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_streaming