talawahdotnet

Great to see consolidation in this area. Observability is super important in the cloud/microservices era. Standardizing the collection of logs, metrics and tracing is a big win.

In this equation you are valuing the bootcamp and career placement portion of their offering at $0. If you were to value it $10-15k then it is a different story.

At the end of the day they are offering a lot more than just 10k. They are offering training AND placement assistance. They are also assuming the costs of the people who fail to complete the program of get a job.

I am still praying that some day soon AWS will announce that they are joining Opencensus (along with Google, MS, Datadog, Prometheus)[1] in the hopes that we can move towards standard tooling for observability.

They also seriously need to give CloudWatch a UI/UX overhaul.

1. https://opencensus.io/introduction/#partners-contributors

Would be great to see global network performance comparisons with smaller providers like Digital Ocean and OVH. Everyone always knocks AWS on their bandwidth pricing, yet the pricing is in line with other major cloud providers and CDNs (GCP, Azure, Fastly). I would love to see what the actual trade-off looks like. Is there really that much of a difference in performance or reliability between them, or is it just a case of oligopoly pricing.

Would also be nice to see some stats for traffic within the same AZ as well. I generally see ping times between 0.1 and 0.2 ms within the same AZ on AWS, would be nice to know what that looks like on Azure and GCP.

Yea, it definitely has limited immediate value compared to a database as long as it is on a closed network. However it does allow them to experiment with the technology in a controlled fashion. They could have done so quietly but, you know, marketing.

I think there is still value in Blockchain networks like Stellar[1] that are not fully decentralized, but are federated and diverse. If this is a first step towards them issuing a stable coin on a network like that then I welcome it.

1. https://www.stellar.org

Yea I really am hoping their Chromium based browser gives them the combination of broad compatibility and enterprise integration needed bring about the end of IE 11.

Private repos on Docker Hub is definitely a product, especially if you provide a seamless path for moving from source code on GitHub to images on Docker Hub to containers deployed in the cloud or on premise.

MS could certainly also do good business selling Docker's friendly Enterprise orchestration tools (including their new Kubernetes based tool) which check all the Enterprise requirements for security, policy, identity management etc.

A little off topic, but I wonder how long it will be before MS acquires Docker Inc. Seems like an even better fit for them now that they own GitHub. GitHub + Docker Hub on the developer engagement side and Docker Enterprise on the traditional enterprise side.

Yea, there are quite a number of useful nuggets in there. I also liked this bit on complexity from the third post[1]

> A second important theme for decentralized systems is a common lack of appreciation for just how complex these systems are and how finely balanced they need to be to operate correctly.

I originally joined Bittorrent in 2007 to work on a decentralized CDN which aimed to do something like “tie together all the unused storage and bandwidth on people’s PCs into a content delivery network which had zero operating costs (for us)”.

In time it proved there were a number of things wrong with this ambition (most of which I won’t touch on here), although perhaps the most important one which we discovered the hard way was the cost of complexity.

1. https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/intent-complexity-and-the-g...

This is a four part series of posts by former BitTorrent Inc employee Simon Morris. He makes a well reasoned analogy between the P2P revolution and the current Blockchain/Crypto craze, and provides insight into the powers and pitfalls of decentralized technologies and communities. There is a pretty decent TLDR summary at the end of the final post[1]

Key snippets:

> And this is the main conclusion — decentralization may be great for disruption, but if the experience of Bittorrent is anything to go by it is not at all clear that it has a role in whatever comes next. Blockchain architectures are great for unleashing unstoppable rule-breaking mobs, but we shouldn’t mistake the rule-breakers for the winners.

> Perhaps one of the most far-sighted winners here was Daniel Ek — CEO and Founder of Spotify — who preceded his Spotify success with the sale of the uTorrent client to BitTorrent Inc. Although early versions of Spotify used a Bittorrent-like P2P protocol to try to save money on bandwidth, they quickly realized that the main point of Bittorrent had little to do with saving money, and decentralization of their architecture was actually counter-productive to their aim. Perhaps it was apparent to them way back then that leading a revolution is exciting, but it’s far better to build the thing to save incumbents from the unleashed mob.

1. https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/decentralized-disruption-wh...

You think AWS has a reliability problem for their database products? That's news to me. AWS often launches products with limited features, but security, durability and reliability tend to be the standard.

Reliability is the trickiest of the three because it requires the customer to architect their solution with multi-AZ support in mind, but AWS always provides the foundation for that architecture.

Could they, and should they provide more features and a better developer experience around building fault tolerant solutions? Absolutely! But I certainly don't think they have a bad reputation for reliability.

I certainly agree that they seem half finished in terms of features and developer experience, but from the point of view of security and data durability they have an excellent reputation. They typically have a pretty good reliability story as well, but it relies on the customer architecture their solution to take advantage of multiple AZs/Regions, which is often not trivial.

As far as being "viable to trust a business on" the numbers don't lie, AWS is number one because customers are running their businesses on AWS. The fact that DocumentDB launched with supporting quotes from Capital One, Dow Jones and WaPo shows that customers were clamoring to use it even before GA.

Remember a lot of these customers are coming to AWS because they tried doing themselves and stuggled. When it comes to data, customers trust AWS more than they trust themselves, and rightly so.

It makes sense in terms of feeling out the market as well. If this version of the service takes off it validates the decision to proceed with a more complex/scalable version and it gives them more customer feedback. Standard MVP best practices.

The downside is that a lot of their products lack polish which sucks. On the flip side even when they are launched with minimal features, they do tend to be reliable, durable and secure, which is important when it comes to data related services.

Interesting, how long ago was that? I would be curious to know if the WiredTiger switch ever happened, and what that support relationship looks like not given the contentious relationship between MongoDB and AWS. The old Wired Tiger Inc website[1] still lists AWS as a customer.

Then again, the relationship between AWS and Oracle is even more contentious and Aurora MySQL is one of AWS's most popular products so I don't think they are terribly worried about building on competitor's technologies.

1. http://www.wiredtiger.com/

I am pretty frustrated that DB services like Aurora, and now DocumentDB are still limited to last-gen instance types like r4 instead of the latest instances like r5 and t3 which have marked improvements in terms of CPU and networking performance.

I wonder if it is that they just have a so much r4 inventory left that they are forcing us to use it or if they haven't fully integrated/validated the latest instance types with their custom storage backend.

I doubt that they actually built this on top of Postgres. They probably just integrated the WiredTiger[1] storage engine used by Mongo with their Aurora storage subsystem.

I am however really hoping Amazon provides a MySQL 8.0 compatible version of Aurora with full support for its new hybrid SQL and Document Store interfaces[2] courtesy of the X DevAPI[3] and lightweight "serverless" friendly connections courtesy of the new X Protocol.

That way your don't have to choose just one approach, and you can have your data in one place with high reliability and durability.

My ultimate pipe dream would be that they also provided a redis compatible key/value interface that allows you to fetch simple values directly from the underlying innodb storage engine without going thru the SQL layer, similar to how the memcached plugin currently works[4]

1. https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger

2. https://mysqlserverteam.com/mysql-8-0-announcing-ga-of-the-m...

3. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/x-devapi-userguide/en/devapi-users...

4. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/innodb-memcached.htm...

Awesome to see Firecracker[1] already bearing fruit:

> At re:Invent 2018 we announced Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services. Firecracker enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines called microVMs. These microVMs can initiate code faster, with less overhead. Innovations such as these allow us to improve the efficiency of Fargate and help us pass on cost savings to customers.

Also seeing interesting Firecracker developments around OSv (7ms boot times)[2] and Kata Containers[3]

1. https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

2. https://twitter.com/osvdev/status/1081461689139281920

3. https://twitter.com/egernst/status/1076308458335494144

Awesome to see Firecracker[1] already bearing fruit:

> At re:Invent 2018 we announced Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services. Firecracker enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines called microVMs. These microVMs can initiate code faster, with less overhead. Innovations such as these allow us to improve the efficiency of Fargate and help us pass on cost savings to customers.

Also seeing interesting Firecracker developments around OSv (7ms boot times)[2] and Kata Containers[3]

1. https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

2. https://twitter.com/osvdev/status/1081461689139281920

3. https://twitter.com/egernst/status/1076308458335494144

Awesome to see Firecracker[1] already bearing fruit:

> At re:Invent 2018 we announced Firecracker, an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services. Firecracker enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines called microVMs. These microVMs can initiate code faster, with less overhead. Innovations such as these allow us to improve the efficiency of Fargate and help us pass on cost savings to customers.

Also seeing interesting Firecracker developments around OSv (7ms boot times)[2] and Kata Containers[3]

1. https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

2. https://twitter.com/osvdev/status/1081461689139281920

3. https://twitter.com/egernst/status/1076308458335494144

People want fast, cheap, easy ways to move money. Most don't particularly care whether or not a middleman is involved. They just want the job to get done and they want it to be simple.

Well said. Decentralization does not magically give you reliability or high availability. Sometimes it is quite the opposite. It is still just a bunch of software running on a bunch of miscellaneous computers over an unreliable network.

To me there are strong parallels between the cryptocurrency boom and the previous P2P boom. P2P technology was exciting and super interesting, but people assumed that it would magically be the solution to a million problems just because the tech was awesome and decentralized. But that didn't happen, instead Netflix happened. Netflix found a way to solve the actual problems that people were having and at the end of the day the underlying technology didn't matter.

I expect to see something similar happen with a lot of the current crypto use cases. More centralized solutions like Amazon QLDB[1] will provide the majority of the benefits that people really need: a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log, while also being performant and highly available.

Many people see decentralization as the solution to all problems because it will finally make things fair, a level playing field for all. I just don't see it happening. Not because of some sinister world order trying to retain control, but simply because that is not how human interactions and trust tend to work. I think we can continue to move towards more decentralization, but it shouldn't be the end goal in and of itself and we should always be skeptical when there is more focus on that than there is on solving the problem at hand.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/

> Waymo One is rolling out in the Metro Phoenix area first. Over time, we hope to expand to new places and more people.

You can sign up to express interest using the form at the bottom of this page[1] (asks for your gmail address, zip code and type of phone).

P.S. Why is the mobile experience on Medium so frustratingly bad? Between the permanent heading plus the "please download our app" heading I find it maddening. I also find the UX around reading comments to be unnecessarily confusing.

1. https://waymo.com

Do you guys plan to add support for the new MySQL X-Protocol? Seems like it would be well suited for this type of architecture, especially when using the document store type APIs.

IE 11 is the last browser with any substantial share that is no longer being actively developed (and automatically updated). As such the are a number of new features that get broad support in "evergreen" browsers that IE will never support. Most frameworks and developers end up bending over backwards to polyfill these features leading to more complex code and larger file sizes. Here are a few examples:

ES6/ES2015 - https://caniuse.com/#search=ES6

Every other major browser supports this natively aside from IE, but most people still transpile their modern code down to ES5 + polyfills for compatibility

CSS Variables - https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables

Again, widely supported, but instead we use tools like SASS/LESS

Web Components[1] (Shadow DOM[2] and Custom Elements[3])

Newer frameworks like Ionic 4 rely heavily and web components and see it as the future of all UI frameworks and the end of framework churn[4]. Once again IE 11 holds back the pack and has to be pollyfilled[5]

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components

2. https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdomv1

3. https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1

4. https://blog.ionicframework.com/the-end-of-framework-churn/

5. https://blog.ionicframework.com/october-2018-a-big-month-for...

Proxy - https://caniuse.com/#feat=proxy

Vuejs is completely rewriting its observation mechanism[6] to be proxy-based in version 3, however it appears that cannot be polyfilled and so they will be providing a second, optional, not-fully-compatible build, specifically for IE 11[7]

> Most of the ES2015 features used can be transpiled / polyfilled for IE11, with the exception for Proxies. Our plan is to implement an alternative observer with the same API, but using the good old ES5 Object.defineProperty API. A separate build of Vue 3.x will be distributed using this observer implementation. However, this build will be subject to the same change detection caveats of Vue 2.x and thus not fully compatible with the “modern” build of 3.x. We are aware that this imposes some inconvenience for library authors as they will need to be aware of compatibility for two different builds

6. https://medium.com/the-vue-point/plans-for-the-next-iteratio...

7. https://medium.com/the-vue-point/plans-for-the-next-iteratio...

Imagine the number of hours that could be saved globally if all this work and testing didn't have to happen anymore.

Interesting, but what I really, really want them to do is EOL IE 11 so that the web can move forward without feeling guilty about the X% of users still on it. IE 11 has unfortunately become the new IE 6.

As it is right now I believe the IE 11 EOL is tied to the Windows 10 EOL...which is not happening anytime soon. Many frameworks are dropping support for it anyway so I guess it will end up being defacto desupported.

> Open source takes work and the foresight to separate your custom shit from things genuinely helpful to the community.

That is exactly what AWS has done in releasing Firecracker[1]. Better late than never.

1. https://firecracker-microvm.github.io

I hope there is buy in from at least the Product Manager level as well. The issues are deeper than just a new coat of paint.