Web services

March 31, 2015

You know it's bad when you start writing an incident report with the words "The first 12 hours." You know you need a stiff drink, possibly a career change, when you follow that up with phrases like "this was going to be a lengthy outage...", "the next 48 hours...", and "as much as 3 days".

That's what happened to huge companies like NetFlix, Heroku, Reddit,Hootsuite, Foursquare, Quora, and Imgur the week of April 21, 2011. Amazon AWS went down for over 80 hours, leaving them and others up a creek without a paddle. The root cause of this cloud-tastrify echoed loud and clear. Heroku said:

February 10, 2015

In Israel, more than in most places, no news is good news. Ynet, one of the largest news sites in Israel, recently posted a case study (at the bottom of this article) on handling large loads by moving their notification services to AWS.

"We used EC2, Elastic Load Balancers, and EBS... Us as an enterprise, we need something stable..."

They are contradicting themselves in my opinion. EBS and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are the two AWS services which fail the most and fail hardest with multiple downtimes spanning multiple days each.

EBS: Conceptually flawed, prone to cascading failures

February 09, 2015

I had an idea. That's always how it starts. Before I know it, I've purchased the domain name and I'm futzing around with some HTML but where am I going to host it and how much is this going to end up costing me?

That's where I was when I came up with#DonateMyFee. "This is a site that is only going to cost me money", I thought to myself (the whole point is for people to donate money rather than paying me). I really didn't want to start shelling out big (or small) bucks on hosting.

Long story short, here is the recipe for a screaming fast website on a low budget:

December 31, 2014