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Pricey Architecture

Or, How architecting in the cloud is different  When designing cloud scale always on system, system architects are expected to be experienced in core system requirements - scale, security and high availability. By this day and age, this art is pretty well understood. The public cloud is a great help in driving solutions to those core concerns by providing the hard-to-acquire and hard-to-build foundational elements: Apparently infinite amount of compute and storage capacity for scale Fine grained control at the network and API level for security Fault zone isolation in the form of independent zones and regions for HA However, the tax the cloud imposes on these building blocks, even if not apparent at first, is its own complexity. If you don't consider the pricing models for the underlying building blocks and misapply them the tax is converted to $'s. Here are a few examples from recent design mishaps I've witnessed. An expensive scaling story: What with a
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Dude I'm (not) Getting fired

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
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Why is this blog so UGLY

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
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