software engineering

AWS regions, AZs, and VPCs, NICs, IPs, and performance

Jump to section: Availability zones and regions VPCs Elastic IPs and Elastic Network Interfaces Network performance Resources by scope Connectivity by scope Availability zones and regions AWS’ primary cloud is available in 15 regions, each with two to six availability zones, not including separately operated regions (with independent identity) for GovCloud and China. » about 4600 words

AWS' Andy Troutman on component reusability

What we do first is we build very simple foundational building block services … we will build the simplest possible service that you could think of.

The next thing we do is we encourage an open marketplace within Amazon so individual teams can use, optimize, and extend these basic services.

We use our individual [teams] as a test lab to experiment on better ways to do things, and when we find something that seems to be working, we look for ways to [grow it and use it more] broadly.

Then, on the value of open repos:

We want this ecosystem of learning from each other because we are all leveraging each other’s web services. We have these hardened contracts, it’s incredibly high leverage to be able to go and see how someone else used a web service quickly, and rip a piece of their code—steal it—and make use of it for your own purposes.

Andy’s slides are at Slideshare.

Hardware virtualization has moved to hardware

One of my takeaways from AWS’ bare metal announcements at re:Invent this week is that the compute, storage, and network aspects of hardware virtualization are now optimized and accelerated in hardware. AWS has moved beyond the limitations that constrained VM performance, and the work they’ve done applies both to their bare metal hardware and their latest VM instance types.

» about 900 words

Echoes of product management advice in declarative vs. imperative programming

The following line in a post about the difference between declarative vs. imperative programming caught my attention for the way it echoes product management best practices:

[I]t’s often good not to think of how you want to accomplish a result, but instead what the component should look like in it’s new state.

Of course it does matter how you get to where you’re going, but it’s a whole lot easier if you first focus on aligning everybody on goals and where you’re going.

Docker stories from New Relic

From New Relic’s August 2014 blog post: [W]e didn’t try to create a full PaaS framework all at once. Though this may be our eventual goal, it wouldn’t have solved the immediate deployment problem.   We did not begin Dockerizing our applications by starting with those that have the highest data volume. Rather, we started […] » about 200 words