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 April 1, 2025 -  ,

A bad year for open source databases

 December 31, 2024

Although the definitions of Open Source are related to specific software characteristics (i.e., the license), the reality is much more complex. Open-source is way more related to a social contract that the software’s creator and its users morally sign than the definition might lead you to believe. This social contract’s key aspect concerns the software’s current license and the licenses of future versions. This is because although users of open-source software usually do not pay to use it, they incur high costs to do so. Examples of those costs are training costs and potential costs to replace a certain technology should it become unavailable in the future.

Hyperscalers are not serious about Service Level Agreements (SLA)

 November 30, 2024

I often talk with people about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in public cloud contexts, and I discover that their idea of what those SLAs are is often distorted.

I believe SLAs need to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism. In reality, they often provide little meaningful recourse when things go awry. There are two big issues, in my opinion, with the SLA provided by many companies, including the hyperscalers:

On being the cheapest cloud

 September 30, 2024

Recently, I heard a pitch from a public cloud company. Among other characteristics, a key aspect they stressed is that they are the cheapest cloud. This aspect struck me. Not because I believe it is or is not, but because I’ve heard many companies pitch themselves as the cheapest cloud over the years. I asked the CTO if they were foreseeing consistent and planned cuts in the pricing every year or so. The CTO’s answer was very sensible but negative on the specific point. Later the same day, I was thinking more about my interaction with that CTO, and it became clear to me why pitching to be the cheapest cloud is not a good idea.

Implement WebFinger with AWS CloudFront and AWS Lambda

 July 24, 2023

This website is hosted on AWS S3 and uses AWS CloudFront as CDN. I use a couple of AWS Lambda@Edge functions to make AWS CloudFront a little brighter. When I decided to self-host a Fediverse instance, it became immediately evident that I would have to set up WebFinger on my domain to be able to use my root domain as the account domain. There is documentation on the web on how to set up WebFinger, but it is aimed at different setups, so I had to configure it myself.

AWS SSA-C03 exam

 October 30, 2022

Three years passed from the last AWS exam I took, and my AWS certifications were due a renewal. The first thing I checked was what was the exam code and which one I had taken three years ago. It turns out that the last time I took SAA-C01, this time, the only available version for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam was SAA-C03. SAA-C03 is still very new since it got released last month, so not much third-party material is available.

Can you trust a cloud provider for HA?

 May 23, 2022

We have seen a massive increase in the “real world” dependency on digital services in the last few years. This process will probably continue in the future, and we are not ready for it. In the same few years, we have seen a lot of cases where digital services went offline or got hacked. In a society that relies more and more on digital services, we can not afford such services not to be available or secure. Although security is essential, I want to focus on availability for now.

The risk of a Cloud shutdown

 October 31, 2021

I often see people and companies moving their workloads to the cloud. Speaking with them, they explain that the cloud is cheaper, more flexible, and more reliable than their current infrastructure. To further increase investment return, they often target a specific (single) cloud to reduce management costs and complexity.

By itself, this trend seems a very reasonable one. The risk is that, sometimes, people do not consider the less immediate risks around this move. There are many of those risks, and if there is an appetite for it, I’ll be talking further about the other dangers, but now I would like to focus on a specific one: the risk of a shutdown.

Resource scarcity in Public Clouds

 December 10, 2019

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen problems allocating resources in the Google Cloud Platform in the Frankfurt region. The problem seemed to have occurred due to the high requests Google customers made to sustain their businesses during the Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday period. Making some searches on Google, I’ve found out that this is not the first time it occurs, and this is not only a GCP problem since AWS and Azure had similar incidents.

AWS Solution Architect - Associate

 November 8, 2019

A couple of days ago, I did re-take the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate exam. This was my second time at this certification (I did it the first time in 2015), and I had to retake the exam since my certification expired in 2017. The exam was fairly different this time from the previous time.

The first thing I noticed is that the certification itself is no longer expiring after 2 years since the validity got extended to 3 years. I think this is very interesting, since shows that AWS now has far more confidence in the stability of their platform.