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:

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.

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

 October 10, 2019

As part of my AWS re-certification path, I decided to start from the very begin, with the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials. I was sure to pass the exam, but since in the company I work for other people will be required to become AWS certified, I wanted to check out the exam beforehand, to be able to suggest to the people the right certification for them.

The exam is fairly straight forward and is mainly focused on the advantages of AWS and cloud in general. There is a high amount of questions around the advantages of cloud in scaling, reliability and costs profile.