Several weeks ago, a provisioning error inside Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) accidentally deleted the account of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund with over 165 billion in assets (USD) and 620,000 users. The outage lasted until data could be restored from another cloud provider which acted as a backup repository for UniSuper’s applications and data. When the GCP account was deleted all data including the GCP …

Reading some AWS docs the other day and found something interesting. It’s possible to create RAID Level 0 and 1 EBS volumes for your EC2 instances. It doesn’t provide multi-zone failover like EFS, but Level 0 would be great for a database not supported by RDS. The throughput of the Level 0 EBS volumes attached to the instance is the sum of throughput of all …

AWS has a powerful tool which uses AWS’s global network to accelerate access to EC2 instances, databases and other resources collectively referred to as endpoints. Suppose I deploy a website in the Virginia region, a request to that website must do the DNS walk through a chain of routers that are independent of AWS’s backbone. This involves a lot of hopping especially when you’re far …

Just finished working with a client who had setup a straightforward AWS account with several web servers, a database server … the usual. He had run all the cost analyzers for server size, instance types and reserved versus on demand contracts. His bill should have been about $1500/month, but when he checked halfway through the month on his costs, he was on track to spend …

This was a tricky problem. A retail ecommerce site was having performance problems during the holiday season on a linux instance at AWS. The server itself was beefy enough – 8 vcpus and 32 GB of memory. Also, plenty of storage – 300 GB SSD disk with provisioned IOPS at the right scale to disk size. The server kept throwing errors as if it were …