AWS, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare, Equinix, Pyflame, Infrastructure, OVH DDoS, Cloudfront

Post date: Nov 26, 2016 11:00:53 AM

• Amazon AWS is adding new regions to Europe. London, Paris, etc... That's great. Yet really many Finnish sites are served from Dublin.
• PostgreSQL 9.6 Released - Awesome! I really like PostgreSQL. There are so many technologies you can add to your project, but as long as you can make it with just a few, the better. Each new technology adds more to know and more ways to fail, miserably. Been there done that. Especially the PostgreSQL full text search features are great for most of my purposes with not so massive data sets. Friends have been suggesting Apache Lucene (Solr, Elasticsearch) or Xapian and and stuff like that for me, but no thanks so far. From new features Progress reporting sounds great and index-only scans for partial indexes sound also pretty beneficial for certain use cases. Binary hot-backup improvements are always welcome, backups are one of the most annoying things with some databases. kw: pgsql, postgres, indexing, Full Text Search (FTS).
• Cloudflare finally opens it's Helsinki, Finland data center. - This is something I've been waiting for a long time. Yet as blogged earlier, latency to Stockholm wasn't that bad anyway. It seems that pretty many ISPs are still serving from Stockholm, but I guess they're doing it like they did with Moscow and gradually running it in and also load testing it. Also they chose Luanda over Lagos, that's interesting. AFAIK Lagos would have been better connected. Actually Cloudflares network is now really dense. It's hard to see how many more pops would make any meaningful difference anymore. If I remember right their first goal was to make everyone within 20 ms reach. Stockholm was only 8 ms from Helsinki. So now they're adding pops (data centers in their terms) for sites which were already really well connected. Actually this was to me quite obvious when they added Copenhagen and Oslo. Because those were already really close to existing sites in Europe. Even areas like South America and Africa have been 'sufficiently covered' which is really awesome. So many CDN networks do not have any pops in those regions, or just one.
• Equinix is coming to Finland too. This is just more awesome technology news.
• Played a little with Pyflame, not really useful tool for me. But very good tool to know, if and when basic profiling is required. You'll never know when you'll start lacking required performance in production and don't have actually the "one fail point" which is clearly the source of all the trouble.
• Three infrastructure mistakes your company must not make - Great post! I were at one point really considering AWS and Google App Engine, because those are being hyped so much. But there are restrictions how things work as well as the cost profile gets quite bad. Just as the article says. One way is of course to start building all kind of workarounds which lower the costs. But building those workarounds wastes resources and makes everything more brittle and complex. Also Google App Engine is real "Cloud Jail". If you build on it, you don't have alternative. If they kick you out, ouch. If they rise prices, ouch. If they terminate the service, ouch. No can do! If you just make bang for bug analysis on AWS results are quite horrible. Everything is seriously overpriced. I think many using AWS services don't actually pay the bills. It's easy to say something is nice, if you don't really care about the cost. All those board & cross margin discussions are very familiar and great examples. Same applies to technical debt, we're spending a ton of money on systems which totally fall a part. Yes, that's the debts interest being paid now. - Yet as bad is using random hipster tools which might now have future. - Monitoring parts were also obvious, traceability and accountability are sometimes really hard in distributed systems, if something simple like unique id is missing. I've written about this over and over again. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) & distributed tracing.
• OVHs DDoS protection is clearly working, because we didn't notice anything at all, when they were hit with 1.5 Tbps attack. I could imagine many providers would be having a bad day.
• Many Finnish sites are also using Cloudfront, even if it's really non-optimal for Finnish users. It's also a bad choice for sites which main language is Finnish. Because it's pretty sure that 99%+ of users visiting that site are actually physically in Finland. News in Finnish aren't widely globally followed. It's not like CNN or BBC.