The Other Side of Paternity Leave
I’m back! I took five weeks of parental leave to welcome my daughter Josephine to the world–and those have now ended. I’ll take the balance of my parental leave a week at a time during the first half of next year–because “parental leave is a benefit, not a stick with which to beat people” is […]
Reader Mailbag: Potpourri
At the start of These Unprecedented Times, we hosted two Q&A sessions. Our audience asked a bunch of questions about AWS accounts, and not all of them fit into neat little categories. So, here’s a collection of the misfits. How does the AWS partner ecosystem work regarding reselling of AWS services? Do they get a […]
Reader Mailbag: AWS Accounts
Back at the start of These Unprecedented Times, my business partner and I hosted two Q&A sessions. Our attendees asked a bunch of questions about AWS accounts, which we’ve compiled here, lightly edited to make ourselves sound way more intelligent. Do you have any concerns about the organization master account also being the consolidated billing […]
Reader Mailbag: AWS Services
Before These Unprecedented Times struck, my business partner and I hosted two Q&A sessions. We were asked all kinds of questions about AWS’s multitude of services, which we also answer below, lightly edited to make us sound way more intelligent than we already did. How does RDS pricing compare to other managed database service providers […]
Paternity Leave
This week marks the first of my eight weeks of parental leave so I can attend to the birth of my second child. Men (and really by extension non-mothers) taking parental leave isn’t something that gets a lot of attention, so I wanted to take advantage of my platform to talk about it today. I’m […]
Reader Mailbag: AWS Billing
At the start of These Unprecedented Times, my business partner and I hosted two Q&A sessions, fielding all sorts of questions from the audience about the world of AWS. Here are the questions that are filed under the general billing category, with a bit more nuance in the responses. 1. Why is my bill so […]
Is the AWS Free Tier really free?
Is the AWS Free Tier really free? No. No! Oh my god no. It absolutely is not. The AWS Free Tier is free in the same way that a table saw is childproof. If you blindly rush in to use an AWS service with the expectation that you won’t be charged, you’re likely to lose […]
Dipping My Toes into the DigitalOcean
In February (before these Unprecedented Times), I decided it was time to play Explore That Cloud with DigitalOcean. They’d be sponsoring some of my nonsense in the near future, but this is why I have sponsorship folks on my end—to serve as an editorial firewall. Unfortunately, that investment won’t save them. But it does get […]
8 AWS Terms Project Managers Need to Know
Recently, an anonymous individual told me that their company was planning to migrate to AWS and they were looking for someone to help with the project management side. This anonymous person was hoping to be that project manager. There was one caveat: The right individual would be “familiar with AWS.” The inquiring mind was not, […]
Everything You Need to Know about Route 53 Resolver Query Logging
I’ve long been a fan of Amazon’s premier database, Route 53, but its analytics have had something of a flaw. You’ve been able to see query logs for hosted zones for a while, but what about when you access other DNS “databases”? Today, Amazon has released a new query logging functionality that helps you understand […]
Cloud Repatriation Isn’t a Thing
Every so often, we see a blog post surface proclaiming that “cloud repatriation” or “moving workloads out of public clouds and back into data centers”is a trend that’s poised to take off. The idea’s compelling; there absolutely are workloads that aren’t economically viable in the public cloud, and it sparks a ray of hope for […]
Your Disaster Recovery Plan is a Joke Written by Clowns
If you take a look somewhere in an engineering VP or Director’s office, you’ll find a binder that hasn’t been touched in a while labeled “DR / BCM Plan.” Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Management planning are important things to take into consideration. But the clowns you work for have almost certainly screwed it up […]