Category: Amazon

Posted in Amazon, AWS, Cloud, Google, Facebook, Networks

What constitutes the Internet

Posted on by rwjordan

The recent hysteria about the massive and unfortunate AWS outage in US-EAST-1 and their S2 storage issues. Has raised the discussion about the vulnerability of the Internet. First lets be clear here, the Internet is NOT services like Amazon, or Google, or Dropbox, or any one of thousands of ‘Sites’ ON the internet. The Internet did not fail during the AWS outage, Sites on the Internet were offline, as in, “not on the Internet”, or at best unavailable as a facility there on.

The internet is a web, which can be fragile, but is mostly fairly resilient to most things, including facilities being disabled, or unavailable. So when you listen to talk about ‘LOSING the INTERNET’ take it with a grain of salt. It’s probably more about loosing connectivity with someones favorite destination on the Internet, facebook, Netflix whatever and less likely about the Internet actually being down.

Posted in AI, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Law

AI ≠ Sentience (as in does not equal)

Posted on by rwjordan

AI ≠ Sentience. That pretty much says is all, but the dialog about AI almost always seems to really be, not about AI, but about AI’s reaching Sentience. The Killer robot syndrome.

But the future will entail more and varied AI’s than they will need Sentience AI’s. This doesn’t mean that the AI will not converse with you in a manor that most Humans do, it will just fall short of choosing to kill you, just because you cast aspersions on their parentage.

That will open the courts to trying to determine which AI’s are Sentient enough to have legal rights, and which ones merely need to be reprogrammed.  And wither the AI chooses to receive system updates or not.

Scary? Maybe, but we will be interacting with AI’s very soon, sooner than most will believe possible. And we will get get used to it, and it’s familiarity will naturally lead to Sentience being the norm.

 

Posted in Amazon, Amazon, AWS, Cloud, Database, DBA, MariaDB, MariaDB, MySQL, MySQL, RDS

Amazon RDS for MariaDB

Posted on by rwjordan

Amazon RDS for MariaDB Finally! I have been broadcasting for sometime that the reason that Amazon has not moved RDS MySQL from it’s 5.6.x version, was due to the belief that Oracle was intending to charge an arm-and-a-leg from AWS for the privilege of doing the upgrade to 5.7.x. I was of the opinion that this was the initial reason for AWS Aurora, to have an alternative both to arm twist Oracle into a better deal for MySQL 5.7, but also a fallback position should Oracle refuse to bargain.

Now that whole subject has been rendered null and void with this announcement. The MySQL community will now have a direct replacement, with improvements, from the 5.6.x installations into MariaDB 10.x and the Oracle (toll booth) issue can now be side stepped entirely.

I have already indicated to my management that this move should be undertaken as soon as is viable.