Category: Cloud

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 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.

Posted in Cloud, history, Internet, Networks

The Expenditure of TCPv4

Posted on by rwjordan

While working on an TCP/IP problem today, I was finally struck by the fact that we have for all intents and purposes expended the entire TCPv4 addressing space. I knew it was coming, years ago, but now while testing IP addresses, it dawned on me.

You can now pick any arbitrary set of numbers nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn and expect a response. Ping them, probe them, something will be there, or it’s being held. All gone, this is the equivalent of spitting in the middle of an ocean while swimming,  you are going to hit ocean.

4,294,967,296 (232) addresses gone, 4 Billion addresses in use…..

Posted in Amazon, Cloud, Database

The Future of Aurora

Posted on by rwjordan

Amazon Aurora for the RDS is more or less on hold for the company I’m working for, it looks like it works, but it’s not a consistent performance across all the SQL that is deployed here. Having said that if you are starting a project, this might be a functional alternative to MySQL. But at this point neither the increase performance shown, on only part of our BI queries, and the massive down time in any attempt to to move to Aurora from MySQL does not merit a change. Should things change, like Oracle forcing a pricing change on Amazon, this option will be reconsidered. I just wish that AWS would consider implementation of MariaDB within the RDS environment.

Posted in Amazon, Cloud, DBA, Economy & Business, Internet, IT Issues, MySQL, RDBMS, RDS, Sybase

The end of Sybase

Posted on by rwjordan

It is with sadness that I had to turn off the last Sybase Instance we had running. Our last ASE server quietly shutdown on an Amazon EC2 server on Tuesday the 20th of December, never to boot again.

In all truth both Sybase instances were developer installs operating as production systems. Our two instances, operating with the 25 user limit that each was restricted to, was barely able to operate the system. But the Sybase Licensing was too archaic and inflexible to continue operating it as a small business. Thus the economics forced us to convert to MySQL.

If it hadn’t been for the previous management, who in some delusion of saving money, refused to pay the datacenter bill, forcing us to move the Sybase instances out into the Amazon cloud (EC2) in the first place we would probably have been on MySQL sooner, as that was the plan.

But the sadness remains, Sybase as a technology proved again that it would run, and run reliably, on just about any hardware, even when it was virtual, and NOT meeting the specified certified, requirements of operation. Which can’t be said for the Amazon RDS version of MySQL, which crashed spontaneously while applying an index on our live production database without warning. This having happened after weeks of testing and trial runs at operating the system on it. The only defense, the RDS instance rebooted and was available without data loss, in less time than a Sybase HA switchover would have taken, a system this production system was developed from.

So we are up in MySQL and I am now a MySQL DBA exclusively, after spending the last 25 years as a Sybase DBA and evangelist. The decision now has to be rather to remain so, or find another place of employment where Sybase remains. Those are becoming more and more rare. Maybe I should takeup MongoDB to stay at the cutting edge.