Kudos to RDS's SLA, proving the point of the public cloud

If you go and spin a new RDS server, you'll see this new page added before the wizard:

My perception over the last months is that AWS improved RDS availability, multi-AZ, and they are pushing it more aggressively.

An availability factor of "three and a half nines" (~8hr/year of downtime) is very very good, it usually has a very high price tag attached to it (hardware, software & labor) and usually is a dream for the smaller-medium IT organizations.

Enabling it on a utility low price, 25%-33% higher than the corresponding EC2 machine, RDS makes a real bargain for everyone, making it harder to stay out of public cloud.

Eventual consistency of NoSQL marketing

Yesterday I learnt an important lesson about an important difference between NoSQL and MySQL, at least when it comes to the marketing and hype.

I saw a tweet from around marketing of one of NoSQL leaders:

Most people apparently would just conclude from the tweet's text, however I actually clicked the link, and couldn't believe eyes:

I guess that in NoSQL, when it comes to the integrity of data as well as hype - it is eventually consistent...

Explaining the case for MySQL

My faithful readers, please spare 10 mins of your time, and read Baron's excellent post: https://vividcortex.com/blog/2014/04/30/why-mysql

Nuff said.


Since I can't really shut up, and only if you do like my (humble) take on this, I could say in short:

Every technology/platform/framework I choose, will end up surprising me, limiting me for things can be done easily, and throw many painful challenges at me if and when I need to do things that are closer to the platform's "edges". This is true for everything including Rails, JEE, Hibernate, MongoDB, MySQL.

I've learned that the more mature, generically-capable, transparent and ecosystem-rich a solution is - the less painful surprises for me in the worst timings - and more successful I am in my job.