/Cloud

Inside Uber’s Move To The Cloud: Part 1

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely covers: (1) The history of Uber’s data centers. (2) Challenges of operating your own data centers - hard drives, ODM woes, and the automation of data center maintenance. (3) Incentives and pull factors from Covid-19, the Postmates acquisition, and CapEx and OpEx costs. (4) Cloud basics. A primer on data centers, regions, and availability zones. What these mean for public Cloud providers and businesses like Uber.

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We Stand To Save $7m Over Five Years From Our Cloud Exit

- David Heinemeier Hansson tl;dr: “The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That's the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we'll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.”

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Our Cloud Spend In 2022

- Fernando Álvarez tl;dr: "Getting this massive spend down to just $3.2 million has taken a ton of work. The ops team runs a vigilant cost-inspection program, with monthly reporting and tracking, and we’ve entered into long-term agreements on Reserved Instances and committed usage, as part of a Private Pricing Agreement. This is a highly-optimized budget.""This post will cover why I went through the effort of creating a Python SQL engine and how a simple query goes from a string to actually transforming data." Toby covers tokenizing, parsing, optimizing, planning and executing.

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How I Got Pwned By My Cloud Costs

- Troy Hunt tl;dr: "I guess I'm looking at this a bit like the last time I lost data due to a hard disk failure. I always knew there was a risk but until it actually happened, I didn't take the necessary steps to protect against that risk doing actual damage. But hey, it could have been so much worse; that number could have been 10x higher and I wouldn't have known any earlier." Troy dives into the 17.3GB data spikes that caused his Azure bill to rocket. 

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10 Rules For Better Cloud Security

- Thomas Segura tl;dr: (1) Limit manual configurations, (2) Design a recovery program to recover from outside accounts, providers, or locales. (3) Regularly review your DNS and cloud configurations to prevent take-over situations, and more.

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How IBM Lost The Cloud

- Tom Krazit tl;dr: A picture of a company caught moving in two directions: "a group that correctly understood how the cloud would play an enormous role in enterprise computing, matched up against a sales-driven culture that prioritized the custom needs of its large customers over the work required to catch up with AWS."

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The Amazon Premium

- Cal Peterson tl;dr: Suspicious of established cloud providers actually providing value for money, Cal compares virtual machine and object storage pricing amongst the main providers. Google, AWS, Azure came out to be more expensive than the others. 

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Andy Jassy Aims To Reinvent AWS For The Cloud’s Next Generation

- John Furrier tl;dr: Fascinating conversation with the CEO of AWS on the ongoing transformation of AWS approach in cloud computing.

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The Cloud And Open Source Powder Keg

- Stephen O'Grady tl;dr: Commercial open source vendors are inevitably heading into conflict with cloud companies, as seen in the ongoing chess match between Elastic and Amazon.

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