Episode Details

About Corey Quinn

Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.

Links

• CHAOSSEARCH
• @QuinnyPig

Transcript

Corey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.

Corey: This episode is brought to you by Trend Micro Cloud One™. A security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. I know you're thinking that that's a mouthful because it is, but what's easier to say? “I'm glad we have Trend Micro Cloud One™, a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud,” or, “Hey, bad news. It's going to be a few more weeks. I kind of forgot about that security thing.” I thought so. Trend Micro Cloud One™ is an automated, flexible all-in-one solution that protects your workflows and containers with cloud-native security. Identify and resolve security issues earlier in the pipeline, and access your cloud environments sooner, with full visibility, so you can get back to what you do best, which is generally building great applications. Discover Trend Micro Cloud One™ a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. Whew. At trendmicro.com/screaming.

Hello, and welcome to this edition of the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional, where we confess our various architectural sins that we and others have committed. Today, we're going to talk about, once upon a time, me taking a job at a web hosting provider. It was the thing to do at the time because AWS hadn't eaten the entire world yet, therefore, everything that we talk about today was still a little far in the future. So, it was a more reasonable approach, especially for those with, you know, budgets that didn't stretch to infinity, or willingness to be an early adopter of someone else's hosting nonsense to go ahead and build out something in a data center. 

Now, they were obviously themselves not hosting on top of a cloud provider because the economics made less than no sense back then. So, instead, they had multiple data centers built out that provided for customers various hosting needs. Each one of these was relatively self-contained unless customers wound up building something themselves for failover. So, it wasn't really highly available so much as it was a bunch of different single points of failure, and an outage of one would impact some subset of their customers, but not all of them. And that was a fairly reasonable approach provided that you communicate that scenario to your customers because that's an awful surprise to have later in ti