Episode Details
Back to EpisodesWhiteboard Confessional: Hacking Email Newsletter Analytics & Breaking Links
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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.
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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.
On this show, I talk an awful lot about architectural patterns that are horrifying. Let’s instead talk for a moment about something that isn’t horrifying. CHAOSSEARCH. Architecturally, they do things right. They provide a log analytics solution that separates out your storage from your compute. The data lives inside of your S3 buckets, and you can access it using APIs you’ve come to know and tolerate, through a series of containers that live next to that S3 storage. Rather than replicating massive clusters that you have to care and feed for yourself, instead, you now get to focus on just storing data, treating it like you normally would other S3 data and not replicating it, storing it on expensive disks in triplicate, and fundamentally not having to deal with the pains of running other log analytics infrastructure. Check them out today at CHAOSSEARCH.io.
On Monday, I sent out a newsletter issue to over 18,000 people where the links didn't work for the first hour and a half. Then they magically started working. Today on the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I'm not talking about a particular design pattern, but rather conducting a bit of a post mortem of what exactly broke and why it suddenly started working again an hour and a half later. To send out the Last Week in AWS newsletter, I use a third-party service called ConvertKit that, in turn, wraps itself around SendGrid for actual email delivery. They, in turn, handle an awful lot of the annoying difficult parts of newsletter management. As a quick example, unsubscribes. If you unsubscribe from my newsletter, which you should never do, I won't email you again. That's because they handle the subscription and unsubscription process.
Now, as another example, when you sign up for the newsletter, you get an email series that tailors itself to a “choose your own platypus” adventure based upon what you select. True story. Their logic engine powers that, too. ConvertKit is awesome for these things, but they do some things that are also kind of crappy. For example, they do a lot of link tracking that is valuable, but it's the creepy kind of link tracking that I don't c