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
• Amazon Elastic File System
• Network File System
• AWS Fargate

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: 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.

I talked a lot about databases on this show. There are a bunch of reasons for that, but they mostly all distill down to that databases are, and please don't quote me on this as I'm not a DBA, where the data lives. If I blow up a web server, it can have hilarious consequences for a few minutes, but it's extremely unlikely to have the potential to do too much damage to the business. That's the nature of stateless things. They're easily replaced, and it's why the infrastructure world has focused so much on the recurring mantra of cattle, not pets.

But I digress. This episode is not about mantras. It's about databases. Today's episode of the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional returns to the database world with a story that's now safely far enough in the past that I can talk about it without risking a lawsuit. We were running a fairly standard three-tiered web app. For those who haven't had the pleasure because their brains are being eaten by the microservices worms, these three tiers are web servers, application servers, and database servers. It's a model that my father used to deploy, and his father before him.

But I digress. This story isn't about my family tree. It's about databases. We were trying to scale, which is