Anonymous Amazon
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Interesting interview:
Lots of stuff in there. Some things that caught my eye:
Security:
After AWS got started in 2006, security became a much bigger concern. Amazon realized how important it was to its most lucrative customers. These days, the company takes security extremely seriously. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many nation states that have as sophisticated a security approach as Amazon does.
Security is mostly about making yourself a difficult target. It’s like that joke where you go hiking with your friends and a bear attacks you. You don’t need to be faster than the bear; you just need to be faster than your slowest friend.
Data migration:
Plus, we make it easy to migrate and difficult to leave. If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.
LOL:
If you're a competent system administrator, you should have done all that when you configured your system. But not every system administrator is competent. If you’re the sysadmin for some, you know, insurance agency, what do you give a shit? You live in Sioux Falls. Why would you care about cloud security? You don't have to bust your ass because you live in a small-town market where you know everybody and you’re never going to be out of a job. A lot of companies that are headquartered in remote areas don't have particularly sophisticated IT teams. So they’ll pay Amazon to do security for them.
Haven't finished reading TFA but it's time to start dinner...
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The data migration thing isn't exactly unique. Azure's the same way. "Sure, we'll give you all these ways to bring your data in. What, you want a backup of that SQL database you can restore on-prem? lol nope"
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Anonymous Amazon:
The data migration thing isn't exactly unique. Azure's the same way. "Sure, we'll give you all these ways to bring your data in. What, you want a backup of that SQL database you can restore on-prem? lol nope"
I've never had any problem getting a real, fully functional backup out of Azure SQL Server.
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@Mason_Wheeler You can get a BACPAC, which is a large ZIP file containing SQL statements to rebuild the database that aren't guaranteed to be transactionally consistent and take forever to restore for a database of any decent size. (Our DBs run from 50 GB - 3 TB.) You can't get a compressed, transactionally-consistent native backup out of Azure SQL.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Anonymous Amazon:
aren't guaranteed to be transactionally consistent
How do you even fuck this up by accident?
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@Gąska said in Anonymous Amazon:
@Unperverted-Vixen said in Anonymous Amazon:
aren't guaranteed to be transactionally consistent
How do you even fuck this up by accident?
The links @Unperverted-Vixen provided state that you either need to make your DB read-only while exporting it (which makes sense) or you make a transactionally consistent database copy and export that.
I'm not understanding how those are unreasonable requirements.
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@Rhywden On-premise, if I want to create a backup of a database, I don't need to either take it offline (causing application downtime) or create a second online copy (costing $$$) first.
But there are at least ways around that, even if they suck. The bigger problem is just that BACPACs aren't suited for anything bigger than toy databases.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Anonymous Amazon:
BACPACs aren't suited for anything bigger than toy databases.
This. I always wonder why it takes nearly half an hour for it to generate a 2Mb BACPAC file of the dev database...
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Anonymous Amazon:
The data migration thing isn't exactly unique. Azure's the same way. "Sure, we'll give you all these ways to bring your data in. What, you want a backup of that SQL database you can restore on-prem? lol nope"
Not as normal backup I think, but for either platform, downloading data to local via your own data replication program is pretty doable.
Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian
