Blog de Joe Freeman

PaaS services fit in that world in between serverless and roll-your-own infrustructure.  AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS service exposes their their service usage to teach you the right way to deploy web applications. The EB team eats their own AWS dogfood and generates a full featured environment via a generated CloudFormation template that you can examine and leverage. For this example we will deploy Apache Tika document parser as a service. We'll leverage a previous blog article PaaS Document Parsing With Tika and EBS for the instructions.  A shortened version is below Topology Discussion This diagram shows the components deployed to make an autoscaling web application that leverages Elastic Beanstalk , IAM, ALBs and other AWS goodness. Resources and Services Elastic Beanstalk uses these services to provision and deploy a simple no-database web application like the Apache Tika Parser.  We use the CLI to upload the configuration which Elastic Beanstalk the...

What should customers hear when you give a long explanation in response a question that can be answered with a yes or no?  I believe that they are usually hearing  no  when they get a long explanation . Short answers usually mean the responder understands the question and is comfortable with the answer.  Long answers are a way of applying conditions to the response.  Long answers are often an attempt to steer the question in a different direction.   By yes  I mean a positive outcome and not necessarily the word yes. Ask Questions to Drive the Conversation Ask questions until you can give a short answer as long as you don't drag it out or frustrate the other party. I worked with a great sales representative that always seemed dense in meetings.  He asked questions that made him look bad.  Later he told me that it gave the customer the opportunity to in struct and flesh out their needs. More than sales situations Asking expl...

The cost and scale of cloud storage makes it possible to store large amounts of data in almost any format.  We can build abstractions on top of this simple cheap highly available storage that lets us access it as if it were something more sophisticated. Let's divide the data into two coarse types,  unstructured  and  structured . Unstructured data, in this case, is any data where the content is un-typed, is not easily machine parse-able or does not store data with a tight schema.  Sound, media, pictures and PDF documents are examples of unstructured data for this discussion. Structured data has a deterministic content format and if often designed for machine consumption.  Let us break structured into columnar-record and non-columnar record formats.  Most columnar record formats are designed for many records per data object.  Non-columnar formats may be single record per file or may not be easily flatten able into record format. We ill...

Everyone loves the flexibility and capability of S3 but wants to make sure they can control access to data and stay out of the news.  Lets talk S3 Access Points and S3 VPC Endpoints to protect your data and simplify your access control policies.  We're talking about these services: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-endpoints-s3.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/using-access-points.html We're going to walk through the components of this picture. It has the side benefit of acting as a pretty default image on the blog splash page ;-) S3 landscape Amazon AWS S3 was an internet first  design that makes it easy to store and access large amounts of data inside and outside of the enterprise. We want to secure this data, simplify access control management and reduce the cognitive load while maintaining a high level of security and auditability. S3 buckets have a single global namespace and use the public network for routing...

Create Storage Spaces in Windows 10 Windows Server O/S contains Storage Spaces support for Server Spaces tiered storage. You can front slower spinning disks with smaller faster SSDs. Windows 10 has a Storage Spaces GUI Control Panel that does not include the tiered storage GUI. This means Powershell must be used for all configuration. https://github.com/freemansoft/win10-storage-spaces  contains scripts that create tiered storage pools that integrate SSDs as caching drives and HDDs as storage drives. They assume you have at least one SSD and one HDD. The scripts automatically find all raw drives and add them to the pool. Some HDDs have their types incorrectly identified. The script can coerce them to be MediaType:HDD The entire virtual drive is added to the system as a single large volume You need at least 1 SSD and 1 HDD to run cached storage / Simple resiliency 2 SSD and 2 HDD to run cached storage / Mirror resiliency / 1 SSD and 2 HDD to run cached storage / Simpl...