Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

Priceline PCLN and Expedia EXPE  continue boycotting TripAdvisor's Mobile Booking Engine, while working with smaller MetaSearch players.  TripAdvisor rolled out it's mobile booking engine capabilities some time ago, claiming that their Mobile Booking Experience is far superior from other booking engines out there. Their Instant Booking feature (this is how they call it) is powered by Tingo and Getaroom. While the user experience may be questionable for many smaller and/or older online booking engines, this is not the case in 2014/2015 anymore - most bigger brands understand the increasing value of mobile visitor and have invested into their booking engines, some of them taking Mobile-First design approach. TripAdvisor's claims (who by the way has no real life experience in hotel eCommerce) do not apply bigger OTAs (and even bigger brands like Marriott). The question is not about the (mobile) user experience - it's about who owns the data. Every visitor to the...

Simplifying the EC2 Reserved Instance Model There is now a single type of Reserved Instance and it has three payment options. All of the options continue to provide capacity assurance and discounts that are typically around 63% for a three year term when compared to On-Demand prices. There are three payment options that so that you can decide how you would like to pay for your Reserved Instance throughout the term (in descending order of effective discount), and you can find these new options under the Offering  settings when purchasing Reserved Instances: All Upfront -  You pay for the entire Reserved Instance term (one or three years) with one upfront payment and get the best effective hourly price when compared to On-Demand. Partial Upfront -  You pay for a portion of the Reserved Instance upfront, and then pay for the remainder over the course of the one or three year term. This option balances the RI payments between upfront and hourly No Upfront -...

New, "Explosive" C4 instance type from AWS It has been a while since Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced new cloud hardware. For those unfamiliar with the cloud: yes, even cloud computing need actual hardware to run. The update will brings new, explosive c4 compute-optimized instance type on board, and while I still cannot see this type in my AWS console, I'm sure the promised architecture behind it will be good one. Apparently AWS has ordered the specific Haswell CPU from Intel, designed just for EC2: The new C4 instances are based on the Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell ) processor. This custom processor, designed specifically for EC2 , runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Turbo boost. These instances are designed to deliver the highest level of processor performance on EC2.  As said, there are no CPU benchmarks available yet, but I was quite surprised on their c3.large instance type performance and it h...

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Shopify , a widely used and beloved eCommerce platform, started experiencing issues today around 2:09pm. They are currently investigating problems with a data store, causing all shops to be unavailable. According to a customer rep, everything should be back to normal in 10 minutes. Update - The service came back in less than hour around 3:07pm. None of the Shopify twitter accounts reported this incident. Visit status.shopify.com for status updates.

The issues with connectivities to certain computers and servers does not affect only everyday users but also major businesses, especially those primarily relying their business on the cloud servers, cloud storage, and SaaS/PaaS solutions. With the introduction of cloud computing, total number of IP addresses has grown every month ever since. From Wiki: 512K Day  is the unofficial title of an event that occurred on August 12, 2014. Multiple  Internet routers , manufactured by  Cisco  and other vendors, encountered a default software limit of "512K" (actually 2^19 )  IPv4   BGP  routing table entries, causing assorted outages at various  data centers . Various IT professionals reported the issue on  Internet forums , sometimes as just " 512K ", and under a  Twitter  hashtag of  #512k . Quote from Reddit: BGP is the backbone of the internet and the internets just got fat enough for the backbone to start cracking. Here's ...

Amazon ElastiCache can be configured in Multi-AZ setup (or as they call it "Flexible Node Placement"). Your Memcached Cache Clusters can now span multiple Availability Zones within a Region, improving reliability and availability of the Cluster. And, if you are still using old cache.m1 instances, see this article about new M3 and R3 instances  and upgrade for better and more reliable hardware. You can now choose the Availability Zone for new nodes when you create a new Cache Cluster or add more nodes to an existing Cluster. You can specify the new desired number of nodes in each Availability Zone or you can simply choose the Spread Nodes Across Zones option. The feature is available exclusively to memcached cluster only.

I received today email notification from Zend Developer Cloud stating that the PHP Developer Cloud (phpcloud.com) will be closed on 09/07/14 for good. Quite surprise (and not so much) from a company as great as Zend. Just FYI - I tried their service only once and after 48 hours of waiting for my virtual instance to become available, I gave up. For your reference, here's the copy of whole email sent today:   Hi Jaan, You are receiving this email because you have created PHP containers on the  phpcloud.com  - Zend Developer Cloud.   When we launched Zend Developer Cloud in 2011, there were few options for PHP developers to experience Cloud development. We set out to deliver a development-only Cloud environment that could provide you a simple and frictionless way to experience development in the Cloud. In parallel, we began working with the leading cloud providers to define Zend Server-based environments that could run your projects at scale once th...

What will happen to the so-much once-beloved and now so-much-hated e-mail service in near future? Email's future? According to the man who invented email back in 1978 and is original author of EchoMail , it gets better. When I tell people I invented email, the first thing they say is, 'I want to kill you.' Email is here to stay—it's time we got better at using it. Email originated from the interoffice paper mail system (Inbox, Outbox, etc.) used in every office across the world. In the good old days, the secretary did all the hard work and the boss did two things: dictating and editing. But email has made secretaries of us all; we spend up to 38% of our day managing email. The future email systems will have integrated artificial intelligence that will know you as well as the secretary of 1978 once did, and you will be able to dictate to it. It will automatically sort your inbox, file and archive, prioritize, and even come up with reasonable responses, which you simpl...

Amazon Web Services announced General Availability of second-gen Standard instances (M3) in Amazon RDS, making RDS even better with almost 50% more computing power thanks to new hardware architecture (Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPU) and about 6% lower cost. In my previous post I wrote how did I upgrade db.m1.large to 1000IOPS which resulted single-digit ms MySQL read latency  - that was pretty nice surprise. This time I've decided to take advantage of faster CPU and lower cost offered by db.m3.large instance type. I was pretty aware that m3.large instance type is not EBS optimized (only db.m3.xlarge and above is) and was ready for performance drop, luckily it never happened - charts read the same except CPU load which seems to have dropped ~ 10%. Because I had multi-AZ RDS setup, the failover took ~ 30 seconds and upgrade was completed in 8 minutes. Nice. Amazon RDS Dashboard My recommendation is to upgrade your db.m1 instance type to db.m3 as soon as you can - not only you will ...

High-performance, provisioned IOPS storage was available in Amazon RDS for more than a year ago, as you can read from AWS article published on 9/25/2012. Recently our MySQL database has grown and contains more than 200 databases, with some of them containing millions of rows (and growing rapidly). Our Multi-AZ RDS instance is db.m1.large which provides pretty decent performance even when it is not EBS optimized. Squeezing more performance was one of my goals when decided to take the road to enable IOPS. You can start from 1000 IOPS with 1000 IOPS increments. I decided to go with 1000 for a start. Process for upgrading Multi-AZ instance is far from complicated - after making your selections through the dashboard UI and deciding to apply changes immediately, instance performs automated fail-over which minimizes the downtime for merely minute or so until DNS reacts to changes. Total upgrade took about 5 hours but system was never down and I did not notice any slowness. Once done, ...