Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

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, ...