mark-ruwt

Agreed! My take is that you don't have to, you shouldn't.

Surely! Our business is mainly an API that B-to-B customers consume. The strategy is to create identical "pods" in different cities across different providers on identical distros. Between Vultr, Linode, and DO, that's 20+ cities you could place a pod in the States alone. Each pod has a proxy up front, a database slave, and a pair of app server and cache machines.

Ignoring tweaks for international customers, each proxy is in an A record round-robin with health checks via Route 53. US-based requests get forwarded to one of the pods, and the proxy either handles the request with local servers, or points to servers in another pod if it has servers that are down. If any pod has a power outage or goes down for any reason, Route 53 automatically pulls the entire pod out of the rotation. If an entire provider goes dark, all of the pods get pulled out of the rotation, but all the others keep running.

Very true! I have a script that automatically commits any DNS changes to source control, so if Route 53 bites it I could quickly move somewhere else, but you're right, on the off chance my registrar decides to vanish, there'll be some panicking.

It is a very different model, but my take is that you shouldn't be building anything on one provider that you couldn't easily move over to another. Provider lock-in is scary.

If maximum uptime is critical to the business, your infrastructure should be cross-provider.

I've been running three providers as peers (DO, Linode, Vultr) as a one-man shop for years, and I sleep better at night knowing that no one intern can fatfinger code that takes me offline.

The source research paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.8b02322?src=recsys

For anyone curious about the MIT course numbering system: http://catalog.mit.edu/subjects/

Disappointing, but expected. Looks like my Fantasy Football hiatus will extend into another year.

It's the first of many. Companies have been circling for years, prepping for access to the US market.

Our API Infrastructure (~40 servers) is spread across Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. We use home-rolled scripts to build machines from scratch (aggressively tear down and rebuild to avoid maintenance windows), and use Ansible to deploy any code updates.

My favorite passage:

The idea is to create “a deeper and deeper emotional connection,” Sofman said. “And if you neglect [the toy robot], you feel the pain of that.”

When he told me this, I felt a flash of not-quite-anger. It seemed almost cruel to design a robot that could play on a young kid’s emotions. And I had never considered that, in the coming human–robot conflagration, robots might take over simply by expertly manipulating us into letting them win.

I was happy to see it there too, but if Cost of Living for San Francisco is 2.91 and Austin is 3.71, I'm having trouble putting much value in their metrics.

tl;dr Subscribing to a standalone ESPN service will be possible starting in 2018.

This is an earth shaker for sports properties, cable companies, and subscription VODs. NFLX was quickly down 5%, but is rebounding.

Condensing the quote into the title was hard--here it is in full:

“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Mr. Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”

Indefinitely means "for an unlimited or unspecified period of time".

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/indefinitely

Sadly, I'm used to that on all three at this point. In order of most frequent "Surprise! Node Reboot!" emails from most frequent to least, it's been Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, for me.

(for anyone curious, it's ~50 servers across 8 different data centers, roughly equally distributed)

Our data centers span across Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. Ranking my satisfaction with each, would be in that order, best to worst.

Sadly, this is the crux of the problem. If you equate increasing diversity with lowering the bar, you're missing the point.

https://42hire.com/the-big-lie-tech-companies-and-diversity-...

For anyone interested in digging into this concept, read up on "Impostor Syndrome".

https://counseling.caltech.edu/general/InfoandResources/Impo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

Are You Watching This?! | Austin, TX | ONSITE

RUWT?! is a Sports Excitement Analytics company that identifies exciting games in real-time, and then licesnse that data to cable companies and sports properties around the globe.

http://areyouwatchingthis.com/jobs

You will be Full-Time Employee #1, so you'll have the opportunity to become a stronger developer and learn about the business from many different angles.

In a given week, our work will span from native iOS and Android development, to responsive HTML5 development, to algorithm development in Java, to upgrading our 10-city, global API infrastucture. We're looking for candidates with experience in at least one of these realms, but more importantly, someone excited to learn many more.

Thanks! I get to watch sports all day--I try not to ever complain.

Watching a VC being interviewed pretending he invented something that will be the second sentence in the first paragraph of your obituary, is stronger than 5 cups of coffee. It's a blessing.

I run Are You Watching This?!, a B-to-B sports excitement analytics company that identifies exciting games in real time by analyzing live game data. Sports, media, and cable companies license that data for use on sites, in apps, and on cable boxes.

A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees and 5M in funding.

We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clone. It'll be 10 years this Fall, and we've been profitable since 2013.

Yeah, they had to show bank statements.

A pair of friends just moved to Paris to do just this. They had to travel to a French Embassy (Houston was closest) and prove they had a States-based job, and that they were financially secure. They're allowed to stay for one year, and then have the opportunity to re-up for one more.

I don't know of a master list, unfortunately.

I use AWS Route 53 DNS with Health Checks, and put one "A" record in for each "pod". If an entire pod somehow disappears, Route 53 will take it out of the rotation.

Sure, think of it this way:

If you had a perfectly clean install of your distro of choice, could you write a shell script that could build your server from scratch?

If you can answer Yes to that (and you should), then you can build an if/then-heavy shell script that works with each of the APIs to create a perfectly clean install of your favorite distro.

One script to create the clean slate machine.

One script to build what you need.

We have 9 "pods" around the globe, each with API servers (Java/Tomcat/Apache), static servers (Varnish), a MySQL slave, and an HAProxy Maître D'. With close to 60 servers, our monthly bills are less than $1,000, and we haven't had downtime in years. Spinning up a new server is just: sh build.sh atl api 1.

Feel free to ping me if you want any more details: mark@areyouwatchingthis.com.

We were exclusively on AWS, but now are distributed across Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. We're saving a lot, and getting better performance.

That's actually backwards. The City created the laws, Uber/Lyft created "Proposition 1" to repeal them, and Austinites voted against the proposition.

More on weev. This isn't new.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindnes...