tillk

Ubuntu's business server is hardly something as turn-key as vagrant.

We use Ubuntu on EC2 and Canonical has made so many atrocious decisions since the release of 10.04, I am not sure if I ever want to run anything from them again. =( We are however heavily invested with custom PPAs and all that.

Back to Vagrant - as others said before: `vagrant up` and productivity starts. At work I manage local and remote people and they all work with Vagrant. It works the same for developers and frontend people. And most importantly: it works.

Yes, there are ins and outs, but they are mostly Virtualbox related and I cannot wait until other virtualization is supported.

Ok, to be more obvious: by comparison, a multi-region setup is maybe over the top. Because essentially, you are distributing over something like eight data centers then.

Because you cannot stay in a single AZ either – who knows what will go down and when.

It's insane how this post is so high up on this website. But it goes to show that neither you or the author of this blog post have ever attempted any replication over WAN. Otherwise it would not be called simple.

This blog post is hilarious.

A region in AWS speak is already multiple supposedly independent data centers (in AWS terms: AZ (availability zone)).

So if an entire region fails, that's four or so data centers which all go down at the same time.

So how many companies on bare metal have four data centers and experience this kind of catastrophic downtimes? Add to that, how many of these companies operate completely in the dark about which data center is actually which?

These blog posts are annoying because it seems like these people have never done anything they suggest themselves.

Yes, the cloud lets you setup a fully configured instance within minutes. But at which expense? Mostly intransparency about what the entire stack and what is going on?

Food for thoughts.

If Windows is not your game, you can use this credit to run FreeBSD on EC2: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

People are enjoying themselves. It's a matter of personal opinion if this is the kind of environment you want to be in. Maybe sometimes it's out of control and more a frat party than a conference.

For the record, the opposite is probably not what most people want either. And I wouldn't want to work in the opposite environment either.

In the end it's up to the people attending and of course up to the people organizing what they make of it.

A friend of mine just recommended Kerio, or one of the resellers: https://www.r1sync.com/shop.html?page=shop.browse&catego...

This looks pretty interesting though I had to sign-up to figure out what they offer exactly (for 2 USD/user/month):

* 10GB storage * Webmail * POP3/IMAP * Calendaring * Groupware * Mobile Sync

Not sure if I'd paint it so black and white, I think in general I have been in many of these things as well.

On both ends – I guess more on the 'I'm getting a drink' one because I agree that after a while there is no reason to stay sober anymore, because everyone else is on their way already. It's either that or go home, which I do frequently as well. But it very much depends on the kind of people I am with – in many cases it's not just colleagues or people I find interesting in terms of technological background: they are my actual friends (not Facebook-friends).

And despite getting smashed I've still had a lot of interesting conversations and discussions with people in the same setting. I don't want to call anyone out which is why I won't name names, but I think all (three) conferences I attended last year had an "open bar" at some point and it was still worth while.

One was an amazing weekend of great talks, conversations, food and drinks.

And I don't regret going to any of these either. For starters, I can stop whenever I want and go back to my hotel or go home. I can still stay around and not drink anything and chat with others all night if I want to. Or do the opposite and have a drink with them.

I personally caught myself pondering about how you keep a level of professionalism – e.g. when you see your work mates (and/or superiors) drunk all the time, how do you keep the respect around?

We hired a lot of people in the last two years and while it's good to be friends with everyone you work with, I think there is a gray area of how far you want to go. There is work and after-work and in the end, some people manage it and others do not. For myself, I just decided to not shift into last gear when I go out with them and that means I can still have a good time and even have a drink if I want to. Got that much self-control (or maybe just fear of the next day).

I'm not sure I agree on a ban for alcohol from conferences. I can see where you're coming from and I'd like to think people should consume within reason, but I'm sure that doesn't really work out at all. At least for the majority. In the end it's always freedom of choice.

I give you that though: Maybe drinks should not be free so people don't get wasted right on. Whoever sponsors them could also sponsor something else, or something more worth while.

http://fastmail.fm and http://pobox.com/ are the services people keep recommending (for IMAP, SMTP, etc.).

Check out this blog post about fastmail.fm: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/03/from-gmail-to-fast...

I'm not sure how well either of the services does address books and most importantly sync'ing it to multiple devices. It could be as simple as LDAP – but then again, that's not trivial but probably still doable. :)

Personally, I also like google docs a lot. Something like Zoho Office wasn't an alternative for myself primarily because I didn't like the UI at all.

great story, bro

Are they all static (elastic) IPs?

I have a similar alias file for the instances which have static IPs. But not all of my servers do. E.g. my loadbalancer has a static IP, but why would all of my app servers have one?

I have a similar script to generate names.

People like you give nosql a bad name. Yes, nosql can help, but you're looking at it for the wrong reasons.

Go back to school, or hire capable developers.

No one sane runs code to automatically take out and replace EBS volumes from raids.

I'm a little let down by the detail of this blog post.

For anyone who cares: we've had 6x as many documents (as linkfluence) in a single CouchDB instane before we moved to Cloudant. We now have over 360 million documents on Cloudant.

Our database is very write intense, lots of new documents, little updates to the actual documents and a lot of reads of the documents in between. We also have a couple larger views to aggregate the data for our users.

The ride with CouchDB has been bumpy at times, but not at the 'scale' where linkfluence is at.

I like how this video uses different camera perspectives during the interview. That's some quality editing, Tim. Keep up the good work!

First off, thanks! And sorry I didn't catch your comment earlier.

I'll make sure I focus on that in a later part of the series! :)

There's also part II and part III.

Thanks for sharing on here, guys!