Archives for January 2018

In most of my projects where end-user latency is important, I usually add a caching layer to the architecture. The goal of a caching layer is to reduce load from the database and the speed up the most popular data retrievals. In one project, I was asked to investigate an increase in latency over the […]

Amazon RDS provides PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server as a Service. The fully managed service covers a lot of the challenges of operating a database (e.g., master-standby replication, snapshots, patching the operating system and the database system, …). But you are still responsible for some operational aspects: sizing and performance optimizations. Therefore, […]

I run all my EC2 workloads on Amazon Linux. It comes with a superb AWS integration, a secure default configuration, regular security updates, and I can open AWS Support tickets if I run into any problems. In late December 2017, AWS announced the successor of Amazon Linux: Amazon Linux 2. AWS also announced that Amazon […]

Monitoring is critical for a secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure. This blog post summarizes all the bits and pieces you need to think of when monitoring your AWS account. Overview The following mind map provides an overview of monitoring goals as well as all services and features related to monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch Events: […]

What is the maximum network throughput of your EC2 instance? The answer to this question is key to choosing the type of an instance or defining monitoring alerts on network throughput. Unfortunately, you will only find very vague information about the networking capabilities of EC2 instances within AWS’s service description and documentation. That is why […]