Is AI as Impactful as the Internet? More? Less?
This post is in progress — check back soon. I have a lot of thoughts on this one.
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AWS had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day on Dec 7th, 2021. What happens next?
AWS had an outage on December 7th, 2021. It was a bad outage, and highlighted that even after 15 years of offering cloud services, even an experienced cloud provider can have a bad day. Companies across the world were affected. (I couldn’t even practice DuoLingo, but thankfully, they preserved my streak…). And while the operational failure (which could have been avoided, like most operational failures) was bad, what really caused trust problems was that Amazon took too long to post and then didn’t post fully. There are very few things as annoying as your internet site being down, going to the Amazon Web Services Status Page, and seeing “Service is operating normally” when you can see on your own screens it’s not – and it’s all over Twitter and it’s even hit media outlets. All while Amazon is mum. ...
Why Did I Come to MongoDB?
People ask me this often enough that I decided to put it on my home page: “Aren’t you one of the SQL folks? Why would one of you join MongoDB?” For me, it was always about delighting customers; SQL and Relational were just a means to that end. Databases are indeed amazing because of the promises around data in terms of consistency, ease of use, and durability that they make to customers. I sat with one of my old relational friends about a year ago, in Oct of 2019, before MongoDB was even a gleam in my eye, and we decided that 30 years into our careers, databases were still hard to use by operators and developers, but especially developers (cloud has made operator job a lot easier). They were also still unpredictable and didn’t defend themselves against misuse. Not only that, but scalability and distribution were bolted on as afterthoughts rather than core elements of the product – making scaling either difficult or impractical or brittle. ...