Archive

2018

November

• November 30, 2018
  AWS & strategy over the years Wardley what?
  I started using and consulting on AWS somewhere around 2008. Over the years AWS has extended its service portfolio and its geographic presence, not to speak of the huge increase in computing and storage capacity in all its datacenters. more »»
• November 28, 2018
  Betatesting AWS certifications tests
  I got the whole bunch of AWS certifications in 2012 and 2013 at re:Invent (bunch = all that were available). AWS has a tendency to offer so-called “beta” certification tests at re:Invent. These beta tests are essentially the “next” set of tests to be rolled out on that particular certification.... more »»
• November 27, 2018
  re:Invent — growth pains
  This is a just quick post from re:Invent 2018 conference. I am planning to later write more on how the cloud industry has changed over the years since my previous visits at the conference. more »»
• November 25, 2018
  re re:Invent and here we go again
  I have attended AWS re:Invent conference twice, in 2012 and 2013. This year as the Head of AWS Business from Fiare Consulting will mark my third visit to the conference. more »»

June

• June 26, 2018
  Life is short, why URLs long? Yeah, something broke ...
  At the end of last year, I wrote as part of a thesis work an energy market simulator modeling the Finnish electricity market. While I moved onward after finishing that work, I’ve been intending to return to the project to fix a few of the nagging TODO items. more »»

January

• January 10, 2018
  Energy Simulator A sandbox simulaton of Finland's electricity market
  (I have been quiet on this blog for quite a while. I might offer an explanation on that at some point. Although, some of the reasons can be found in this blog post.) more »»

2016

January

• January 30, 2016
  Dynamic devtest deployments
  While I work less and less on down-to-earth development, there are times when I get a chance to hack something. In this post I’ll describe a devtest deployment system I got a chance to be work on. more »»
• January 17, 2016
  On Software Development and Layperson's Perceptions Easy Peasy or Fiendishly Hard?
  Since I have been in the “software business” for about two decades it is natural that I project my own knowledge on to any software problem I hear. Yet sometimes I get a glimpse of how this whole “software thing” might look to people who have little or no knowledge... more »»

2015

September

• September 11, 2015
  Wardley maps at the low end Does size matter?
  I have had this nagging thought about Wardley maps. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wardley maps! For example I have found the concept of evolution to give me insight into a lot of both recent and older events both generally in the technology sector as well as in business... more »»

June

• June 18, 2015
  Watts, watts, watts! Energy labeling for web sites?
  A few days ago I read this tweet from Nicholas Weaver about laptop fans spinning on a certain web site. more »»

April

• April 25, 2015
  Custom Termination Policy for Auto Scaling Priority Order!
  While chatting with Thomas Avasol about auto scaling group termination policies1 I got an idea on how to implement custom termination policies for AWS auto scaling groups. On 21st April 2015 at AWS Summit Stockholm, to be precise. ↩ more »»
• April 21, 2015
  Picoservice bruhahaha Sir, I think you have consumed too many microservices for today and should head for home.
  I’ve been busy, as again, an haven’t had a good chance to continue on my µ²services series. I’m planning to discuss more of the potential implications of technology development meeting microservice architecture models. But this post isn’t about that. more »»

February

• February 14, 2015
  Divine concurrency C$PAR DOALL
  In previous post I described µ²services, a system development model that is based on extrapolation of current trends in microservices and shrinking containers. I argumented that potential benefits of µ²service model might outweigh its costs. But are µ²services really technically feasible? more »»

January

• January 31, 2015
  µ²services Docker and evolution
  Previously I started playing the futurician, a path I’m now continuing against all good advice. I’ve always envied “visionaries” at companies as they get to play around without any kind of responsibility (they will have long since flocked elsewhere when their predictions can be checked). Similarly I am planning to... more »»
• January 6, 2015
  Trans-earth networking protocols Will your credit card work on Mars?
  Assuming you read scifi novels — have you ever stopped, really stopped and thought about how the technology in those stories work? Let’s skip the obvious things that you just have to suspend your belief over like ray guns, faster-than-light travel, space lifts and sentient artificial intelligences. more »»
• January 3, 2015
  Year of the Cloud? or not
  It is the time of the year that people are trying to fill the intellectual void caused by overabudance of eggnog, glögg and premium chocolate by producing predictions for the coming year 2015. I’m not much of a seer, so instead I’ll take a look at the past year 2014... more »»

2014

December

• December 23, 2014
  Sauna Detour from technology
  It’s been a while since my last blog post — not that I don’t have many ideas, but too little time — and I decided to do something different this time. A deviation from the very technical blog posts I normally do. more »»

September

• September 20, 2014
  Turingin testi
  This is a short poem I wrote in 2011 as a course assignment asking to write a short essay on Turing’s test (though it was not supposed to be in prose). It is in finnish, so if you don’t know finnish, sorry. I’m bad a writing poetry even in finnish... more »»
• September 12, 2014
  What's in your AWS bill? DevOps Meetup, Helsinki, September 10th 2014
  Two nights ago there was a #DevOps meetup where I had a talk about AWS cost management. If you missed the event (slides) please come to the next Helsinki AWS User’s Group meeting on October 9th where I’m going to do better-and-improved version of the DevOps talk. (I wasn’t entirely... more »»

July

• July 17, 2014
  Cornucopia machine as a service … reading the Cloudonomics book
  I’m currently reading Cloudonomics by Joe Weinman. I frequently find myself nodding in approval as his conclusions either parallel mine or provide deeper insight into what I’ve seen when working with and consulting customers on “the cloud”. I’m not through the book yet, but I do like his insightful and... more »»

June

• June 23, 2014
  AWS Service Metadata github.com/santtu/cloud-meta
  For about 4–5 days I’ve been working through AWS’s news announcements, forum posts, digging through history with The Wayback Machine with the single goal of sorting out more »»
• June 16, 2014
  "Previous generation instance types" Where did m1.medium go?
  Just recently I noticed that AWS had removed most first-generation instance types from its instance type description page. Digging back in history you can find Jeff Barr’s post from April 15th describing this change (you can double-check using the Internet Archive that it occurred after April 13th). (How did I... more »»
• June 13, 2014
  Structure and interpretation of AWS service health dashboard messages Dissection time!
  For the past three months I’ve been busy and haven’t had much of a time to write new blog posts. If you’re expecting more EC2 spot instance analysis you have to wait some more, sorry. Instead I want to share some results from one of the things I’ve been up... more »»

March

• March 25, 2014
  Minimum spot instance prices Drawing numbers out of thin air
  (You might want first see the introduction to this series of posts if you jumped in here randomly.) more »»
• March 20, 2014
  Mechanics of the spot instance market Where is the root of spot instances?
  (You might want first see the introduction to this series of posts if you jumped in here randomly.) more »»
• March 19, 2014
  Using spot instances
  (You might want first see the introduction to this series of posts if you jumped in here randomly.) more »»
• March 12, 2014
  Spot instances and price behavior What, when and at what price?
  (You might want first see the introduction to this series of posts if you jumped in here randomly.) more »»
• March 12, 2014
  Series on AWS spot instances Preface
  While pondering about whether and why AWS would retire instance types (see here) I started looking more deeply into the spot instance market to see if and what it could potentially tell about instance type retirement. more »»
• March 7, 2014
  m1 marching into obsolescence? Retiring instance types - revisited
  I’m revisiting the topic of my earlier post retiring instance types from a couple months back. You might want to check it out first. It has more pictures than this post. more »»
• March 6, 2014
  Sockets and concurrency the buggy way How to introduce a subtle race condition
  Updated 2016-02-16: I have added more details pointing out the exact conditions under which the race condition I describe can be triggered. See below. more »»
• March 3, 2014
  Experiences in Erlang you ! {will,understand,self()}
  I got an programming assignment in a course I was taking. The task was to create an overlay network topology and implement a routing protocol for it with some given constraints — where I quickly realized a hypercube mesh would meet the rating criteria. (This shows my age — hypercube... more »»

January

• January 13, 2014
  Retiring instance types? Lifespan of cloud resources
  TL;DR: AWS is building an interstellar spaceship. more »»
• January 7, 2014
  Replay The history of video games
  more »»

2013

December

• December 18, 2013
  Freezing Travis Automated testing for those with frozen feet
  This is just a quickie. While working on freezr I decided to take a look at Travis CI, which is a “hosted continuous integration service for the open source community” (as they say). more »»
• December 11, 2013
  Ember - (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? R Another go
  Earlier I wrote about problems I had while trying to develop an Ember.js application with a Django REST framework-based backend. I did some research (I’ll get back to other results from that later) and tried using AngularJS for browser-side development, but it didn’t work out too well. I checked some... more »»
• December 11, 2013
  Gotcha! Beware of bidirectional traffic
  (Note: The code examples below use coffeescript instead of plain javascript. If you don’t know coffeescript here’s a quick cheat sheet: @foo ≅ this.foo and () -> stmt ≅ function () { stmt }. Additionally text in curly braces {{…}} is Ember’s templating language.) more »»
• December 5, 2013
  Idempotent PUT is a fake Do. Not. Create. Objects. On. PUT.
  Previously I poured my thoughts on REST/JSON protocol differences. I am still researching on how different server and client frameworks work, but as an interlude I’ll comment on the interpretation of the PUT operation in relation to its use on “RESTful” APIs. more »»
• December 4, 2013
  REST MESS What's in an API?
  While working on a hobby project called freezr I came across a few assumptions I had made which turned out to be wrong. I’m going to write a bit about these assumptions, since I found solving the resulting problems very frustrating. more »»

November

• November 29, 2013
  Working on freezr It's cold out there, baby!
  Just a quick post — I’m working now on something I call freezr. It is is a) a hobby project and b) based on a real world need. Since it’s a hobby project it is also naturally an open source project (or at least will be when I get around... more »»
• November 3, 2013
  My old flame ... from 17 years past Also: Why you should not be using mine or anybody's MD5 hash implementation
  Before I get about talking old stuff, here’s a few important suggestions for anyone who came here looking for my old MD5 Java implementation (in case you don’t know, MD5 is a cryptographic hash function): more »»

October

• October 28, 2013
  Life's easier if you can code Even if it is just excel formulas and mail merge
  If you have never ever programmed anything, you can find the title of this post strange. Are programmers somehow superhuman, capable of lifting railroad cars with their bare hands? Are they more intelligent, more capable than other people? Or is there a secret cabal of programmers where by joining you’ll... more »»

July

• July 10, 2013
  One viewpoint on cloud computing Why did initially startups embrace it and enterprises fail to take notice?
  Recently I was consulting a client on cloud strategy. When we were trying to explain to the client how the risk landscape with growing adoption of cloud computing (being the case that it affects them even if they don’t themselves use cloud services) … I had an idea. more »»
• July 8, 2013
  Enter Jekyll (where's Hyde?)
  Live and learn. Earlier I wondered whether I could use a github repository as a place to publish a blog. Essentially my original plan was to use the plain repository view as a way to render ReST formatted pages. But it got a bit unwieldy very fast after that. more »»

April

• April 12, 2013
  Can you blog in github?
  I’ve written quite a lot in my life. Some of it has ended up in blogs (now since gone, although I have archive copies), alas most not. Mostly what I write is targeted towards a small audience — customers, co-workers, friends. For those venues a blog isn’t actually the best... more »»