My name is Daniel Green. I am a programmer from the western USA. In 2008, I created camelcamelcamel.com, the Internet's most camel-themed Amazon price tracker, and here in the far-distant future I am very gratefully still running the site.... continue reading
I recently noticed some SASS variables in the compiled CSS output of our Rails app. I looked all over the place, trying to determine how I broke compilation, to no avail. The answer ended up being obscure but rather simple:... continue reading
Today we learned that DynamoDB has a per-item storage overhead of at least 100 bytes (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/CapacityUnitCalculations.html). Depending on your item size, this can significantly increase your storage costs. And, conveniently, AWS... continue reading
Update: The creator of Sidekiq, Mike Perham, quickly and correctly pointed out that standard ActiveRecord use inside Sidekiq should include automatic connection pool checkins when jobs are complete. I failed to realize that using ActiveRecord::Base.connection checks out a... continue reading
Amazon recently updated their mobile app's "share" feature to use shortened URLs. Here are the domain names I'm aware of. * a.co * amzn.to * amzn.eu * amzn.asia Probably more to come eventually!... continue reading
If you have your RDS backup retention period set to a non-zero value, then change it to zero, all of your automatic snapshots get deleted...at least when deploying via CDK. Easy to imagine that causing trouble!... continue reading
When we migrated from our datacenter rack to AWS, most of our stress revolved around our 2TB MySQL database. With a database this size, one does not simply mysqldump your way into Mordor. Our final migration plan required us to... continue reading
When restoring an RDS instance from a snapshot, AWS unavoidably lazy loads the entire database on-demand. This leads to a huge performance penalty until the entire database has been accessed at least once. This is fine if your database is... continue reading
This seems somewhat obvious in hindsight, but the always lovely AWS support taught me that the "Storage-optimization" state occurs – during restore, anyway – when the snapshot's IO provisioning doesn't match that of the newly restored instance. That is, the IO configuration... continue reading
When working with RDS, I would occasionally find my web console-initiated restores-from-s3 stall out indefinitely with no errors of any kind. Confused, I ran to AWS Support, who told me that I should not specify "root" as the admin user... continue reading
While getting our CDK-based AWS infrastructure going, I often found myself restoring a MySQL backup to RDS. This went fairly smoothly, except that I could not avoid the end-of-restore snapshot that the AWS web console requires. This adds several hours... continue reading