Category Archives: General

Faster Reaction Time with Hazelcast

Are databases too slow for your application? I don’t mean, is your database slow, and do queries take minutes to complete. I mean, is an optimized database still too slow for the rate at which things happen? That brings you … Continue reading

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AWS Principles: Optimize for cost

This AWS design principle is based on the financial reality of using cloud services. The magic of AWS is that you can use as much or as little resource as you want and only pay for what you use. The … Continue reading

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AWS Principles: Understand Your Single Points of Failure

My favourite quote from Werner Vogels is, “Everything fails, all the time.” One of the AWS design principles is to understand where things fail and prevent a failure from causing your application to stop doing its job. The guidance from … Continue reading

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AWS Principles: Choose the Right Database Solutions

Some of the AWS design principles pinpoint that AWS has many services to fulfill many different needs. The guidance for choosing the correct database solutions is not to say that you must standardize with one database for your application, quite … Continue reading

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AWS Principles: Design Services, not Servers

Most of the AWS design principles are about using the unique features and limitations of the AWS platform. With on-premises enterprise infrastructure, applications can assume that the infrastructure is perfect and will handle failures without the application knowing. The result … Continue reading

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Build Day TV with VMware SD-WAN

As I’m sure you know, VMware has been making a big move into networking in the last few years. The acquisition of VeloCloud in 2017 added WAN capabilities to the data center networking of NSX, from the Nicira acquisition in … Continue reading

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AWS Design: Loosely Couple Your Components

The next of our design principles on AWS is loose coupling. A part of this idea is to reduce the blast radius for problems in your application. Another aspect is to define and simplify the connection between parts of your … Continue reading

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Missing Meals with My Teams

I wrote before about New Zealand being like a boy in a bubble, we are still in our bubble. The hardest thing is that most of my friends and clients are not in this bubble. Since most of my work … Continue reading

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You Can Save Money on Your Insurance, OK Your DR

Disaster recovery is like insurance; paying for it hurts but not having it when you need it hurts even more. The trick is to have the right insurance for your situation and risks and the right DR too. The reason … Continue reading

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Oracle Cloud VMware, Your own vSphere in the Cloud

One of the most exciting projects I worked on last year was the CTOAdvisor Datacentre project around using vSphere-on-Cloud services. The project was for the Oracle Cloud VMware Service (OCVS); they paid for the analysis. We started with the premise … Continue reading

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