Time to pop some stuff off the stack

ComputerStack It’s been a swirl lately. That means limited time to post here. It pains me when I don’t post here regularly.

Mind you, I am always thinking about things to say. I’d rather just get it out there in short form than forget stuff.

Herewith, a “short stack”. (How’s that for mixing pancake and computer idioms?)

  • The AWS API is “eventually consistent“. This is, in a word, a disaster for developers. It shifts the entire burden of timing from the cloud to developers. I’ve been complaining about this long and loud to AWS. Their response? In a word, it’s to “scale.” Pshaw! If an automation script has to loop waiting an indeterminate amount of time to check results, it’s not a production-ready API. AWS took a filesystem model, in which eventual consistency isn’t as crucial (still, it’s enough of a problem in S3 that AWS is promoting EFS to get around it) and applied that filesystem model to command and control APIs. Major freakin’ mistake.
  • Windows 10 is great. And it’s not the UI I am talking about (which is nice, BTW). It’s the performance. Windows 8.1 was majorly dissed because of the UI disaster Metro was. But the performance improvements internal to Windows 8.1 (and now in Windows 10) didn’t get much love. It’s even more noticeable in the corresponding server products: Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 run rings around Windows Server 2008 in equivalent EC2 instances. You can really see this in the pedal-to-medal, new c4 EC2 instance types. The big surprise here: the industry experts who should know better. My personal tech guru, Steve Gibson, said this week that he is staying with Windows 7 because of the UI. It amazes me how even the most technically brilliant people fall prey to the “the UI is the product” syndrome. Geeks know that behind the eye-candy, there’s real tech. If not, why’s Linux so popular?
  • Sorry, Keith. “Sgt. Peppers” is the most important rock album ever made. It turned rock from a genre into an art form.

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