Category: AWS

New kid in the block – Rocky linux.

If you’ve been following the recent changes in the linux world you probably remember how Red Hat and Centos announced in December 2020 that the CentOS Project was shifting focus to CentOS Stream and support for CentOS Linux 8 had been cut to December 31, 2021. It created a wave of discussions in the community about the future for Centos as an enterprise platform and some people started to look to alternative Linux distributives. As a result we got a new, community-driven downstream built, same as Centos used to be, Rocky linux.

The downstream build is based on the same code base as the vendor distributive and resembles most features of the “parent” vendor Linux. It is following all the releases after they have been built by the vendor. In most of my tests I am using Oracle Linux when I am in the Oracle cloud but I am using Centos in Google cloud and other public clouds like Azure or AWS. Now we have Rocky Linux available on those platforms and I’ve had a quick look and done some testing using the Rocky Linux 8.4 (Green Obsidian).

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IPSec VPN between OCI and AWS.

I’ve been using the OCI and AWS clouds for a number of years, but primarily it was either one or another. Only in a few cases was it required to connect each other and mainly get data from an AWS S3 bucket. But with the new OCI services, the idea of using both clouds is getting more attractive, and multi-cloud environments become more common. One of the main challenges for such a layout is the network. We have several options using dedicated connections or 3d party tools deployed on both sides, and all of them have their pros and cons. Today, I would like to talk about the most simplistic case when we use only native services on both sides and establish IPSec VPN connections between two clouds.

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Cloud and how it might help at difficult times.

The recent changes caused by the virus and economic meltdown affected almost everybody in the world. We are all now going through a difficult period of our history, and when many companies are struggling to survive, the other thrive and boost production. In such volatile environment, it becomes more and more important to be able to adapt the IT environment to immediate business needs quickly.

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Desktop in the cloud? Easy.

This is a difficult time for everyone, even if you are used to working most of the time from home, airport, cafe, or any other place. The problem is not only how good you are managing your time but sometimes in network reliability and throughput. When so many people work from home, and so many kids are trying to watch streaming services at the same time, your home network might be under severe pressure. In such a case, a remotely hosted desktop product could be the solution.

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First Touch Penalty On AWS Cloud

(first time published in March 2018 some information may not be correct anymore)
A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion about AWS RDS with one of my colleagues and he mentioned some unexpected IO problem during migration. It was during production cutover when they switched from the old environment on-prem to the freshly restored database on RDS. The migration itself is out of scope for the today’s topic. We are going to point our attention to the unexpected IO problem. They should have plenty of IO bandwidth and everything was totally fine when they tested it before, but somehow many of the queries to the database were performing extremely slow for around 30 or 40 minutes and even after that they observed sporadic spikes in the number of sessions waiting for IO. After a couple of additional questions, it was more or less clear that they most likely hit a known problem described in AWS documentation. I am talking about “First touch penalty” on AWS. For this topic, I will use an Oracle RDS database to demonstrate the issue and how you can prepare for it. Continue reading “First Touch Penalty On AWS Cloud”