About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.Links
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TranscriptCorey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.nOps will help you reduce AWS costs 15 to 50% if you do what it tells you. But some people do, for example, watch their webcast, "How Uber reduced AWS costs 15% in 30 days". That is six figures in 30 days. Rather than a thing you might do, this is something that they actually did. Take a look at it. It's designed for dev ops teams nOps helps quickly discover the root causes of costs and correlate that with infrastructure changes. Try it free for 30 days. Go to nops.io/snark. That's nops.io/snark.Today I want to talk about a funny thing: time. Time has taken on a different meaning for many of us during the current pandemic. Hours seem like days. Days seem like months. But in the context of computers, time is a steady thing. Except when it's not. Things like leap years, leap seconds, Google's famous leap smear and, of course, our ever-changing friends, time zones, combine and collude with one another to make time a very hard problem when it comes to computers. In the general case, computers think of time in terms of seconds since the start of the Unix epoch on January 1, 1970. This is incidentally—and not the point of this episode—going to cause a heck of a lot of excitement when 32-bit counters rollover in 2038. But that's a future problem similar to Y2K, that I'm sure won't bother anyone. Time leads to suboptimal architectural choices, which is bad, and then those choices become guidance which is in turn far, far worse. Now, AWS has said a lot of things over the years that I despise and take massive issue with. Some petty and venial, like pronunciation, but none of them were quite so horrifying as a tweet. On May 17, 2018, the official AWS Cloud Twitter account tweeted out an article with the following caption, “Change the timezone of your Amazon RDS instance to local time.” I hit the roof immediately and began ranting about it and railing against that tweet in particular. I believe this is the first time that me yelling at AWS in public hit semi-viral status. My comment, to be precise, was absolutely do not do this. UTC is the proper server timezone unless you want an incredibly complex problem after you scale. Fixing this specific problem has bought consultants entire houses in San Francisco. Now, I stand by that criticism and I maintain that your databases should be in UTC at all times, as should the rest of your servers. And I'll explain why, but first:This episode is sponsored in part by N2WS. You know what you care about? Many things, but never backups. At least, until right after you really, really, really needed to care about backups. That's what N2WS does for your AWS account. It allows you to cycle backups through different storage tiers so you can back things up cost effectively and safely. For a limited time N2WS is offering you a hundred dollars in AWS credits for setting up their free trial. And I encourage you to give it a shot. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/n2ws. That's snark.cloud/n