Cloud

I processed a large fraction of the Internet on a single machine, trying to find some valuable but forgotten domain names to buy (probably 25 years too late). Here’s the story of what I found and how I did it, and not the story of why I decided to try, because I don’t know myself. Spoiler alert: If you just want to know whether there is indeed something, and you should scramble to scoop it up to become a domain-flipper billionaire, hold your horses: I believe there isn’t much. The following sections are more focused on the engineering side, so if you only care about the conclusion, skip to Results. ...

I was frustrated by the gap between stateless and stateful applications in the cloud. While I could easily spin up a stateless application as a “serverless” function in any major cloud provider and pretty much forget about it, persisting data between requests was a game of pick two among three: cheap, strongly consistent, portable. Could I solve portability and lack of transactions myself with a single client-side solution? I thought it would be possible through object storage (e.g. AWS S3), which is strongly consistent, ubiquitous and cheap. ...