Cloud

This is a repost from my company’s engineering blog 1. Same content, different layout. Opinions and voice my own. Tell me you work with enterprise customers without telling me you work with enterprise customers: Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK). If you know this acronym, welcome! This is a compliance topic, and I know that these are second in boredom only to German tax law, but I found some interesting lessons that apply more generally, so here we are. ...

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. ...