forrestbrazeal

The post does mention Azure's Arc and Sentinel, but definitely should have called out Anthos specifically.

The interesting part of this to me isn't so much that other solutions already exist -- Azure and GCP, due to their catch-up position, have always been far more conciliatory toward the reality of other cloud workloads than AWS. It's that AWS is signaling, however grudgingly, that they will have to play ball with other clouds in order to stay ahead. That's a big shift.

It's very much new for AWS. Their messaging has always been incredibly exclusionary of other clouds. to the point where they've even prohibited their partners from using words like "multi-cloud, anycloud", etc.

More detailed breakdown from AWS's James Beswick: https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/building-more-cost-e...

Systematic error is a specific term with a specific definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_error#Random_err...

well, yes and no.

On the one hand, if maximizing eyeballs is really the only reason you want to write a book, maybe it should just be a blog post.

On the other hand, the publisher can and does negotiate price to do volume deals with retailers. Barnes and Noble buys in bulk at a price we can assume is optimal for them.

I did them myself. Back to the "social proof" thing, the book is the outgrowth of a fairly successful webcomic I've done off and on for a few years [0], which was attractive to the publisher.

[0] https://faasandfurious.com

Having recently released a "technical" book with a large traditional publisher (Wiley) [0], here are a few of my learnings:

- Expect nothing from the publisher in terms of marketing support. In fact, a good nonfiction book proposal is going to spend most of its length explaining to the publisher how you will sell the book for them through your connections and credibility - not the other way around. It's all on you.

- Don't do it for the money. You're going to make 10-15% of a pretty small pie. If you want to write info products as a moneymaking side gig and you have any following at all, self publish!

So why go with a traditional publisher? I don't feel this is fully articulated in the OP, but here was my reasoning:

- The publisher probably will get your book in the hands of a larger absolute number of people, so if you care about maximizing readership and you don't have a stupid-large online following, their network effects through bookstores, library sales, etc will help you sell more copies than you could on your own (though again, you'll see very little of the money!)

- There's still some social proof involved with traditional publishing, and it's a nice thing to do once - just so you know in the back of your head that you "can"

- In my case, I was producing a highly graphic book that really doesn't work except in print and in full color, and I needed the resources of a traditional publishing house to make it not look terrible.

The Wiley experience was overall positive for me and I don't regret it, but if I ever produce a text-based info product in future it's hard to look away from the ROI advantages of self-publishing.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-Cloud-Innocents-Inside/dp/...

...And 8 hours after I wrote this piece, AWS announces their public container registry. [0]

Is that the "multi-cloud management tool" The Information heard about? Not exactly how I would have characterized it...

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/advice-for-customers...

Hi HN,

I'm cloud architect and webcomic artist Forrest Brazeal. My new book, "The Read Aloud Cloud", is a quirky cartoon intro to cloud computing for all ages!

Over a decade in the tech industry, I've installed software updates during a live cataract surgery, created robots that perform machine learning on pizza, and sung 168 AWS services in 2 minutes [0].

I couldn't be more excited to share The Read Aloud Cloud, which is out today from Wiley Publishing (the "For Dummies" people) [1]. It uses more than 100 cartoon illustrations, poems, essays, and who knows what else to explain cloud in terms even a CEO can understand.

Just for HN, I've uploaded a sneak peek of Chapter 2: "Evolution of the Cloud (A Prehistory)" [2]

Happy to answer questions about:

- How to write a nonfiction book proposal that sells

- The traditional publishing process (and why I went that route instead of self-pub)

- Cloud or tech careers in general

- Cartooning

- Whatever else!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtJAsvJOlhM&feature=emb_logo

[1] https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Read-Aloud-Cloud/97811196...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/izyele6p60dfb68/Ch2.pdf?dl=0

Poor choice of words on my part. Should have said something like "easily-grasped value prop". You want a very short elevator pitch for what you do, that makes it clear what value you provide.

I think of Corey Quinn, whose pitch is "I fix your AWS bill." Short, easily-grasped, specific.

Read a version of this book pre-release and loved it!

Distills much of the best advice you can get if you hang out for a few years on HN into an easily shareable package.

Would recommend as a graduation gift or career starter for the new tech person in your life. But also super valuable for folks who have been in the industry as well. The chapter on "Marketing Yourself" contains some reminders that I found really helpful:

- Keep online presence 90% positive

- Be consistent (same profile pic everywhere, etc)

- Be "The Guy" (or non-guy) for a specific, unique, easily-grasped value prop

- Don't chase celebrity or short-term optimizations (posting times, weekly metrics, etc)

Hi HN. I made a dedicated homepage for the Cloud Resume Challenge [0], which has been making the rounds for the last few weeks.

Basically it's a project anyone can complete to level up their cloud skills - but I'm specifically looking for people between jobs or new to the industry whose resumes I can boost to help them get a job in the cloud.

So far we've had two graduates of the challenge get hired (yay!) and several more with interviews lined up.

Would love your thoughts!

[0] https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/the-cloud-resume-chall...

Hi HN.

I made a dedicated homepage for the Cloud Resume Challenge [0], which has been making the rounds for the last few weeks.

Basically it's a project anyone can complete to level up their cloud skills - but I'm specifically looking for people between jobs or new to the industry whose resumes I can boost to help them get a job in the cloud.

I do believe that if you can, in good faith, complete the Cloud Resume Challenge, you will already have more useful skills than a lot of people who graduate from university computer science programs. Specifically: you will understand something about full-stack software development, version control, infrastructure as code, automation, continuous integration and delivery, cloud services and “serverless”, application security, and networking. And you’ll have learned by doing, because I didn’t give you enough instructions to figure any of this out without going down some late-night rabbit holes. Most importantly, you will have demonstrated the number-one skill in a cloud engineer’s toolbox: the ability to learn fast and google well.

Would love your thoughts!

[0] https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/the-cloud-resume-chall...

Thanks. Well so far. Same to you

My 4yo did a "circle time" over Zoom with his preschool class yesterday. I was skeptical, but he loved it and it was a huge morale boost to see his friends. This is a hard time for little kids.

I was scheduled to speak at the Infra & Ops conference in Santa Clara in June -- didn't hold out much hope of that event going forward at this point, but odd that they have not communicated anything with speakers. Now I don't know if that event is truly cancelled, moving online, or what.

They deliberately switch around the placement of the homepage queues. The goal is to keep you engaging with the product and discovering new things. They don't want you holding a Netflix subscription just for Friends, or whatever.

My colleague shortj and I put this together. Basically a public repo of serverless questions and answers. Don't see your question? Submit to the form and we'll answer it. Or you can update the repo directly with your own Q&A: https://github.com/trek10inc/serverless.help

Serious question for all on this thread: have you personally encountered a deal-breaking issue while actually implementing a significant application on "Lambda and serverless"? Whether that's lock-in, scaling issues, cost, performance, or whatever. Has there been something that's caused you to go "yeah, no, this was a bad idea; should've rolled my own infra."

I'm not asking this disingenuously; I legitimately want to know.

No particular reason, just trying to provide an example of low-value integration work that is likely to be subsumed by a service at some point.

Thank you, that's very kind!

Author here - I'm serious when I say that I'm happy to be a sounding board if you're at a career crossroads. Twitter DMs are open @forrestbrazeal.

It does apply to the GSI. This point is briefly addressed in the sidebar about sharding father down in the post. Not sure the "customer" records would have a problem, but the static GSI partition keys for orders, products, and suppliers could potentially run into issues.

Rick Houlihan has another talk from re:Invent 2018 where he goes into great detail about this -- see the following Twitter thread for a jumping off point.

https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie/status/1081237474930769920

Prior to the release of on-demand scaling, you had to provision your capacity units in DDB, and even once they introduced autoscaling there was always the risk that a burst of activity over your set threshold would lead to some throttled calls. My point isn't about the specific numbers so much as that it's nice to see that scaling finally being managed smoothly - one less thing to worry about.

In case you missed it, the code needed to load the Northwind database into DDB with appropriate indexes is here [0].

One fun thing: this was my first time playing with the new DynamoDB on-demand capacity features. If you do run the code, check out the CloudWatch metrics on the table. It's pretty cool to see the WCUs shoot up to 150 and back down to 0 with no throttling whatsoever.

[0] https://github.com/trek10inc/ddb-single-table-example

Bassett Furniture was made in the US (some of it in the company town of Bassett, Virginia -- not far from where I live) for many years, but today my understanding is that much of it is manufactured offshore. John D. Bassett III comes from that family, and worked for Bassett Furniture for many years, but today he runs a separate company called Vaughan-Bassett that makes 100% of its furniture in the USA. [0]

The Bassett family history and corporate provenance is weird and a bit incestuous (both figuratively and literally; J.D. married a cousin), and I really do recommend reading Macy's book for the full scoop.

[0] http://www.vaughan-bassett.com/about-us/

"Factory Man" actually addresses these questions in considerable detail. You might be surprised how difficult it is to produce good-looking finishes, veneers, etc -- especially at scale. There was a time when the American manufacturers thought their competition would never catch up (and then they explicitly trained their competition so they could outsource production, which backfired when retailers realized they could cut out the middleman and order directly from China/Vietnam/wherever the cheap labor currently is.)

American furniture manufacturing does have one significant advantage in the US compared to its offshore competitors: proximity. Furniture is bulky to store and time-consuming to ship. The one manufacturer who realized this, John Basset, is the titular "Factory Man" who has kept his factories running by doubling down on just-in-time delivery, etc.

The article alludes to, but doesn't expand on, the US's lost lead in furniture manufacturing. For more on this fascinating story, I recommend Beth Macy's "Factory Man" [0], the story of the systematic destruction of the North Carolina and Virginia-based wooden furniture industry by Chinese imports.

It's the exact same playbook as Huawei -- govt-backed "dumping" of loss-priced goods in an attempt for total market dominance. And US companies have historically been way too willing to expose trade secrets to Chinese manufacturers in exchange for temporarily cheaper supplies -- a Faustian bargain.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Factory-Man-Furniture-Offshoring-Amer...

Ada Lovelace called creativity "the combining faculty" that "brings together things, facts, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations." [0]

Reflection time is hugely needed. But I don't know that it's hugely important to distinguish in that time between reflection on your "own" thoughts and those that originated in some way outside your head, because at some level it's impossible to make the distinction. You'll need a huge base of exposure to other people's ideas if you hope to assemble them into a new and interesting combination of your own.

[0] https://www.elfproductions.com/news/2017/6/25/applying-imagi...