Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Tab Sweep – 5 August 2017

Region restrictions in a globalised world

I think we can all agree that globalisation has won, and we live in a flat world.

However when it comes to consuming media, we still live in a world of regional restrictions. Rights are not issued globally, and rights owners see this as milking every last penny by ensuring that regional restrictions apply. This is not just true for the movie world, but also the music world, and generally the book world. Apparently the entertainment industry is one of the last holdouts in realising that we live in a truly globalised world.

Yesterday I read an interview in the FT with Kate Tempest, a writer/rapper whom I’ve not heard of. I immediately hopped onto iTunes, searched Apple Music and started playing her tunes from her album Let Them Eat Chaos – Kate Tempest. This was a success and I’d discovered a new artist.

A few months back I was in a bar (the recently shuttered La Conserverie) in Paris, speaking to a Japanese friend, and I was telling her that I did know some J-Pop; growing up it wasn’t too far fetched you would listen to some songs that made the mainstream English radio stations. One example was Utada Hikaru’s First Love. The French friend who was there said he’d love to hear it, so I fired up iTunes on my phone, and tried in vain to find the song, and realised its not in the catalogue (don’t worry, YouTube saved the day). This was a failure, and I didn’t get to reminisce properly.

Just last week, I fired up Netflix (now blocking all VPN traffic, an almost impossible thought two years ago, with VPN providers giving up the fight nowadays) and started streaming The Mirror Has Two Faces. I stopped around the half way mark and switched countries only to realise that now I’ll have to wait to be in the same geographical location again to continue watching the movie! I’d mark this as a failure because it hurts the user experience; it isn’t Netflix’s fault, it is the entertainment industry.

I still listen to an old song that I like, that resides on my drive and not in the cloud — Puff Daddy featuring Jimmy Page – Come With Me from the Godzilla soundtrack. It’s not on Apple Music, but it is available with Amazon Prime Music, that comes for free with an Amazon Prime subscription! I’d mark this as a failure since I’d expect my music collection to be available in one place, not scattered across various services.

We’re living in an increasingly globalised world. We have friends from all over the world. We’re travelling more frequently. This is all supposed to be a good thing – exposure to the world. Why hasn’t the entertainment industry caught up yet? Would they prefer everyone just focused on content piracy? Region restrictions do not work in a globalised world.

Amazon RDS updates February 2016

I think one of the big announcements that came out from the Amazon Web Services world in October 2015 was the fact that you could spin up instances of MariaDB Server on it. You would get MariaDB Server 10.0.17. As of this writing, you are still getting that (the MySQL shipping then was 5.6.23, and today you can create a 5.6.27 instance, but there were no .24/.25/.26 releases). I’m hoping that there’s active work going on to make MariaDB Server 10.1 available ASAP on the platform.

Just last week you would have noticed that Amazon has rolled out MySQL 5.7.10. The in-place upgrades are not available yet, so updating is via dump/reload or using read replicas. According to the forums, a lot of people have been wanting to use the JSON functionality.

Are you trying MySQL 5.7 on RDS? How about your usage of MariaDB Server 10.0 on RDS? I’d be interested in feedback either as a comment here, or via email.

3 Big Announcements from MariaDB (my take for Oct 2015)

Today I received about five emails with the subject: 3 Big Announcements from MariaDB. Maybe you did as well (else, read it online). October has brought on some very interest announcements, and I think my priority for the big announcements vary a little:

  1. MariaDB Server is now available on Amazon RDS – you wouldn’t believe how many people ask for this, as many now deploy using Amazon Web Services (AWS), so now that it is available, I consider this to be extremely amazing. You get 10.0.17 today, and within 3-5 months of a GA, you get the next release (the docs are a work of art – read them!).
  2. MariaDB Server 10.1 is now a stable GA – this is a milestone. Our last stable GA came out in March 2014. There are plenty of new features and we had a developer meeting to plan what comes in 10.2 as well. Remember to read: What is MariaDB 10.1?
  3. New XAMPP with MariaDB – The new XAMPP does not ship with MySQL any longer but MariaDB Server 10.0.17. This is going to help distribution tremendously as many people use XAMPP as a development environment (it is after all the most popular PHP development environment out there). Remember to get your downloads for Windows/Linux/OSX. 

I think the above are my highlights of 3 big announcements from the MariaDB world. What are you waiting for, download it now! And remember to report bugs/feature requests to our Jira instance.

Amazon EC2 Linux AMIs

If you use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), you are always given choices of AMIs (by default; there are plenty of other AMIs available for your base-os): Amazon Linux AMI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server and Ubuntu. In terms of cost, the Amazon Linux AMI is the cheapest, followed by SUSE then RHEL. 

I use EC2 a lot for testing, and recently had to pay a “RHEL tax” as I needed to run a RHEL environment. For most uses I’m sure you can be satisfied by the Amazon Linux AMI. The last numbers suggest Amazon Linux is #2 in terms of usage on EC2.

Anyway, recently Amazon Linux AMI came out with the 2014.03 release (see release notes). You can install MySQL 5.1.73 or MySQL 5.5.36 (the latter makes the most sense today) easily without additional repositories.

The most interesting part of the release notes though? When the 2014.09 release comes out, it would mark 3 years since they’ve gone GA with the Amazon Linux AMI. They are likely to remove MySQL 5.1 (its old and deprecated upstream). And:

We are considering switching from MySQL to MariaDB.

This should be interesting going forward. MariaDB in the EC2 AMI would be a welcome addition naturally. I do wonder if the choice will be offered in RDS too. I will be watching the forums closely

MariaDB now in the AWS Marketplace

Saw this on @awsmarketplace the other day:

Now on the AWS Marketplace, you can get MariaDB 5.5.32 on Ubuntu 12.04, CentOS 6 and Debian Wheezy. These are eligible for the Amazon free tier as well.

Would love to see people use this and to provide feedback. Do we need to expand this to offer Cassandra integration so you can spin up a basic cluster and get it going? Would you love to see this integration with Galera Cluster?

Much thanks to SkySQL for making this possible.


i