drubenstein

Can I pay someone to monitor my AWS deploy and make sure it's healthy?

Yes. There are consulting shops that will do this, as will many of the monitoring tools listed in the thread (though these tools will not fix the problem for you). Broadly speaking, there is a cost associated with this, as well as the cost associated with your downtime. If the cost of your downtime (reputational risk, SLA credits, etc) outweighs the cost of hiring someone to cut your MTTR to 5 minutes (assuming you can playbook out all of the relevant scenarios) + provides some value in stress reduction, then you should do this. If you've been doing this a while, you can math it out. In what experience I've had though, an outside person is unlikely to be able to fix an "unknown unknown", they just won't know your environment as well as you will.

All that said, one hour of service interruption a year is still better than most.

Depends on the issue - if there's a code / logic bug that doesn't affect the data schema, we use elastic beanstalk versions to go back the previous version (usually this is a rolling deploy backwards), and then clean up the data manually if necessary. Otherwise, we roll forward (fix the bug, clean up the data, etc).

It's more often been the case for us that issues are caused by mistaken configuration / infrastructure updates. We do a lot of IAC (Chef, Cloudformation), so with those, it's usually a straight git revert and then a normal release.

AWS has outpost, which is "EC2 mechanics in your own datacenter": https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

I've had a reasonably good time with Laravel (versions 5.x), although not having a lot of experience with other stacks (say, django), ymmv.

That said, I don't think it's so profoundly amazing as to be worth learning PHP if 1) you're not already somewhat exposed to it or 2) the place where you work doesn't already use a lot of PHP.

Kashkari was the lone dissenter in the most recent FOMC meeting, which determines the US Federal Funds Rate.

A decent intro (<25 pages) to US monetary policy (I read it during intro macro), if you're interested: http://www.frbsf.org/education/files/MonetaryPolicy.pdf

Agreed about the "many holes". Furthermore on the models

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment.

This seems to be conjuring a whole new economic model out of thin air. How can it be the case that all of the models are wrong and that this model is right? I'm not saying it's wrong or right, but the preceding argumentation is not enough to support this line of thought.

This seems like a bad idea in that it allows the powerful to completely control the messages that are affiliated with them. Suppose celebrity x does wrong to a regular citizen, and they have Google posts at their disposal while Jane Smith does not.

On the other hand, this seems like something Rick Santorum might have been grateful for.