jeffbarr

I also saw that concert.

Oh yeah, we were in the same row!

The original object size limit for S3 was 5 GB, as noted in my 2006 blog post:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_s3/

I do not know if this has anything to do with the cliff that you saw.

Wow, that brings back memories.

In 1979 I was 19 years old and had just started studying CS in community college. Through a lucky break I got a job at a consulting company and my first assignment was to write a 6502 macro assembler from scratch, in 6502 assembly language. At that point I had written less than 100 lines of 6502 code on my Apple ][, but I was fairly good with 8080 and IBM-370 assembly.

My mentor / manager outlined the basic model for the assembler and I wrote the entire thing myself, quickly getting it to the point where it could self-assemble, and adding features from there. I was making about $7 / hour when I started. However, I wrote a FORTRAN simulation of the hashing algorithm that I was asked to use, shared it with my manager, and got a raise to $8-something an hour.

I had macros, a very fancy listing format that showed all of the hex codes generated by the macros in neat rows, and a lot more. The entire thing fit on two tracks of the 8" floppy disks that we were using -- definitely less than 8000 bytes.

OMG...

Shh....

I understand the risks of inactive accounts, but as I have pointed out here before these binary policies do not address the all-too-common situation where someone is forgetful and/or incapacitated prior to their death. These people have more important things to think about than their email and their photos,and the transition from alive to dead (to be blunt) can easily take more than two years. By the time that the estate and the executor has control of the account it can easily be too late to save precious memories.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Are you referring to the universe or to S3? Corey and I were chatting a few weeks ago during his most recent visit to Seattle and I shared my thoughts with him while we were cooking and eating homemade pizza.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were doing something similar decades ago. According to https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35442969 (but well known before that):

Paul Allen, who would later become a co-founder of Microsoft, was a couple of years above Gates at school. Together they fixed the school scheduling software to ensure Gates was the only boy in classes of girls.

Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary.

Pessimists!

At the first day on my first professional programming job in 1980 or so, my new manager told me that I would be writing a brand-new 6502 macro assembler, in 6502 assembly language, to replace the slow & limited one supplied by the vendor (Ohio Scientific).

Under his guidance I wrote the assembler, and even earned a raise after simulating the hashing function in FORTRAN and finding it lacking.

I still have very fond memories of that job and of the 6502, and would be interested in purchasing a replica as soon as you go into production!

Talk about testing in production. You have to die first to see if this triggers, and if not -- your automation becomes the ultimate in legacy code.

Seriously, this is a very interesting idea. However, after losing both of my parents in the last 4 years, there's a sad but legitimate intermediate state between alive & well, and deceased. People lose their ability to function and make decisions on their own, might not be able to renew your service.

Correct - you know your AWS launch history!

Perhaps they were thinking of Rochester, New York: https://rocwiki.org/abandoned_subway

Hi Simone, doing well and we are trying to add more info while still being frugal with words and with the time of our readers.

The Nitro SSDs are currently used as instance storage, directly attached to particular EC2 instances.

I don't know one way or the other, but great question. I prefer launching stuff to hinting about it :-)

I wrote the AWS post and did my best to share lots of technical details; are there any specific things that you want to know more about?

Hello old friend!

Amazon S3 on Outposts (more info at https://aws.amazon.com/s3/outposts/ ) runs on-premises, offers durable storage, high throughput, the S3 API, currently scales to 380 TB, and doesn't require you to watch for and deal with failing disks.

I believe that it addresses many of the OP's reasons for deciding against S3.

You will be happy to know that I used Dendron to manage my TODO list that included an entry for writing this blog post!

Yes indeed!

That's hilarious. I think Jeff has an account here.

I am 100% sure that I did not write that, and I am 100% sure that this comes across as far too Jeff-like for comfort!

There's more info in the Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1250287741247426565). Patience and pruning every two years are key!

Check out https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/4/184701-how-amazon-web-... ("How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods") and https://d1.awsstatic.com/Security/pdfs/One_Click_Formal_Meth... ("One-Click Formal Methods") for more info.

Yes, see my December 2020 post at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-update-strong-rea... :

"Effective immediately, all S3 GET, PUT, and LIST operations, as well as operations that change object tags, ACLs, or metadata, are now strongly consistent. What you write is what you will read, and the results of a LIST will be an accurate reflection of what’s in the bucket. This applies to all existing and new S3 objects, works in all regions, and is available to you at no extra charge! There’s no impact on performance, you can update an object hundreds of times per second if you’d like, and there are no global dependencies."

Was that in / near the University of Maryland in the late 1970's? I was working at a computer store in Rockville as a teenager. Chuck Rieger came in and showed me and the other employees the MicroAngelo. It seemed to be very expensive and very complex, if memory serves me right.

This is cool, and closes a huge loop for me.

Before joining Amazon in 2002, I built and ran Syndic8, a side project site that collected, polled, and organized RSS and Atom feeds for easy discovery. In addition to the web UI, Syndic8 featured a comprehensive web service API, powered by the then-popular XML-RPC protocol.

Syndic8 was built on PHP and MySQL and hosted at a colo provider. I was never able to scale beyond a single instance at my colo, and have sometimes thought about how I would rebuild the site today using EC2, S3, DynamoDB, and so forth.

My operational experience with XML, RSS, and web services was (I was later told) a deciding factor in the decision to hire me.

I thought I was the only one who had trouble with this. Based on the other replies here, that's definitely not the case.

Thanks for being such a long-time reader!

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudshell/ is the right link; I am updating the post now!