Top all-time · #1427
Eric Hammond
Personal blog · alestic.comprogrammingsystems
Eric Hammond's personal blog at alestic.com covers programming and systems. Since 2009, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “How Much Does It Cost to Run a Serverless API on AWS?”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link alestic.com, Eric Hammond's blog of AWS how-tos since 2009, covering EC2 availability zones, EBS snapshots, AMI copying and AWS Lambda.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called "the best thing" for Ubuntu and AWS solutions and "a great blog" for Lambda; AMI copy and XFS snapshot posts suggested.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A Personal AWS Blog by Eric Hammond
Most-linked posts?
- How Much Does It Cost to Run a Serverless API on AWS?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-12-12
- /2009/07/ec2-availability-zones5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-04-07
- Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC24 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-04-04
- Cost of Transitioning S3 Objects to Glacier3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-17
- AWS Git-Backed Static Website3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-10-24
- /2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-05-10
- /2010/10/ec2-ami-copy3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-10-30
- Schedule recurring AWS Lambda invocations with the Unreliable Town Clock2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-26
- Alestic Git Server (EC2)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-10-05
- Amazon Has a Ceiling of 896,966 Public IP Addresses Reserved for EC22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-16
What Hacker News says?
https://www.infoq.com https://www.heavybit.com/library/ https://alestic.com https://blog.deepracing.io https://www.haproxy.com/blog/ Podcasts: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/offerzen-podcast https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzo_FqWUbEH0AYs0NilUWpA https://podbay.fm/podcast/996111298
Comment linking /
on “Most tech content is bullshit”Submitted Creating Public AMIs Securely for EC2 as a story · 16 points
HN discussionYes, the Lambda function is run in an Amazon Linux environment. I published some explorations of that environment here: http://alestic.com/2014/11/aws-lambda-environment Let me know in the comments on that article what other commands you'd like to see output for.
Comment linking /2014/11/aws-lambda-environment
on “AWS Lambda”Submitted 1 TB of Memory in 1 Minute with 1 Command as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI'm no experienced Lambda user either, but here's a couple helpful things I've found: * I think API Gateway can throttle requests. Not sure if that was part of your pipeline or if your lambda had a different trigger. * There is a Town clock SNS event https://alestic.com/2015/05/aws-lambda-recurring-schedule/
Comment linking /2015/05/aws-lambda-recurring-schedule/
on “Serverless Architectures”Submitted How to automate EC2 instance setup with user-data scripts as a story · 16 points
HN discussionNote: your "zone d" is not my "zone d". AWS shuffles zone IDs across users. See http://alestic.com/2009/07/ec2-availability-zones
Comment linking /2009/07/ec2-availability-zones
on “AWS is down, but here's why the sky is falling”Submitted Exploring the AWS Lambda Runtime Environment as a story · 9 points
HN discussionYou can use the EC2 API and ec2-describe-availability-zones to find out which availability zone is having issues: http://alestic.com/2012/06/ec2-outage-availability-zone
Comment linking /2012/06/ec2-outage-availability-zone
on “AWS is down due to an electrical storm in the US”Submitted Schedule recurring AWS Lambda invocations with the Unreliable Town Clock as a story · 8 points
HN discussionhttp://alestic.com/ is the best thing I've come across (Ubuntu focused, but many general solutions as well). FWIW, we (at DuckDuckGo) ended up in much the same place: ditched EBS, avoid anything that relies on EBS, and multi-zone and multi-region redundancy (also for latency purposes). For ephemeral storage purposes, we end up mainly using xlarge machines since they have the greatest stability and speed (with 4 driv…
Comment linking /
on “AWS: the good, the bad and the ugly”Submitted Throw Away the Password to Your AWS Account as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThey pointed out the thinking behind it. If you check out Eric Hammond's blog at Alestic, it expands on what was mentioned here: http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot
Comment linking /2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot
on “The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars”Submitted Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThe creator of the first Ubuntu distros for EC2 wrote about the dangers of public EBS snapshots 10 years ago: https://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-public-ebs-danger/ He just got notified by AWS a couple days ago about the public snapshot he mentioned in the article. But at least AWS is trying to make things better here by proactively checking for public EBS snapshots and notifying people.
Comment linking /2009/09/ec2-public-ebs-danger/
on “Hundreds of exposed Amazon cloud backups found leaking sensitive data”Submitted How Much Does It Cost to Run a Serverless API on AWS? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThis is a great blog for all things AWS Lambda: https://alestic.com/ The author is popular in the AWS developer community, and he's a really good guy to work with.
Comment linking /
on “AWS Lambda: Run Java Code in Response to Events”Submitted How Much Does It Cost to Run a Serverless API on AWS? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYou can match them up through a quirk in one of the APIs. http://alestic.com/2009/07/ec2-availability-zones My us-east-1a is the affected zone, which is 3a98bf7d-126d-411a-a612-3a57a62dc688 using the incantation on the site. (Oh, and to note: my us-east-1a was also the affected zone during the massive outage last year, and I believe I remember another outage sometime between then and now. I almost feel like every Am…
Comment linking /2009/07/ec2-availability-zones
on “Amazon EC2 down?”Submitted Cost of Transitioning S3 Objects to Glacier as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAlestic does list an AMI for 10.10 now. http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ubuntu-maverick
Comment linking /2010/10/ec2-ubuntu-maverick
on “Try Ubuntu 10.10 Server in Amazon EC2, entirely on our dime”Submitted How Much Does It Cost to Run a Serverless API on AWS? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionwow - $0.085 for free! they better give Ubuntu 10.10 public AMI ID. http://alestic.com/ still doesn't list one.
Comment linking /
on “Try Ubuntu 10.10 Server in Amazon EC2, entirely on our dime”Submitted AWS Git-Backed Static Website as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAvailability zones are randomized per accounts; my us-east-1a might be the same as your us-east-1b. This is presumably done to stop everyone putting things into the same AZ by just choosing the first one in the list. There is some more detail here: http://alestic.com/2009/07/ec2-availability-zones
Comment linking /2009/07/ec2-availability-zones
on “High Frequency Trading on the Coinbase Exchange”Submitted AWS Git-Backed Static Website as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis article includes a script that will perform a consistent snapshot of an XFS-formatted EBS drive (in linux). http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot Consistent snapshots are needed when the disk contains multiple files that must be kept in sync with each other - such as a database's data files and the journal. If your DB gets its disk snapshotted while these files are out of sync, the DB will need to…
Comment linking /2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot
on “"Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data"”Submitted Lambdash: AWS Lambda Shell Hack as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttp://alestic.com/2011/08/ec2-max-instances Somewhat out-of-date (Aug, 2011) but a useful estimate.
Comment linking /2011/08/ec2-max-instances
on “Don’t look now, but AWS might be a billion-dollar biz”Submitted How Much Does It Cost to Run a Serverless API on AWS? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
