1. The News – Maybe if people as a whole were more intelligent, but, the closest you’re going to get is Digg or Reddit and those require thousands of data points (over time) before an article bubbles to the top of the relevancy list. The exception of course is “Bad News”, that could easily be done in real-time.

2. Product Pricing - Retailers have a hard enough time with loss prevention and maintaining profits than to care if their published prices and inventory are accurate or not. Sure, they have real-time inventory internally, but that’s a large enough dataset that it’ll never be replicated to a service provider; the short story is that you’ll never be able to get both an instant price and instant data at the same time.

Maybe if you were Google.

3. Search (sites, news, or otherwise) – Indexing is hard and there’s only one cat in the game with the facilities to do so in real-time. The only problem is the rest of the world doesn’t have a supercomputer running their system and there will always be a delay before Google gets the memo. The exceptions here are sites that Google cares about but chances are you’re not going to be big enough for that, else, you probably wouldn’t be a startup.

4. Communications – There’s already an “app for that”. It’s called the phone and your voice. Pickup phone, call friend, profit. Anything else might provide real-time delivery on one end or the other, but chances are, one person in the party is playing a video game, watching youtube, or chatting on Facebook in which case their response will be in Internet time.

Let me just steal the definition of Real-Time from Wikipedia:

In computer science, real-time computing (RTC), or “reactive computing”, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a “real-time constraint”—i.e., operational deadlines from event to system response. By contrast, a non-real-time system is one for which there is no deadline, even if fast response or high performance is desired or preferred. The needs of real-time software are often addressed in the context of real-time operating systems, and synchronous programming languages, which provide frameworks on which to build real-time application software.

If that’s not your product then please, stop calling yourself real-time and get an old comp sci book, then figure out what real-time really is.

This is primarily with regard to WordPress.com, but, it’s an important and delicate concern for any service. Currently, if you want yourdomain.com to point to your WP blog, you have to give WP control over your domain name. WordPress has the challenging problem of providing scalable content and this is very hard to do while providing domain name support at the same time; this is why WP requires control of your domain’s DNS. WordPress has a highly redundant and robust network and part of that is having control over their user’s domains. This is limiting in that a user can’t point a subdomain like securepayments.yourdomain.com to another service.

While DNS natively supports this functionality, it’s not something the average blogger, hosting provider, or even application developer understands (it’s called Slaving). If/when WordPress supports this functionality, they’ll need to do so carefully to limit exposing their systems to outside risks, make it easy to use, and support the most complex users who need to run their own DNS.

If you provide a web service, such as a blogging platform, don’t build “domain name support” by forcing your users to give you full control over their domain name. In short, I don’t blame WP for their current implementation (it’s probably a lower priority for them), but here’s a few tips on what you should do if you want to make YOUR app/service support user-supplied domain names:

1. Don’t give the feature away for free. Your support costs will be higher for this feature than most.
2. Don’t give the feature away for free. DNS plays a big role in spam and you don’t want to associate your systems with a spammer’s domain name.
3. Think very hard if you want to point a user’s app to the root of their domain. Doing so opens you up to the concerns above.
4. If your service involves high-traffic content such that load balancers are involved, consult someone who’s figured this problem out before. (my advice is typically free)
5. Whenever you’re building and scaling your services, keep all the above in mind. As the Internet becomes connected at the application layer, via things like federations and digital certificates, domain names will become more and more important as a component of security and authority.
6. Let users host their own DNS and point it at you instead of the other way around. Administering DNS servers isn’t very cost effective and you’ll save money leaving it up to the users. The downside is you’ll need to be very good at providing your users with instructions and you’ll need to notify them when changes are necessary; again, Don’t give the feature away for free.
7. Let users host their own DNS. You don’t want to host DNS for your users — doing so is a long-term cost commitment and something you can’t “undo”.

So why is Amazon RDS so bad, so much that you shouldn’t use it?

Well, there’s not an easy answer, the better question is to ask yourself: Why do you think AWS will be better than your own MySQL deployment? There is no right answer because almost any answer will probably, one day, bite you in the ass. Hard. I mean data loss, and it won’t be Amazon’s fault.

RDBMS systems and applications which depend on them are built from the ground up to rely on persistence, integrity, and static data models (schema). In contrast AWS has been built for distribution, decentralization, and the “cloud”. For Amazon, this service is somewhat of a U-turn from their original direction and has also placed a stamp on their forehead which says “That MySQL Guy” which is not good — I have nothing against mysql, however, as a de facto entry-level (free open source) software, it has accrued a strong following of immature software. Such software has nothing to do with the basic purposes of AWS or MySQL but has everything to do with how Amazon’s support and engineering staff will be spending their time which is supporting users and software which aren’t built for the cloud.

I hope that RDS won’t be a situation of butterflies & hurricanes but here’s a quick list of why the relative cost of RDS is high both for Amazon (the company) and all of it’s AWS users:

• Cost for Amazon (operations, engineers, and products)
  • MySQL, like most open source systems, has been historically buggy software with a trailing release+testing+production schedule which requires continuous testing between production releases for large deployments (such as RDS).
  • MySQL has a large set of features which vary across releases and which share equal presence in production; in other words, Amazon will need to cater to providing production support for multiple versions, not just the latest stable version.
  • Amazon has no control over features and capabilities of MySQL and is thus limited to what MySQL provides; while MySQL provides many “good things”, Amazon will still be obligated to maintain through the bad. This is a shared disadvantage of AWS Map Reduce via Hadoop however, those are mostly mitigated because Map Reduce is such a low-level distributed system.
  • MySQL is very flexible and itself scales very well however it doesn’t do so by itself and requires a significant effort to be properly configured for the data being managed. All the folks who don’t know this will default into thinking Amazon will do this for them and will be disappointed when it doesn’t “just work”. Whether they ditch RDS or bug Amazon’s support, either way, it’s not a positive situation.

• Cost for AWS (primarily EC2) users
  • Potential degradation of service and support for EC2 instances
    • With RDS available Amazon can defer issues with regard to running MySQL on EC2 instances to a recommendation for RDS — this will be a terrible waste of time for both parties.
    • MySQL is a very centralized system and by transitioning the decision of where MySQL resides in the AWS cloud from the user to Amazon, Amazon will be further centralizing the impact of MySQL on the cloud. Whereas users will randomly have MySQL deployed across any EC2 instance, Amazon will be appointing MySQL to specific hardware; this is based on the assumption that Amazon is clustering RDS deployments onto local hardware and not randomly deploying instances in the cloud. This is somewhat of a compromise for security and adds significant SLA risks (read: cost) to Amazon. In short, when a MySQL cluster dies – a LOT of folks are going to be VERY unhappy – their support tickets will be a burden to staff and their requests for credits will be a financial cost. Moreover, support staff will be yielding priority to these customers over other services because of the implicit severity.
  • Increased cost
    • RDS instances cost >10% more than regular instances and only come with the added benefit of backups — something which every system should already have in place. If you do choose to delegate the task of backups to RDS, you’re paying extra for a task you’ve already thought about doing yourself.
    • Cost of keeping your database, it’s backups, and it’s history all within AWS is multiplicative and if you grow to the point where you’re ready to move off you’ll be charged to transfer all the data to an external system. While this is a subjective cost it’s still worth pointing out; if folks aren’t already doing backups right, they’ll likely not know that cost effective database backups make use of binary logging facilities, not filesystem snapshots, and use significantly less disk space (and thus I/O).
  • False confidence
    • As I’ve mentioned before, letting other folks control your backups for you is a mistake. Failure is a matter of when, not if, and you’ll be in better control of responding if you understand what you’re dealing with. Just because RDS is doing you’re backups doesn’t mean you’re safe.
    • RDS users will expect MySQL to scale on-demand as everything else works that way with AWS and it’s just not that simple. Scaling a database requires analysis and a balanced combination of server settings, data normalization, and indexes; all of these things will still be the user’s responsibility and Amazon’s solution of “throw hardware at it” is a haunted path to send it’s users down.

Overall, I feel that Amazon could quickly cannibalize the value and quality of AWS if they (continue to) introduce trivial services. Supporting open source software they have no control over is a significant increase in relative support and operations cost. Amazon seems to be approaching this by making the cost of RDS instances more than EC2 which is a mistake because the real cost is the lost opportunity of engineers spending their time on systems which are more efficient for cloud computing – Amazon could charge 3 times an EC2 instance and their engineers would still be better off building technologies for cloud-based systems and not centralized RDBMS-dependent web applications.

Where I feel Amazon has fallen short the most, is that RDS only provides single-instance MySQL support and nothing more. No load balancing, replication, Hadoop integration, or any other form of data abstraction which could make it functional in a cloud computing context. Not implementing these features is a very clear indicator that AWS is focused more on short term revenue generating feature rather than cost effective cloud computing systems or improving the shortfalls of legacy centralized system.

With all this said, I have to consider the possibility of this being a good move for Amazon. I present the potential issues with RDS simply to warn folks from relying on it as a crutch, and, to point out the new direction AWS has veered is into choppy waters. There are several aspects of RDS which will give Amazon insight into correlations among and between the varying systems of data storage and processing – comparing SimpleDB, MapReduce, MySQL, and general resource consumption could shed light onto how their cloud is being used at a higher level than processors and bandwidth. Last, Amazon might be aware that MySQL is a crutch and is putting the service out there as a way to wean folks off of centralized systems.

To do this, first edit config/initializers/session_store.rb where you’ll want to add the key:

:domain => ‘.example.com’

The format here is important – if you don’t prefix the domain with a period the cookie (and session) will not apply for requests to subdomains. This covers the rails session — however we also need to cover the cookie set by restful-authentication which you’ll find in lib/authenticated_system.rb. In the kill_remember_cookie! and send_remember_cookie! methods insert same key as above or a reference to the session_options key. It’ll look like this:

def kill_remember_cookie!
  cookies.delete :auth_token, :domain => ActionController::Base.session_options[:domain]
end

def send_remember_cookie!
  cookies[:auth_token] = {
    :value   => @current_user.remember_token,
    :expires => @current_user.remember_token_expires_at,
    :domain => ActionController::Base.session_options[:domain] }
end

During development you should be aware this might not work using ‘localhost’, depending on your OS. The best thing to do is to edit your hosts file to have “example.local” point to your machine and use those domains for testing instead.

If you’re doing anything more complicated, you’ve got your work cut out for you as you may need to write custom rack middleware (see: Google) and/or use a Proc. In the latest Rails, cookies are being handled by Rack (instead of CGI); in any version, setting Cookies via cookies[:key]= is performed independent of the session options which is why you must specify the domain separately. There are some folks who describe monkey patching Rails to set the domain automatically but this is unreliable as I believe it’s changed every release. If you don’t want to have to change it, just create a wrapper method for setting your cookies, or, set the domain wherever you set or delete a cookie. We only set one cookie via restful-authentication so 2 lines is a fairly simple fix.

• Purchasing a new car (2 total; Dealer – Auto Nation and BMW Assist)
• Sun Microsystems CommunityOne event
• Nine Inch Nails (yes, the band — I purchased the new album by naming my price)
• PayPal ‘Phone Handling Opinion’
• Microsoft Feedback Program

1. using PHP < 5.3 (4 was beta in 1999)
2. making use of perl for *anything* (see #4)
3. template engines (scope and variable interpolation exist for a reason)
4. Perl6 (active 1999 mailing list)
5. Java Web Applets
6. SELECT * FROM (seriously, get ORM, select only what you need, or quit your day job.)
7. lisp (like a hero from a classic book, tragic)
8. non-functional redirect pages (hello js or location header; good-bye bad knocking off a lame phpbb feature)
9. ActiveX plug-ins (who developers sites with IE, anyways?)
10. SOAP (all your interoperability are belong to SOAP)

In short, if your core application for which your business and revenue suffers any of the above atrocities, step back for a minute and ask yourself if you really know any better? If you don’t, hire someone who does – FAST!