Today should be a great day. It’s Saturday, my Big Green Egg was delivered, and I bought some great meat at Costco to christen it tomorrow. But, it’s not really a great day….

Got word this morning that my Grandmother passed away overnight. Now, before everyone goes and floods me with condolences and stuff, it’s ok. Not looking for that. My Grandmother was 7 months short of 100 years old. 100. I’m 33, and I can’t even IMAGINE what it’s like to live that long.

I have a huge family. Had 2 sets of grandparents, then through a series of life events for my parents, added another full set. All of them were great family, but I always gravitated towards my Dad’s parents. Grandmother and Granddad. We just clicked. Always. They got me, I got them. No matter what was happening, they were always stable. They were my two favorite people on the face of the planet, and no matter what anybody else in my family says, I know I was their favorite. I grew up flying to their farm in McFarland, California at least once a year. Family was everything for them. When I was a young kid, my parents would go off on family cruises with them and my other aunts/uncles. I never understood why we were never invited until Niki and I had Aven. Then I realized why bringing little kids on trips like that was not a great idea. I get it now. My dad has continued their tradition with all of us a couple times, and Aven was too young to enjoy it, or we needed to be able to relax and enjoy it. You parents get it, dont‘ judge me.

Once my sister and I got old enough, they took us on a trip. One of the best memories I have in life is getting to go to Hawaii with them. We flew from LAX to the big island. Stayed at a hotel for a couple of nights, then got on a cruise ship where we island hopped for a few days. Then flew back. I got to miss a week of school for it, in 6th grade. That trip was priceless to me. We lost Granddad several years back, and that hit me really hard. We knew he had a lot of health issues, but he was always in great spirits. He was “sick” for 10+ years, so it just became normal. Grandmother was never really the same after he was gone. They were married for a couple of decades longer than I’ve even been alive. It’s completely understandable. She’s been struggling with the day to day life stuff a lot for the past year or two. She very obviously was not enjoying herself anymore. It was nothing personal to us, she had just stopped being super active, and started to slip. Personally, the second my health or mind starts to slip to an unrecoverable state, I’m out. I refuse to stay around and suffer. I’m not about that. Because of this mindset, I feel relieved for her. She was having a hard time. She held on for so long. Now it’s ok. This feeling has left me in a weird state. I’m really upset that she’s gone. She was the best. My favorite person ever. But at the same time, I’m relieved that she’s finally gone. I feel like an asshole. I know I shouldn’t because I’m relieved for her with the best of intentions. It just is what it is.

I have a crazy travel schedule all month, but I’ll be making changes at some point in the next two weeks to head out to LaVerne, CA to meet up with everyone. She will be laid to rest in Delano, reunited with Granddad.

Not really sure why I felt the need to blast all this out, but writing seems to make me feel better. Also, I didn’t want to simply post a short tweet about it. She deserved more than that. Hug your family, kids. That’s what is most important in life. Enjoy the time you get.

Well, I am now on the Cloud Advocacy team with VMware. A big part of my job is now content creation. Due to some internal politics, and copyrights, etc. I have started posting on Medium. Also, our team has just launched our new team identity, Beyond Virtual. So you will be able to get my new content at the two following places:

http://www.medium.com/@vtimd

http://www.beyondvirtual.io

Check them out, and let us know what you think. Thanks!

-vTimD

In our last adventure, we went over the FitCycle app from ACME Fitness. An imaginary company made up for the VMware Cloud Services – Cloud Technology Solutions team. We talked about the architecture of the app, and then used Cloud Health to analyze the cost difference between the EC2 / MySQL backed version, and the RDS MySQL backed app. We saw that RDS was quite a bit more expensive. One of the last things I mentioned was that this was going to be a 2-part series. What we have done now is we re-architected the app to be a bit more “Cloud Native” in design. Before we had the two apps designed the same. 2 DB instances with an HAProxy load balancer in front. For RDS, while it is a fully functional design, this doesn’t really take advantage of native HA capabilities. For this, we have completely redesigned the DB / DBLB tier. We removed the HA Proxy VM entirely, and instead of 2 RDS instances, we have a single Multi-AZ RDS instance. 

Now that we’ve gone over the architectural changes, let’s take a look at what this has done to our costing. We’re going to check out pricing a different way this time. Since it is 1 instance, let’s take a look at just that instance. We’ll go to Assets, AWS, then RDS Instances. This will show us all of the RDS instances currently in our account. 

From there, we will click the View (eye) next to our FitCycle DB (db-fit-b-a-us-w1-01-r). This brings up the entire asset information for our RDS instance. 

One thing you may notice on here is that we have several cost numbers right on the front page. We have the List Price Per Month, the Current Hourly Cost, and the Projected Cost For Current Month. This is the number that we’re going to use for the purpose of this exercise. So this shows that we are spending roughly $68.88 this month on this RDS instance. 

This is a pretty substantial uptick in the cost of our DB tier. But overall, lots of factors go into cost analysis. One thing being that we removed the DBLB box. Though this is a small change, it can add up across the infrastructure. It isn’t just instances prices that can help to bring savings. Think about operational savings. You no longer have to maintain the HA Proxy EC2 instance. So this is OS, App, and Config updates you no longer have to make. Also think about the EC2 instances for the MySQL DB’s. You have to keep up with patching on the OS, App, and Configs there as well. 

There are tons of variables that come into play with this type of exercise. We can’t really tell you what is best for your business, without knowing it. Cloud Health is perfect for helping you make the best decisions you can, by providing you with the best possible information about your infrastructure. For more information, please check out https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/

-vTimD