Technobabble

With OSX El Capitan (version 10.11 build 15A204h), I am unable to connect to my Amazon Workspace . The Workspace client (version 1.1.80.347) gives me a weird error about a local certificate (and completely messes up the UI) and at other times is not able to verify the Internet connection. Looking at tcpdump, it seems like the client normally tries to connect to https://connectivity.amazonworkspaces.com which resolves to 54.230.147.12 . However for some reason the client is now connecting to server-54-230-147-12.sfo4.r.cloudfront.net which is what the IP resolves to in reverse. Visiting https://server-54-230-147-12.sfo4.r.cloudfront.net gives a certificate with the name connectivity.amazonworkspaces.com and therefore makes the connection untrusted. No idea how to workaround this. Help?

Amazon has a added a new offering to AWS: Amazon DynamoDB . This is a fully managed NoSQL database. One of the most interesting items to catch my eye was this: "All data items are stored on Solid State Disks (SSDs) and are automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones in a Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability." Does this mean that Amazon is now the largest owner of SSDs? I wonder who they buy from. Amazon's pricing structure for this service is a little weird. They have introduced the concept of "Write Capacity" (one write per second for items of up to 1KB in size) and "Read Capacity" (one strongly consistent read per second or two eventually consistent reads per second of items of up to 1KB in size). Why not just define pricing in terms of data reads and writes per second per KB? With the added bonus of Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) integration, this should be a useful service for all NoSQL users.

Last week, Google announced that they are moving the Google App Engine out of preview status and changed their pricing model . The general buzz is that the new prices are significantly higher and people are disappointed with Google. Here's a comparison of the prices between Google and AWS specifically looking at storage. Google offers the Blobstore API , which is somewhat equivalent to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) . Google's free tier offers 5GB which is same as Amazon's free tier except that Amazon offers that for just a year while Google has no time restrictions. In the paid tier, Google charges a flat $0.17/GB/month. Amazon on the other hand has a tiered pricing scheme based on three factors - amount of data, location of the S3 bucket and, redundancy. Amazon's prices in the US Standard region range from $0.14/GB/month (for less that 1TB) for the nine nines redundancy and reduced redundancy storage is even cheaper ranging from $0.093/GB/month to $0.037/G...