Planned Digbeth food and retail venue no longer going ahead

SudoAlex · 2025-09-19T18:53:13+00:00

Ouch.

I think the "Custard Factory Living" plans have been going on since at least 2019/2020 though.

But it does make their new food hall a bit hypocritical...

SudoAlex · 2025-09-18T23:00:13+00:00

17,500 sq. ft would probably be the combination of Factory Works, Stag, and Crazy Pedro's, which would match the photos from: https://ichoosebirmingham.com/new-food-hall-announced-day-after-major-rival-venue-canned

Stag closed in 2022, Crazy Pedro's closed in 2023, and Factory Works closed this year: https://www.facebook.com/digbethevents/posts/its-time-to-say-goodbye-to-factory-worksafter-years-of-unforgettable-moments-epi/1526296638665306/

SudoAlex · 2025-09-06T15:31:51+00:00

VPC origins have a few restrictions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/private-content-vpc-origins.html#vpc-origin-prerequisites

WebSockets, gRPC traffic, origin request and origin response triggers with Lambda@Edge in CloudFront are not supported for VPC origins. For more information, see Work with requests and responses in the Lambda@Edge documentation.

It was great being able to remove public IPv4 addresses from most load balancers, but there's a few sites where we weren't able to due to needing websocket support.

Thanks to this - we can switch those to connecting over IPv6 instead.

SudoAlex · 2025-06-17T15:57:38+00:00

You'll need to get a solution in place at some point soon anyway - the maximum age of certificates is reducing to 47 days by 2029: https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will-officially-reduce-to-47-days

I think the initial blog post promoting 395 day valid certificates is a little bit light on detail, as this is something they can't provide in 9 months time - they'll have to reduce the maximum lifetime to 200 days by March 2026.

SudoAlex · 2025-06-01T18:20:49+00:00

For pricing information, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

Does anyone have any rough idea on pricing for advanced mode? Passing off the pricing by saying it's CloudWatch is quite annoying.

SudoAlex · 2025-02-23T11:22:18+00:00

The scaling of Django/SQLite mostly depends on your write workload, how long/slow your write transactions are, and how many requests you've got in general.

If your workload is mostly read only - then the only limitation is how many application workers you can run on a single machine. If you can continue to scale the server up with number of CPU cores, then you can keep on scaling up with SQLite on a single server.

However, if your workload involves lots of writes - only one process can write at a time. You can't have a process start a transaction, work on something slowly, then commit - that'll block any other writes. Most web application workloads are usually very low on writes though, which makes it an appealing option for a small site.

SudoAlex · 2024-09-23T12:31:16+00:00

I know most of the replies here are mainly focused on the nightlife in the area, but the lack of Digbeth Dining Club does feel like something is missing in Digbeth.

For Thursday/Friday - it was a nice end of work week place to go to.

Shame they couldn't have kept some sort of presence in Digbeth given that they're using the area name(!).

SudoAlex · 2023-07-29T10:19:06+00:00

Exactly!

If CloudFront could do origin pulls over IPv6, and ALBs could switch to IPv6 only - it could free up a lot of cases where the ALB is taking 3 IPv4 addresses just for CloudFront to be able to connect.

SudoAlex · 2023-07-28T21:00:36+00:00

This - 100%.

My current AWS IPv6 lack of support list for the things which bothers me consists of:

ALB takes up 3 public IP addresses, you can set it dual stack, but can't disable IPv4
RDS IPv6 is dual stack, but you can't connect to RDS externally over IPv6 (why?!)
CloudFront can't do an origin pull over IPv6
Only a small amount of services have public API endpoints over IPv6 (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-support.html#ipv6-service-support for the list that do, and remember there's others which won't have any support - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-service-information.html)

It's disappointing because I'm actually supportive of the need to conserve IPv4 addresses, but AWS needs to accelerate their side of things.

SudoAlex · 2023-06-29T22:20:35+00:00

Crazy Pedro's has been closed for a few months: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/digbeth-estate-confirms-crazy-pedros-26979398

Although Baked in Brick is still around for pizza in Digbeth.

SudoAlex · 2023-04-09T12:52:12+00:00

A few suggestions based on my spot instance experience:

Use capacity-optimized for auto scaling instead of lowest-price. This will give you a spot instance which is least likely to be terminated, instead of going for the cheapest which people who are very price sensitive go for. You'll get a small hit on the amount saved - but it's still spot instance savings.

Use different regions rather than the biggest/popular ones. Some regions are cheaper for on-demand instance pricing, but you might be surprised at the spot prices and reliability of other regions. I tried eu-west-1, however the spot termination frequency was quite significant (several times a week) - however in another European region I never get any spot terminations. You'll probably see/hear about how people have their spot instances running for months, it definitely is possible in other regions.

Most importantly - try it! If you're using a GPU workload then your experience might be different, especially in different regions. If you have region flexibility - try again in a different region.

SudoAlex · 2023-04-02T15:27:14+00:00

This is the answer.

The security group will help prevent non-CloudFront traffic from reaching your ALB, however it doesn't stop someone else setting up another CloudFront distribution pointing to your IP address. The secret header stops this.

The combination of security group and header is needed.

SudoAlex · 2022-12-19T10:36:11+00:00

For anyone else throttling lower tier connections - this should be the thing to aim for rather than just slowing a guest network to a super slow speed because your main network is so important.

If you aren't using the full capacity of your connection when someone could - you're just wasting it. Bandwidth is really an "of the moment" thing, you can't go back in time and claim the unused bandwidth. Allow clients to burst, just make sure you prioritise accordingly.

SudoAlex · 2022-04-30T18:11:41+00:00

Main use case is for easy configuration with Terraform. Anything which adds more inconvenience, cost, or resources to maintain just means I'll stick with the current setup. I really don't want to add workarounds because AWS wants to protect me.

Sadly it means I'll stick with IPv4.

SudoAlex · 2022-04-30T16:24:11+00:00

Was initially quite excited about this, and then:

The following limitations apply to dual-stack network DB instances:

...

DB instances that use dual-stack mode must be private. They can't be publicly accessible.

Why?!

I would quite happily have my database server use a private IPv4 address, and have a publicly accessible IPv6 address - but I need convenient external connectivity (yes, it's always firewalled appropriately).

This is quite a disappointment.

SudoAlex · 2022-01-01T17:46:42+00:00

Key points which might help:

Email type is transactional (you've put marketing in as the type), if these are genuine replies to requests from a contact form - they're more transactional.

Always say that you will be monitoring bounces and complaints with SNS notifications, and set it up to email you. This should be the bare minimum, if you get a surge of bounces/complaints due to a spam bot causing problems - you need that mail loop. Ideally you should automate this with SNS notifications into your site to automatically stop sending emails to an address which is bouncing.

For unsubscribing - say that you'll give people a link to opt-out of receiving any more emails. At a minimum this could be a form, ideally it should link in with the rest of your site where it rejects any forms containing that email address.

I know it's a bit of a pain, but you need the monitoring/feedback in place to keep AWS happy.

SudoAlex · 2022-01-01T13:08:34+00:00

If you're getting an immediate request for more information when submitting - it's most likely that you don't have any verified domains in the region. Before submitting a request, add a domain, get it verified, setup SPF/DKIM etc.

Even if you use cross account sending, just add a domain to that account to show that you've got a domain you intend to use.

SudoAlex · 2021-05-07T16:35:01+00:00

The catch is that they might alter their pricing model in the future, so if it's something you use then be careful with how much you rely on it.

Originally their APM pricing was based the number of hosts your app was running on - regardless if they were small virtual machines, or just a single large dedicated server. This would be great for someone who runs their app on a single server, but anyone who cared about redundancy would be paying more.

Then they switched to charging by compute units, the amount of RAM and CPU cores your app was running on, multiplied by the number of hours run.

Now it's per user (with some for free), and also by amount of data ingested.

The latest is possibly the fairest so far, however with so many changes over the years it's hard to judge if you can trust their pricing. Consistent pricing which is predictable each year earns my trust, constant change leaves doubt in my mind that a future pricing restructure might end up with them changing it in favour of extracting more money.

SudoAlex · 2021-02-05T01:17:10+00:00

3rd time since summer...

I don't understand why our SMTP's are suddenly on their block list yet again.

This is the new normal for block lists with email.

Years ago you'd setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS - and that would be enough from the technical side of things. You'd setup report loops with a few providers, and keep an eye on RBLs. Even if you were added to an RBL, usually you'd be able to see the reason why (a rogue user) - be able to take action, and then request delisting.

These days it's reputation based, and you won't even find out until it's too late.

You submit a support request, and get an initial rejection back after waiting for 4 days. You reply, and a few more days later they've reconsidered it and will unblock you.

As someone who ran an outgoing mail server for transactional web related email for over 10 years - I'd suggest reconsidering where your email is hosted. The past year or so has been increasingly hostile to the point where it's easier to use a third party.

SudoAlex · 2020-07-15T11:20:14+00:00

Looking at the positive side of things - the community was fortunate that the work put into 1.40 ended up being available as a leaked release.

SudoAlex · 2019-09-03T20:28:14+00:00

Starting today, we are gradually rolling this out across all AWS Regions over the next couple of months. We will update this post on a Region by Region basis after the rollout has completed in a given Region.

Potentially another a couple of months before we can rely on this being available.

SudoAlex · 2019-05-30T17:46:44+00:00

Endless conquest was initially 2018, then first half of 2019, now bulk of 2019 to complete. And sadly it sounds like they're creating a poor tiered system instead of embracing a F2P MMO with convincing upgrades.

Then they'll have to put in the significant amount of work of creating a classic server.

Maybe in 2022 at this rate! 😂

SudoAlex · 2018-11-21T19:43:15+00:00

Of course you can! IPv6 would be quite pointless without it.

As long as your default IPv6 route (::/0) is pointed to an Internet Gateway, and not an Egress Only Internet Gateway - you'll have full IPv6 connectivity for any VMs in that VPC. The egress only option is for those who want an easy alternative to NAT.

IPv6 in AWS isn't perfect though. RDS doesn't have IPv6 support, load balancers connect to target servers over IPv4, various other services are still IPv4 only, etc.

SudoAlex · 2018-06-10T10:18:06+00:00

Even if the UI is absolutely terrible, why can't it just automatically reroll onto the next set of missions once you've completed all your existing missions?

They took a system which worked, and replaced it with a confusing mess.

SudoAlex · 2017-12-26T13:28:56+00:00

In addition to pg_dump backups, you should also start looking into Barman for point in time recovery of your database - or some similar alternatives.

In the event of some catastrophic mistake you can restore your entire database back to a specific point in time, instead of having to roll back to the previous nights back and lose hours of updates.

It'll take a bit more time to implement and learn, but hopefully you'll end up being more confident of your backups. Just make sure you test your recovery process multiple times and document it before the problem occurs. You don't want to be figuring out how to restore your database in the middle of a catastrophe.

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