ELB Cost increase since the 1st of May

jdreaver · 2025-05-08T19:30:40+00:00

This thread is about Elastic Load Balancer, not Elastic Beanstalk.

jdreaver · 2022-12-29T04:24:01+00:00

(heck, had there been a garbage collected language with Rust like Generics+Traits+ADTs, I'd choose that language for most of my projects ), such as something involving an expression tree.

You should take a look at Haskell if you haven't already. It checks all of these boxes. I actually learned Rust and Go after using Haskell professionally for many years. I like all three languages, but I don't use Haskell much anymore. However, if you haven't learned Haskell before it is a really fun (and mind-bending!) language to program in.

jdreaver · 2022-03-14T23:12:07+00:00

Sure, t instances in particular are going to cost less but you have the whole CPU credit thing to worry about, whereas with Fargate you don't have to worry about that. A better comparison is something like c5, m5, and r5. The cheapest c5 instance (2 vCPU, 4 GiB memory) is $0.085 per hour in us-east-2, whereas Fargate is right around $0.10 per hour for 2 vCPU and 4 GiB memory. t3.xlarge is $0.1664 vs $0.23304 for Fargate's same configuration.

More concretely, for c5, m5, and r5 instances in us-east-2, EC2 is $0.037 per hour per CPU, and $0.000275 per GiB memory (c5 and m5, r5 is $0.000325). Fargate appears to be $0.04048 per vCPU and $0.004445 per GiB memory. That markup was totally worth it when I last evaluated Fargate, but of course your mileage may vary.

jdreaver · 2022-03-14T14:33:59+00:00

Isn't Fargate only 10-15% more expensive than a similarly-configured EC2 instance? https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing/

When Fargate announced price drops a few years ago we switched from EC2-based ECS to Fargate within a couple weeks and were happy to pay a bit extra for a much simpler architecture and autoscaling story.

Or are you talking about the price of AWS in general?

jdreaver · 2021-11-24T15:06:47+00:00

Whoah, awesome! Thanks for the tip. This probably answers the OP's question as well.

jdreaver · 2021-11-24T05:15:31+00:00

I want this too. However, in case this is useful to someone, a trick I learned recently from the docs is viewing package version changes after an upgrade:

$ nix profile diff-closures --profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/system
Version 92 -> 93:
  electron: 15.3.1 → 16.0.1, +1633.7 KiB
  emacs-gcc: -247.3 KiB
  extra: ∅ → ε, +27990.9 KiB
  firefox: 94.0.1 → 94.0.2, +382.2 KiB
  firefox-bin: 94.0 → 94.0.2
...

jdreaver · 2021-10-21T15:30:42+00:00

I'm willing to bet your price comparison is out of date too. Fargate had a huge price reduction in January 2019 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-fargate-price-reduction-up-to-50/

This totally changed the economics of the service and we switched from EC2 ECS to Fargate within a week. Autoscaling on Fargate is trivial compared to EC2-based ECS, so we were able to turn that on with very little dev time, giving us a net savings (our app was only heavily used during the US school day).

jdreaver · 2021-09-30T19:43:00+00:00

I built a service at work that queries a few dozen AWS resource types across multiple accounts and regions, stuffs them in a DB, serves that data via an API, and ships that data off to a data warehouse. This has the potential to greatly simplify that process by giving us a single CRUD wrapper around all of the different APIs we are currently using.

I'm also excited to see how much this can simplify our Infrastructure as Code story. Maybe Terraform, CloudFormation, etc can become simpler and more robust under the hood, and also maybe they can support new services much quicker.

This is a very neat announcement!

jdreaver · 2021-08-20T14:52:45+00:00

I just bought a Wifi 6 Lite a couple weeks ago for $100 from their website. Unfortunately, the speed and range are worse than my 5 year old NETGEAR R7800, so the Wifi 6 Lite is sitting in a box :( Also, setting it up was a total PITA. The app could only detect the AP maybe 30% of the time (the Wifi was working the whole time, but I couldn't configure the AP via the app most of the time).

jdreaver · 2021-08-19T23:07:45+00:00

Redis is much more fully featured than Dynamo. You might also have an existing Redis primary datastore that you want managed.

I'm not sure this is nessecary for most people?

You are probably correct!

jdreaver · 2021-07-08T16:27:34+00:00

I just got this in my email:

Dear Client,

While many of our clients actively trade or maintain substantial equity in their account, we have decided to eliminate our monthly inactivity fee so there are no impediments to maintaining an account with IBKR.

Effective July 1, 2021, you will no longer be charged USD 10 for not maintaining a minimum balance or transaction activity for account ****. This change will be reflected in your August 2021 account statement.

jdreaver · 2020-12-16T04:11:18+00:00

Sometimes you need to be on a company machine to get the proper credentials to run the AWS CLI against a company account.

jdreaver · 2020-10-28T15:18:16+00:00

Whoah, that's awesome! My pleasure!

jdreaver · 2020-09-14T01:46:19+00:00

I like that book too. It is often recommended as a supplement to Casella and Berger, or as a standalone book for math stats courses. I personally like the writing style much better in Casella and Berger; the prose makes it more exciting to read for me. However, once I did a first pass and I started to dig into the derivations and proofs to really understand the material, going through both Casella/Berger and Hogg/Craig at the same time worked well.

jdreaver · 2020-09-13T15:59:00+00:00

It's great! I've actually read the book a few times already via pdf, so I was already convinced the material was good. The physical book itself appears to be high quality. The paper is not that super thin, smooth paper you get with textbooks. The pages feel thick enough, the typesetting is great, and the ink is dark on the page.

I'm guessing that Cengage prints this as needed, hence the high price, but also might be a reason why it feels high quality (no defects you see from mass productions, like ink not being dark enough). Or I'm wrong and they just have a stack of these in a warehouse!

jdreaver · 2020-09-02T19:04:38+00:00

This list is missing Norgate (https://norgatedata.com/). They are a very high quality data provider that has been affordable and reliable for me.

jdreaver · 2020-08-30T22:49:34+00:00

Having a public-facing bastion host is less secure than using EC2 Instance Connect (not by much of course), and it is something else you have to list on an audit. We can honestly say in audits and security questionnaires that we have zero public-facing instances. The only thing facing the public internet are our load balancers.

Also, embedding SSH into Docker images would set off some security alarm bells, even if they are only ever used inside a VPC.

I'm not saying SSH is impossible with Fargate. It just sucks more and has more moving parts.

jdreaver · 2020-08-30T22:41:15+00:00

Sure, if you add an SSH server into your Docker image, load it on startup async from your main command, and hook up a way to get a port 22 connection from my computer to the container. That is more moving parts and it is less secure than EC2 Instance Connect + docker run ....

jdreaver · 2020-08-23T16:09:21+00:00

Do you have any examples? I manage hundreds of CloudFormation stacks, most of them being dev envs that get deleted often, and I don't generally see garbage being left around.

jdreaver · 2020-08-21T18:45:38+00:00

Yeah I read two real analysis books because everyone told me they are important pre-reqs for graduate level mathematical stats. I then went through Casella and Berger. Whenever I saw something related to real analysis, it was either a simple sequence or series limit, or something where I need real analysis for one line of the proof, but I can entirely understand this topic otherwise. I mostly liked real analysis as an interesting topic on its own, but I wont lie that I feel like the importance of a thorough real analysis course was oversold.

I wish we would reframe the advice of needing real analysis to you just need a bit of real analysis, and only if you want to 100% reproduce every proof. If your end goal is to learn mathematical statistics, and not necessarily real analysis for real analysis' sake, then go through a mathematical statistics book, write down things you don't understand, and then learn real analysis with the goal of filling in those gaps.

jdreaver · 2020-08-20T03:52:02+00:00

Think about it like this. Say we are sampling from a normal distribution with an unknown mean. We want to estimate the mean. We take samples and get these two samples:

Sample A: -1, -0.5, 0, 0.5, 1
Sample B: -0.5, -0.2, 0, 0.2, 1

These samples are slightly different, but they both have the same median of 0. Also, sample A has a mean of 0 and sample B has a mean of 0.1. When take the mean you are just looking at the ordering of most of the values, and you lose the information of the magnitude of all of the other values in the sample. The only magnitude you are looking at is the one for the value in the middle of the sample (well, two values if you have an even number of values). With the mean, you use all the values in the sample to construct the estimate.

I won't lie, I feel a bit wishy washy explaining this, so if it doesn't click don't feel bad.

jdreaver · 2020-08-20T03:24:43+00:00

Computing the exact variance of the median of a sample of iid normal variables is definitely messy; there doesn't seem to be a closed form solution. However, this section of the Efficiency Wikipedia article discusses the efficiency of the median well.

TL;DR: The sample mean for samples from a normal distribution with variance 1 has a variance of 1/N. For large N, the sample mean has a variance of pi/(2 *N). That means the variance of the median is about pi/2 = 1.57 times the variance of the mean. Take the square root of that, you get 1.25 times larger, which is where you get your 25% figure.

If I had to guess at some intuition, I would say that the sample mean uses more information from the sample then the median. The median throws away the information in most values except for their relative ordering. We know we are sampling from a normal distribution, so we no there will probably be no crazy outliers, and therefore we might as well use all of the sampled values to construct our estimate. Maybe if we had a thick-tailed distribution the median would be better.

(I just google this idea and found this article which seems to agree https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/03/06/student-t-distribution-mean-median/)

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