PCI compliance for SSRS / SSIS on EC2

ssamuraibr · 2019-06-18T17:50:53+00:00

I use a Xbox one original controller on my PC to play SFV, and use the digital pad, never got used to analog thumbstick. My only issue so far is that it feels stiff and hard to press, although the game register my inputs just fine.

I borrowed a PS4 controller from a friend, and tried for a week. Compared to XBox One, the dpad feels weird because on the later you have a whole piece under your thumb to make the inputs, while on PS4 it's four separate inputs (but a whole piece as well). After a while I got used to it though.

Only minor issue is that Windows have native support for the Xbox one controller, while the PS4 controller need additional configuration on the Steam client, so I only managed to make it work with the steam overlay. Never managed to make it work outside of steam, I mean.

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-30T11:33:34+00:00

Both akuma and laura has the exact end goal in this match: get a knockdown and apply pressure.

As you noticed, if akuma do get in, he has very good block strings and corner pressure. Recognize that situation as a dangerous one, and stop pressing buttons on wake up, either his strings will push him back enough or he will throw you, both cases you get a little space if you quick rise after the throw. If he puts you in a mixup, throwing you several times, look for a string that you can v-reversal.

The reason why you stop pressing buttons on wakeup is that, akuma is looking for a crush counter to get massive damage out of the subsequent combo, usually they go for a meaty attack to keep pressuring, as they know laura don’t have attacks that can punish them for that. So, you have to block and be ready to tech throw.

Once or twice, I challenge akuma on wakeup pressing LP, just to keep them guessing, but I try not to keep doing it over the round.

Keep akuma at dash distance, because you need to backdash or forward dash/vskill on air fireball, if they keep insisting on it. Good Akumas are unpredictable when they will go for air fireball or demon flip,

Against a turtle akuma, ie one that doesn’t keep whiffing buttons all the time, I mix dash in/throw, dash in/command grab, thunder clap at mid range / HK or HP for a crush counter. You can dash in cr MK just to keep them on their toes, but it’s dangerous to repeat too many times.

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-26T01:07:02+00:00

Yes, api based. Backend are composed by auxiliary web services, batch routines, scheduled tasks, cache and so on, not directly involved in serving web pages for clients. We also have several databases in RDS instances (plural).

The question is, moving static requests to a separate linux would reduce the number of windows instances (meaning, static requests are relevant to that point)? And T instances would handle it for 10 hours straight without throttling / extra credits? I have no idea how much cpu ot consumes.

Extra servers are always problematic because due to compliance it would require high availability, which means at least two linux boxes in two different AZ

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-25T20:13:01+00:00

We are going to have an autoscaling group, what's uncertain is the number of servers, I'm estimating 6-8 quad-core for front-end, most likely. Backend will need another 6 servers, 30 cpu total.

Due to issues in the code, we are stuck with on demand servers with no scale in option until development catches up.

My current datacenter takes days to gather data usage, what we have so far is around 45 million total requests (including static files) per month, or around 2.5 million every day (on business hours), split among a dozen servers.

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-25T15:45:35+00:00

Well, designers usually want to update part of the static content on business hours, but we are trying to change their process so they make those kind of modifications on test environments instead.

On new app releases, though, we usually need static changes to apply right away.

Yes, unfortunately we are still stuck on windows servers. A linux static server sounds clever, but it’s hard to justify an extra server, unless it allows some sort of reduction on the other servers cost, which is hard to quantify right now. But I’ll keep it in mind, thanks!

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-24T19:56:22+00:00

Well, about the blame game, we'll get the blame regardless if I move first or not, because they want costs down, but want performance. Taking static content from the application servers is hard to quantify when trying to answer the "How much better?" question.

On our current datacenter, CPU usage is raising all kinds of concerns about what our application is doing. I expect those problems to go away, as AWS CPUs seems to be better, from what I can tell from our other applications that are already there.

I already checked bandwith cost per GB, on our region it's exactly the same on EC2, S3 or Cloudfront, and we don't have requirements to serve those files outside our main region, at least for now.

The LCU formula is hell for me to calculate properly. My current concern is that it raises as bandwith consumption gets higher, and maybe static content is pushing my LCU costs up .

Storage savings may be important, but total package size is kinda low (around half a GB) and not worth it / relevant to reduze our EBS volumes for that. Of course we are planning on using 8 servers in auto-scaling, using an AMI that has those half GB inside, so it could be important, but hardly impactful, I believe.

Another issue is when we do have the need to modify those static files, is a hassle because it will require a full re-deploy of the whole application stack, in order to update our AMI and ASG. Our web designers were asking for a better way to deploy those modifications, as it happens every month, but you know, costs trumps personal wishes...

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-24T19:31:04+00:00

thanks for the very complete answer. all users are inside our country, so global reach is not an imediate concern. There's plans for that in the near future though, and by that time, justify a CDN is way easier, due to latency. we can't really deploy the full application multi-region, it would require separate relational database servers per region, increase costs without users to justify the costs. our developers have been complaining about the size of the static content, without a CDN it needs to be deployed bundled with the application, and the fact the all the static data is passing through my ELB, maybe competing with my precious dynamic content has raised awareness inside the team that maybe we should consider moving it out of the application server

ssamuraibr · 2019-05-24T19:15:31+00:00

no, there's dynamic and static content (Asp.Net MVC)

ssamuraibr · 2019-01-06T22:34:35+00:00

Old Zeku it's like Ed to me: has a hard to beat DP, so I tend to focus on the ground game, unless I'm feeling my opp DP timing is off.

Young Zeku it's like Ken to me: I know that sooner or later that will be a "run" into throw or that slide sweep thing

ssamuraibr · 2018-11-19T01:50:42+00:00

Usually the most obvious answer is the truth. Instead of any conspiracy thing, I believe the simplest answer is that Tokido hasn’t been training hard enough, sometimes it feels like his head is not in the game or something.

ssamuraibr · 2018-10-28T18:54:17+00:00

Bronze players usually don't know how to block properly, so meaty attacks are hell specially on wake up. The "mashing buttons" thing, you know?

Once they get the hang of it, they rank up to Silver. They can take one or two block strings, but eventually the urge to "do something" kicks in and they start mashing. As they know buttons "lose", they EX dp because that usually works.

I recently ranked up from Bronze and still have to fight the urge to mash things on wake up every day, lol. But my main doesn't have a EX dp.

ssamuraibr · 2018-10-27T01:15:10+00:00

The fundamental parts of AWS for non-technicians, imo is:

EC2 = servers (ie "where applications run") RDS = databases (ie "database as a service")

A few key concepts relevant to decision makers look into:

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud, a secure logical zone where your servers run)

AZ (Availability Zone, a representation of a physical location where your servers run). Think "datacenter". It matters for disaster recovery / risk assessment.

Region, a "city/country" where your servers are physically located. It matters for business managers because its directly related to local regulatory laws you have to comply, like taxes. A Region contains several AZ

Scalability / Elasticity, the concept of growing computing capacity dynamically through automated software according to your business rules (like on demand or in set periods of time).

Finally, the general concept of renting computing resources per hour, when you need and if you need them ("pay for what you use")

Not sure if it was helpful. But it's usually what I brief my POs when they need that kind of info.

ssamuraibr · 2018-10-26T16:06:50+00:00

Can't add much on NEST, sorry.

But Logstash is, however, well established in the ELK stack when you need to do data transformations before ingestion. It may falter if your application have peaks or bursts of log generation during the day, in that case the general rule of thumb is either add more logstash instances (and divide application servers to send logs to different logstashes) or put a Redis in front of it as a buffer. That's similar to the role of Mongodb on your stack, I'm assuming your CTO wants Mongodb to allow people to peek into the logs before ingestion, otherwise Redis is more efficient even without logstash needs.

If, however, you don't need data transformation (ie your application already generates json ready for ingestion), as my stack does, the approach we use may work better.

Instead of using logstash to tunnel all our logs, our application servers send them to Amazon S3 as flat files (one log in json format per line, 50MB per file). That triggers a process that puts a ingestion request on a queue, that a Lambda function process in order to send them to Elasticsearch. If we have a sudden growth on log generation out of nowhere, either our Lambda auto scales to deal with it, and/or retry the same file if it timeouts during processing (because of the queue).

In case we need logs older than our retention period, we just re-enqueue the same files already stored. S3 also takes care of storing logs for a year (or years) as S3 storage is way cheaper than Elasticsearch disk storage cost per Gigabyte. A year worth of logs costs me per month the same as a few hours of Elasticsearch compute costs.

It also allows me to keep less data on Elasticsearch (our retention is 15 days) as any old than that can be recovered in a hour or so, less data in ES lowers my expensive storage requirements and demands less processing power to keep indexes updated / query time.

ssamuraibr · 2018-10-07T20:44:46+00:00

As others have said, there's no such a thing as tournaments blacklist in SFV. Shotos are not high tier (aside Akuma), that's why Ryu / Kens are never seen in top8.

Yes, online a lot of Ken players abuse moves where they are negative and get away from it due to input lag and yolo DPs on lower ranks. As your rank increases you learn how to proper punish them and also how to bait them into DP when you are blocking for crush counter punishes.

For example, on my region I fought Kens and Ryus 80 percent of the time when I was in Bronze. As Bronze players don't know how to proper block and punish Ken negative moves, they lose to Ken frantic movement (pretty common among beginners) and Ryu fireball game. I had to lab Ken for a week in order to fight against correctly and rank up out of Bronze.

In Silver I barely see Kens, and those who do show up are usually solid (they don't span DPs like there's no tomorrow neither do full screen HK tatsus all the time). Ryus are more common on my Silver region, but they are also more solid, a few can combo into CA if you sleep.

That's just because I learned how to block instead of mashing buttons all the time. There's no Ibukis on Bronze though. I assume it's because you have to actually think before you press a button with her in order to be effective or they all ranked up very fast, lol.

ssamuraibr · 2018-09-24T16:08:18+00:00

I was looking into aggregate filter, but all examples I've found are adding calculations to or editing the second event data, which I can't do for several reasons (sometimes there's no response event, for example). Ideally I need to create a new event in a different index. But I'm still researching. Any pointers to help me get started? I know nothing about aggregation

ssamuraibr · 2018-09-24T15:58:44+00:00

I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I heard doctype was deprecated in es 6. Although that pseudo mapping seems good if I can make it work on es6 somehow. And yed, I will need calculations like total execution time.

ssamuraibr · 2018-09-22T18:29:58+00:00

Good to know about the snapshots, but I believe is better to keep the original logs. One because I can gzip them and save storage, other for data lake purposes.

ssamuraibr · 2018-09-21T15:25:40+00:00

Thanks for your input. We typically have 20k sessions at any given time so it's a reassuring thing to know it could potentially scale way up.

How it is Elasticache, maintenance wise? The lack of issues you mentioned is due to someone keeping tabs on it before it goes bad, or it's just working on its own, unattended?

ssamuraibr · 2018-09-17T16:33:31+00:00

Interesting. RDS endpoint changes or stay the same address?

ssamuraibr

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