LoudSpeakers

Here’s a quick list of things I want from Amazon’s EC2 Web Services offering:

1. Better I/O performance for machine instances because it’s currently less than desirable. Most applications are disk I/O bound not CPU bound. Being able to scale processing resources is great and it’s a wonderful thing to boast, but that doesn’t help make basic, practical services like MySQL any faster without a ton non-trivial application engineering. Restoring a large amount of MySQL data took 5 to 8 times longer on EC2 than it did on similarly equipped physical hardware.

2. I need to be able to call and speak to a human when things start acting up. I recently used the official Amazon 64bit Fedora Core image for some large scale processing that I needed. I restored a database with hundreds of millions of records and configured it appropriately. Apparently, the Linux kernel was leaking memory like a sieve (for no obvious reason) and Amazon told me to go pound sand when I posted to their message board. Kill the instance and start anew. In other words, scrap your work and start over again because we’re not going to help you. A good web host would have taken responsibility for their hardware and fixed the problem. Amazon let me down in a big way. P.S. Providing primary support via a message board is lame, lame, lame.

3. Graphical tools to manage instances. Don’t get me wrong — I like text console foreplay like the rest of the world, but give me web-based tools to manage AWS please. And don’t point me to some 3rd party service that wants to charge for this — it should come free with usage of Amazon Web Services. Seriously.

4. Dynamically allocate more storage to instances without some kludge FUSE based spaghetti-strapped hack. Seriously, it’s weak on too many levels to complain about. It’s almost embarrassing.

5. The ability to suspend an instance without killing it entirely. I need to put a configured instance to sleep without destroying it. There are times when I need to suspend an instance for some interval and then start it again —- I need a state between instance reboot and ec2kill.

I’m gravely concerned with the recent uprising and resulting squashing of the Tibetans in Lhasa by the Chinese. The Chinese govt is simply inching their way up the punishment ladder to determine what the West can stomach.

The Chinese would like us to believe that “Tibetan culture is repugnant, full of superstition, cruelty, and that it’s an inalienable part of China.” Apparent double-think, but enough for them to wage cultural genocide on the Tibetan people unscathed.

If we let them get away with killing Buddhist monks who protest inhumane treatment, there will be no end in sight to their rampage. There are already plans in place to censor activities in Tiananmen Square from the Chinese TV watching audience. There are bound to be protests (rightfully so) and demonstrators pointing out the laundry list of human rights abuses in China.

I’m saddened that we even have China as a trading partner given their support for other dastardly regimes such as in Sudan. The Chinese (and Indians for that matter) are largely interested in African energy resources — everything else is secondary including human life.

I’m generally disinterested in Olympic sports because the West tends to dominate in most every category — so is it really a competition at all? Those with better resources are better trained and probably fed better to boot. Within a margin of error, we likely already know who will win given past performance data. But the Chinese Games should be protested on more moral grounds: dictatorial and repressive regimes should not be rewarded for their valor in killing innocent people. Or else we can’t fight the next battles as effectively. Boycott China and the Beijing Games.