HEEL DROP IN RUNNING SHOES
One of the things I didn’t know about when I began running and shopping for shoes is a small but crucial factor: heel drop—the difference in height between the heel and forefoot. While traditional running shoes often have a higher heel drop (10-12mm), lower-drop shoes (0-6mm) are gaining popularity among runners. But is less heel drop better? Let’s break it down.
PRISON FELLOWSHIP'S MIGRATION TO CLOUDFLARE
As a long-time advocate of Cloudflare, I have relied on their services for my personal DNS hosting for several years. Their robust features and user-friendly interface have made my experience seamless and efficient. Recently, I took on the task of migrating all of Prison Fellowship’s DNS to Cloudflare, which presented a new challenge: deciding between their Pro and Business level plans. After extensive research and several enlightening sessions with ChatGPT, I concluded that the Pro plan would adequately meet our needs for the time being.
AWS AURORA VS. REDSHIFT FOR DATA WAREHOUSING
At work we are looking into moving from a data dumping ground into a real data warehouse solution. So this took me down a rabbit hole of what should we use to host this ever expanding database? Since we are hosting in AWS two commonly considered AWS services for analytical workloads are Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift. While both are powerful, they serve different purposes and are optimized for different types of workloads. So to sort out which way to go, here’s a brief overview of the two solutions that helped me work through this decision:
MIGRATING K8S FROM GP2 TO GP3
At work we have a Stackgres kuberentes cluster that hosts our postgres databases. This allows for high availability, easy data recovery and generally is pretty easy to manage. I admit that when I first started looking at postgres on Kubernetes I was pretty skeptical but it’s honestly given me very little to complain about. It does have some issues due to how the cluster was initially configured that I am planning to fix in the future.
TRAEFIK ADVENTURES
At work I was looking into ways to decrease our AWS Public IP usage. We, along with the rest of the world were hit with monthly cost of using too many IP addresses. And it was not a total surprise since AWS announced this was coming, the price tag was a bit of shock though as I hadn’t realized how many Public IP’s we were using.
AWS SOLUTION ARCHITECT PROFESSIONAL
I had let my AWS Solution Architect Professional certification expire as I didn’t have a lot of spare time during my previous role. So I figured now with my surplus of time I would work on renewing it.
ONE YEAR OF MAILCOW
I’ve been hosting my personal domain’s email on Mailcow for over a year now after Google apps started charging for their service and I have to say it works pretty good. I had an good architecture to start but needed to iterate on the design of the infrastructure. A few things that changed was I did swap out EFS for a 2nd EBS data volume that was dynamically attached at EC2 boot time. I moved my s3 back backups into glacier to reduce costs. And I did end up needing to upgrade my Ec2 to larger instance, I still need to revisit the metrics on this to determine if it was really necessary. But you know how it is when you break something and the family is using it… you hear about it.
SITE IS BACK
The year of stress and crazy is over and I wanted to get back to working on this blog. I refreshed the theme with something simpler and updated the pipeline… Now I just need to write some content.
REPLACING GOOGLE WORKSPACES
So with the announcement that my freeloading for email hosting on Google is coming to an end I decided to go down the road of setting up my own email server as I figured since I was going to have to pay for email going forward why not just host it. Is this a good idea? I’m not sure, it seems like there are lots of blog posts that tell you not to host your own email but in my situation I have several custom domains that i was feeding into google with around 20 family freeloaders users and cost became an issue.
MY FIRST POST
So I wanted to play with some new tools and needed a blog or some sort of website to allow me to test things. So if you have found your way to this blog use at your own peril.