Netflix now available worldwide, Cyprus too

These are super exciting news – Netflix now available worldwide, Cyprus too!  For those who don’t know this service, Netflix is basically the Google of the TV series and movies.  Until recently it was only available in US, UK, and very few other locations, but now they’ve expanded to 130 countries more.

netflix pricing cy

For 8 EUR a month you get an unlimited access to all their movies and TV shows.  You can stream content to your TV, laptop, tablet, or phone, and for a couple of extra euros you can even watch stuff on more than one screen simultaneously!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Today Russia and a few other countries celebrate Christmas, so I’d like to take this chance to wish Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone still in the holiday mood.

I usually take the time around these days to review the year gone and to make a wishlist for the upcoming one.  But the year gone was mostly spent at work, which I summed up in the post “One year at Qobo” back in August.  Since then nothing much changed – it’s just been work, work, work.  And most of the out-of-work stuff was personal enough for me not to share it online.

So that’s about it.  My three wishes for the 2016 are:

  • I wish for everyone I know (and don’t know) to stay healthy.  Being sick, getting injured and being kicked out of life aren’t fun things to experience or watch.
  • I wish the momentum that we were building up at work starts picking up.  We’ve done plenty to get this thing rolling, and it feels like it’s about to. It would be awesome if it does this year!
  • I wish to travel a bit more.  I’ve done plenty of travels in 2014, visiting 4 countries in summer, but I haven’t been off the island since.  It’d be nice to go to a conference or something.

That’s about it.  Merry Christmas and a Happy New 2016! Cheers!

Jetpack annual report for mamchenkov.net in 2015

This year’s Jetpack annual report for this blog is ready – have a look.  Here’s a teaser:

blog stats 2015

It’s been a busy year, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I wanted to, but overall, I think I did good (have a look at 2014 and 2013).  Just to give you a quick comparison:

Metric 2013 2014 2015
Visitors 58,000 81,000 96,000
Posts 560 628 541

I blog mostly for myself, but it’s nice to see a slight grow in traffic. Although the fact that the most popular post in this blog throughout the years – how to check Squid proxy version – is a little concerning, yet funny.  Well, at least people still find my “Vim for Perl developers” useful, even though it’s been more than 10 years since I wrote that (and probably five years since I promised to update it soon).

But as I said, I’m quite satisfied with my blogging this year.  Hopefully I can continue to do the same in 2016.

 

5 AWS mistakes you should avoid

“5 AWS mistakes you should avoid” is a rather opinionated piece on what you should and shouldn’t do with your infrastructure, especially, when using AWS.  Here’s an example:

A typical web application consists of at least:

  • load balancer
  • scalable web backend
  • database

and looks like the following figure.

typical-web-application

This pattern is very common and if yours look different you should have (strong) reasons.

It’s all good advice in there, but it comes from a very narrow perspective.  The “mistakes” are:

  • managing infrastructure manually
  • not using Auto Scaling Groups
  • not analyzing metrics in CloudWatch
  • ignoring Trusted Advisor
  • underutilizing virtual machines