Why Amazon should get into the dedicated server business
Amazon ECS is a great way to scale an application quickly; being able to
spin up 20 front-end web servers or 30 back end compute engines quickly
is terrific and the cost savings from being able to keep them running
for as short a time as you need are undeniable. But as I noted in an
earlier post there are a few dark clouds ...
In particular even a High-CPU Instance performs relatively slowly
compared to a dedicated core 2 duo server. In our case we found it to be
30% slower. Many others have reported performance issues resulting from
the slow cpu to disk bandwidth available on a virtualized disk system
like EBS.
For tasks where latency matters or you need a better disk performance a
dedicated server is simply a better choice. The snag is that that server
has to be off in some other data center and you have to pass all your
data back and forth over the internet to Amazon ECS or S3 you hit more
slowdowns and you incur more bandwidth costs.
The solution is simple and I think it makes good business sense.
Amazon should get into the dedicated server business. If Amazon
offered dedicated servers hosted in its datacenters with free back-end
bandwidth to Amazon S3 and ECS instances I predict they would pick up a
significant chunk of the dedicated server market overnight.
With a hybrid approach like this you could put your database cluster on
a few dedicated servers and spin up front-end web-servers and back-end
compute engines as necessary without any compromises on latency or disk
performance.
Digital Twin are an online representation of a real world object, a copy of its properties in the digital world and a way to send updated and commands to it. In effect I've been making them for years but now they have a trendy name.
Why automated learning is hard for a smart home. The perils of over-fitting, under-fitting and how the general unpredictable nature of life makes it hard to build a system that learns your behavior.
One way to reduce the volume of sensor data is to remove redundant points. In a system with timestamped data recorded on an irregular interval we can achieve this by removing co-linear points.
Home automation systems need to respond to events in the real world. Sometimes it's an analog value, sometimes it's binary, rarely is it clean and not susceptible to problems. Let's discuss some of the ways to convert these inputs into actions.
Another super useful function for handling sensor data and converting to probabilities is the logistic function 1/(1+e^-x). Using this you can easily map values onto a 0.0-1.0 probability range.
In a home automation system we often want to convert a measurement into a probability. The ATAN curve is one of my favorite curves for this as it's easy to map overything onto a 0.0-1.0 range.
Several years ago we did a major remodel. I did all of the finish electrical myself and supervised all of the rough-in electrical. I also put in all of the electrical system and water in our barn. I have opinions ...
