There have been some changes since my last post about CG’s coffee maker. We’ve gotten a new “machine” that’s much simpler. It’s easier to understand and less likely to break down. It’s a 10 cup Chemex that we use with an electric kettle.

The Chemex is really easy to use. Heat up water in the kettle, position a filter in the top of the vessel, add coffee grounds, and pour hot water over it (a little at first, to let it bloom, then as much as you want to make). Sweet Maria’s has an excellent guide on making coffee with a Chemex.

This is week two of our Chemex experience. So far the kitchen is cleaner, the brew is stronger, and the coffee-notify mailing list is more active. Sure, it takes a little longer to make a pot, but I feel like it makes us more mindful of what we’re doing. Apparently we’re not the only ones that have recently switched to the Chemex.

I suppose the next steps are to grind our own beans (by hand of course). We’ll see what we can do. Stay caffeinated my friends.

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Our coffeemaker is broken.

Coffee is a big deal at CG. Most of our geeks pride themselves on being caffeinated and with the coffee machine down panic is on the rise.

The thing about this is that it’s not the actual coffeemaker that is broken, it’s the grinder built into the coffee machine that is having issues. We have a fancy machine that grinds coffee right before brewing it. When it’s working it’s pretty magical — nothing tastes quite like freshly brewed coffee made from freshly ground beans. It happens automatically and other than the noise from the grinder we don’t even know that it’s there.

When the machine is down it’s obvious. Some of us need coffee to work. We are dependent on that machine.

Thinking about the caffeine situation in the office made me wonder about other pieces of technology that we’re dependent on. Our email software runs in the cloud on Google’s computer. Our data traverses networks and is converted to light, microwaves, electricity and back again before it arrives at its destination. Do you know how an email sent from your phone is routed to its destination? What other things does technology do for us automatically that we don’t notice? Heck, I can’t even remember my wife’s phone number — my phone does it for me.

Someone sent me an article the other day entitled, “The Cloud Fails Again.” In the article, John Dvorak complains that a power outage left him unable to function because all of his data and services existed in the cloud and not in his own machine. He goes on to describe a “priesthood” of systems administrators that has existed since the early days of computing whose sole purpose is to “beat back the individualism” that desktop computers brought to all of us.

I was unaware that this cabal existed (if you are a member, please send me an invite) and I feel like the advances that technology has brought us in life, business and communication are really amazing. We live in a magical world. But even though the advances are great, they have made us completely dependent on technology. I think Dvorak’s article is a pretty good example for people who rely on technology and refuse to invest in their own infrastructure. In other words, we need to understand what we’re using so that we can evaluate the risks and benefits of using it.

Control Group’s mission is to help people and their organizations better understand and utilize their technology so they can be more efficient. That’s why Control Group is a great place to work — even when the coffee machine is down.

Our engineers were able to create a temporary workaround for the coffee situation. We’re also not exactly stranded in a coffee-free wasteland: Kaffe 1668 and The Blue Spoon are within walking distance. So, no worries, we’ll stay jittery.

Image via coffeeaddict/Flickr

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We have been doing some work with with Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) which allows us to create virtual machines in the cloud in a few seconds. These are great for hosting websites, and what’s cool about them is that if you get Slashdotted or experience a similar unexpected spike in traffic you can create new hosts immediately. Recently Amazon added a new service called Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) which can distribute load across hosts. We’ve been looking at this for some of our recent development and infrastructure projects.

I just read this description of how ELB works by Shlomo Swidler from his Cloud Developer Tips blog. It’s a great reference.

You pay for ELB by usage just like everything else at AWS. From Amazon: “You are charged at $0.025 per hour for each Elastic Load Balancer, plus $0.008 per GB of data transferred through an Elastic Load Balancer.” For reference, on a deployment project in 2008 our Engineering team used a Cisco load balancer which I imagine cost a few thousand bucks.

Cost isn’t the only advantage. These can be created and destroyed quickly and remotely, allowing us to work more efficiently and spend less time visiting data centers in the middle of nowhere. This leads to improved quality of service for our clients as we can spend more time consulting on future technology growth plans and less time troubleshooting servers in cold, loud data centers.

This blog post brought to you by the iced coffee I am enjoying in the comfort and quiet of my office while deploying virtual machines!

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Thanks, Elizabeth, for this office-wide memo on current coffee status levels at CG HQ:

Coffee Status = Yellow
2lbs in office – 10lbs next week. Please brew responsibly.

• Green = Surplus
• Yellow = Limited Coffee Grounds
• Orange = Last Pot
• Red = No coffee

And thanks, Dave, for this graph illustrating Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level.

Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level

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