Database and Storage

 

The main components of computer are Central Processing Unit (CPU), Memory, and Storage. With comparison to human brain, CPU is the core part in charge of thought processes, Memory takes part of the short-term memory assisting these processes, and Storage covers the long-term memory storing information about experiences and knowledge. The computer server is composed of them while proportion of each component depends on the work duty of each server. A personal computer (PC) contains these three components together with a smaller scale inside it. People are often confused with the difference between the database (DB) server and the storage server because they tend to think both functions are the same or similar to each other whereas they take a part of different roles from each other. 

The DB server deals with sorting the data which must be ready to be downloaded, uploaded, and queried at any time the task is carried out inside this server network. Its weight on CPU and Memory is relatively higher than the storage server specialising in Storage. The DB server needs constant electricity supply all the time for running its CPU and Memory. There are basically two types of database, the vertically scalable database for the structured datasets, sorted out by the specialised programming language such as the Standard Query Language (SQL), and the horizontally scalable database for non-structured datasets. The former is good at the complex processes of handling the datasets required to be properly structured whilst the latter is for handling the multiple kinds of large datasets together at once. There are also furthermore specialised DB servers for such as data analysis, chart creation, data transfer, and data warehousing requiring a complex data query. In particular nowadays, the big data handling is so demanded all the more that an independent DB function each purpose is necessary to equip. Therefore, each independent DB server for each specialised task is more required than before. 

The storage server is for storing various sorts of information including the information of the already processed data and the archive memories of any workload of the entire server network. Although it does not need a constant electric supply, there is a required process for querying the information query. For example, with reference to Amazon Web Service (AWS), Amazon Athena, the interactive query service applying the standard SQL for analysis, is used for calling the storage service of AWS called Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The snapshots of various archives are stored there as a backup for a sufficiently long time period, which requires the process for restoring them. The logs of actions taking places in a server network are often stored in the storage service because the quantity created for the logs is huge and they have to be stored without being modified for a long-term. A static website, not needing a constant feed of streaming data, can be located in the storage server such as Amazon S3 instead of the server instance such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2).

Overall, focusing on the difference between their tasks, it clarifies the difference between DB and storage specialising in their own unique tasks borne to each other. Specialised DB is demanded for various specialised data handling tasks. Various compliance issues demand a durable storage capable to store the information set with a substantially high volume in a sufficiently long term. The key to understand it is to understand the factors of these computer components.

Democracy of the modern world under challenge

 "Liberal Democracy V.S. Authoritarian" is a hotly debated topic especially while China and Russia involving their peer alliance non-democratic nations intensively interfere in various foreign affairs nowadays. In the meantime, both the words "Democracy" and "Liberal" are frankly quoted as the counterpart nations of these authoritarian nations ruled by an iron fist of one party or any other autocratic figure. Therefore, it is suspicious to define whether or not these so-called Liberal Democratic nations are truly liberal as well as democratic as what these original words' definition implies.

The point to be critically evaluated here is that almost all those nations are administrated under indirect democracy which selects the limited number of representatives controlling over the political affairs. Perhaps, Switzerland might be only the democratic nation involving the majority citizens actively participating in their political affairs nowadays. Politics of the other "democratic" nations is handled by the chosen elites called politicians self-proclaiming to represent the majority citizens. However, it is often questionable to define as truly representing the majority individual citizens. 

Technically, these citizens are entitled to cast their vote to select these politicians as their representatives. Nevertheless, in reality, indirect democracy hardly represents the majority citizens. In particular, those with the constituency based electoral system seldom represents their majority citizens proportional to their population. Even by adopting the proportional representation to their electoral system, it is still difficult to satisfy elected politicians proportionally representing the citizens. Politicians may manipulate their fellow citizens for their own favour rather than what these citizens really need and want. Politicians often form their factional group which selects opinions matching with this group interest while excluding each individual's own will. 

At the same time, it is also critical to evaluate that democracy does not always imply fulfilling individual liberty. There is a risk that some institutionalised citizens from their own peer group to marginalise the other individual citizens for their favour propped up by their peer pressure as same as the aforementioned politicians. In order to secure liberty for each autonomous individual's sovereign, it may require an invincible ethical principle promoting their decision-making process as a guideline while enabling politics to represent their opinion. This sounds like a religion, but this should be the morally neutral principle not favouring any particular religious organisation. 

The modern complex institutional structure demands the centralised bureaucracy requiring the elites highly trained with a complex skill as well as the friendly connection and apprenticeship with the elders of this established structure to administrate the entire politics. Therefore, this inevitably needs to select those specialising in political organisational skills and connections with their factional peer groups whereas the rest majority are often ostracised from these influential peer groups. The true nature of the modern indirect democracy is much closer to that aristocracy or oligarchy rather than what democracy really means. All in all, the modern indirect democracy tends to be diverting from what both democracy and liberalism attempt to accomplish.

Nowadays, instead of relying on the centralised political organisation such as nation state government, it will be more efficient to adopt a decentralised administration system propped up with the spontaneous interferences among individuals as as the peer-to-peer (P2P) system. Due to the current remarkable information technological (IT) development, it is more possible to organise the decision-making process at each non-scheduled scattered time period than the past relying on the congregations of representatives gathered at a scheduled time. It is really questionable to insist on the need of replying on the representation by politicians and bureaucrats nowadays. 

Both (the modern indirect) democracy and authoritarian can be obsolete already. Each individual will be able to directly reflect their opinion over the networks of where they want to reflect it upon The furthermore developed IT will help sorting out individuals' opinions and efficiently optimising resource-distribution plans. It will even no longer require a political congregation of direct democracy seen in the ancient Athens because each political decision-making is processed at each spontaneous time, place, and occasion by means of its need and want. This new ideal is a combination of anarchism by individuals and technocracy by the IT resources. 

The new alternative to religion will emerge to fulfil the ideal of liberalising each individual in the world. As all the individuals are connected to each other across the borders more than ever, their spontaneous interactions will bring up the shared objectives and guidelines not bound to their distinctive traditional religious, ethical, and social norms and values. As Aristotle said, human being are naturally social, the naturally derived spontaneous interactions of human individuals will induce them to voluntarily create their own minimum required guidelines and rules necessary to prevent them from unnecessary conflicts and miscommunications. Then, even without a paternalistic intervention, they will find their own optimum method of forming consensus through their own try and error. 

Sum up, describing the modern indirect democratic nations as "Liberal Democratic" is questionable. These indirect democratic nations are not quite identical to the true characteristic of what the word "Liberal Democracy" should be derived from. The border splitting individuals out itself is already an obsolete element disrupting the true liberal democracy spontaneously formed among individuals. Hence, the dispute over "Liberal Democracy" and authoritarian is not essential to consider accomplishing the true ideal of liberal democracy in general.

To divert Stagflation, the conservative macroeconomic measure prevails

 

The whole world is struggling with Stagflation which is derived from the combination of two words, stagnation (of the output) and (the price) inflation. This is also called the bad price inflation by all the economic theoretical perspectives regardless of their controversiality of defining the inflation effect on economy. The lacking aggregate supply repressing economy causes both the cost push for the suppliers and the real income depreciation of consumers and investors. This is the macroeconomic phenomenon nobody welcomes.

The last major Stagflation in the past took place in 1970s when the oil price shot up while the dependency of the major economies on the oil was already substantially high. At that time, many economists especially from the self-proclaimed liberal side or the left-leaning side supported to increase the aggregate demand. Their assumption supported the Philips curve theory assuming that the price inflation rate and the unemployment rate are negatively correlated to each other. Their main reasons are the inflations lowers the real wage of employees (i.e., the cost of employers to hire), and also stimulates the entire market economic activities. Then, they suggested that the perpetuation of the inflation was more tolerate-able than the perpetuation of the declining output.

These pro-inflationary economists expect that the inflation of both the demand push (good) and the supply short (bad) stimulates the market economy with a high incentive of consumption, investment, and production supply. Then, this stimulated market multiplier is anticipated to increase the output growth which offsets all the negative effects of the inflation. Therefore, instead of controlling the inflation, they tolerated the ongoingly rising inflation by overestimating the positive effects while underestimating the negative effects of leaving the high inflation at the contemporary time period. This is why they advised the contemporary government to inject more money instead of tightening it.

Nevertheless, in reality, the negative effects of the price inflation such as increasing  suppliers' costs and depreciating the real income of citizens were more significant than their assumed positive effects. The inflation has rather discouraged the production motivation of suppliers because of the surging cost prices. The incentive of consumers' consumption expenditure and asset investment was hardly stimulated. These citizens rather suffered from the lack of reasonable employment opportunity and the depreciation of their real income taking account of their living cost. The excess money backed up by the government expenditure flowing into the contemporary economy did not seem to have improved the quality of the contemporary socioeconomic environments.

This is the time that the anti-inflationary conservative economic theorists, most notably Monetarists, emerged as the counter-revolutionary against these self-proclaimed liberals and the left leaning economists. They claimed for the extermination of the price inflation even by incurring the negative output gap (slowing or penalising an economic production level) in the short run. Their conservative measure against the inflation was detested by many contemporary citizens whereas it succeeded in stimulating the macroeconomic performance deserving these citizens in consequence later.

First of all, the interest rate must rise for suppressing the excess flow of money even as well as preventing the real interest rate from being substantially low. Secondly, they are highly sceptical about the positive effects of the price inflation such as the incentive for suppliers supplying more and the motivation of investors and consumers purchasing more. Instead, they insist on the bad side effects of the perpetuated inflation rather than the temporary shrinking output level.

 Nowadays, the US government and the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) as well as the European central banks are aware of this lesson in the past so that they decided to raise the interest rate and tighten the money supply even by slowing the economy down further with still hunting socioeconomic sufferings from the pandemic. What the current US government under the Democratic party administration is imposing some unnecessary regulations on business activities in spite of the still stagnant world economy, which seems to be rather irrelevant to suppressing the inflation. Therefore, the current US policy of the interest rate as well as the quantitative tightening are something not to blame for the current stagnant performance of the US economic policy.

On the other hand, the current Japanese government performance under this currently ongoing Stagflation is notably poor. They are reluctant to raise the interest rate even with both the surging price inflation and the Japanese Yen (JPY) value depreciation in the foreign exchange. The reason of both the current government and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) rejecting the interest rate rise has been explained in another article so please kindly find it to read. In addition, they still keep their loose money supply as favouring their peer corporations while the majority Japanese citizens are suffering from the income shortage in their daily life. 

The other suspicious phenomenon is that the opposition parties present no effective policy against the current stagnation. In Japan, no party promises to raise the interest rate at all whereas their manifesting policies are only the temporary countermeasure against this ongoing Stagflation such as tax cut. Even if tax cut may offsets the real income depreciation by sparing the disposable income, the steadily increasing price level caused by the surging costs of both domestic suppliers and imports will depreciate their income furthermore in the middle run. Moreover, investors are less likely to split their extra income gained from tax cut to invest it into their domestic capital market because the currently ongoing currency depreciation is steadily reducing the assets value in the domestic market.

In the meantime, Japanese politicians should be concentrated on tackling Stagflation at first for the time being. The interest rate rise as well as the quantitative tightening are supposed to be implemented.  In particular, the money supply to those corporations of the government peer group must be tightened because it seems to be excess and unnecessary under the current macroeconomic environment. Otherwise, the damage which Japan and its majority citizens will suffer will be even more severe soon. Their real income depreciation will keep steadily impoverishing the majority Japanese citizens.

In conclusion, the pragmatic policy implementation is the key to solve the suddenly emerging problem by referring to the past example of solving it. At the time of Stagflation in particular, the conservative measure is worth implementing even through not supporting the conservative policies in general.

As a service (●aaS) via the public cloud

 

The information technology (IT) services are categorised into various levels nowadays. At this time, the business models providing customers and clients with the services via the online connection such as the internet rather than using services only within the on-premises environment. Most notably, there are three categories of services, the software as a service (SaaS), the platform as a service (PaaS), and the infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Nowadays, many IT service providers offer the subscription service available online rather than the offline purchasing. The notable advantages are agility, availability, and scalability of the resource preparation as well as reliance on the providers for the content and security update and the physical space saving for the physical stuff. The shared access offered by the public cloud is now popular than ever.

The internet connection is not only the online connection option. There is a service called the direct connect connecting users' computer and the server network of the provider located in a remote data centre. The internet connection requires to secure the connection security preventing various incidents such as data breach and information fraud as well as the available IP address allocated to this connection. Then, the direct connect service to the public cloud system is often preferred in order to keep the stable access with an efficient financial cost per use (the internet connection tends to be more expensive for a regular high volume information transaction). For example, there is a movement for various financial institutes to shift their crypto asset management from the internet connection to the direct connect access to the specialised data centre. 

The most familiar service may be the SaaS because it is convenient for users to start using it. The software is already prepared by the providers so that they can simply use the ready-made application and data by just accessing it. Many companies adopt the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) outsourced as subscribing to this service via online instead of purchasing cartridge, CD, or the licence cord offering the software product. The disadvantage is its inflexibility of customisation and modification of applications and data adapted to the users' own requirements and environments.

The PaaS offers a more flexible service for customising and modifying applications and data via the platform composed of the operating system (OS) e.g., Microsoft (MS) Windows, middleware, and runtime is ready. When MS introduced its public cloud service MS Azure, many people thought its compatibility with the commonly distributed OS, the MS Windows, would be high. By contrast, the operation system and its server network architecture may require more flexibility enough to customise their own platform. Then, the IaaS introduced in the next paragraph can be the option.

The IaaS has become popular for the IT engineers to install since Amazon introduced its public cloud service called Amazon Web Service (AWS). The notable benefit is reducing the workloads for maintenance and security update as well as saving space and labour for the physical infrastructure composed of servers, databases, and their network in their on-premises. It is even beneficial to combine the already established on-premises environment and the public cloud services as a hybrid. Another notable useful point is Autoscaling elastically adjusting the volume use by means of its fluctuant demand, which is beneficial not only for the access and service maintenance management but also the financial accounting including the cost calculation and the tax payment. Because AWS was the first pioneer having popularised the public service, this seems to be the main business core of Amazon nowadays. 

In conclusion, considering these characteristics, it is predicted that more businesses will shift their IT basis to this "as a service" due to their convenience and resource scalability. In one of the Bank of England press conferences in 2021, the adoption of the public cloud services by many major private banks was hotly debated. Regardless of its controversy over the national compliance issues, it seems to be the unstoppable inevitable phenomenon across the border in 2020s like the globalisation movement of socio-economy seen in 2000s.

Autoscaling

 * Without Autoscaling: The fixed cost approach

 * With Autoscaling: The variable cost approach

Autoscaling is one of the remarkable advantages of using the public cloud because of its elasticity of the volume usage. This factor is also beneficial by means of the financial accounting.  However, Autoscaling is not that perfect as much as the salespersons from the public cloud providers advertise.  This short essay picks up the typical benefits and challenges of installing the public cloud especially because of its Autoscaling.

Autoscaling is a notable advantage of the public cloud which is usually emphasised in the introductory guideline of the public cloud advertisement. First of all, it allows its users to elastically adjust their quantity usage at each time period, instead of fixing the quality usage, depending on the fluctuant quantity demanded at each time period. This is useful to avoid both the dead-weight of the volume usage while the low access traffic and the volume shortage while the high access traffic.

Focusing on the accounting aspect, it can covert its usage cost to the variable operational cost instead of the capital or fixed-cost = liability. In many cases, it is often advantageous because it is likely to avoid paying the high tax levied onto the capital expenditure. By contrast, the cost covered for the public cloud is often accounted as the variable operational cost which is actually useful to reduce the total tax payment. Regardless of the total cost amount, in many administrative accounting cases, it provides individuals and their firms with the tax payment advantages.

At the same time, Autoscaling does not perfectly work as the textbooks and the introductory guideline of the public cloud explains. In reality, there is a limit of calling for extra instances at once because there is a certain maximum number of the server instances within a certain time period e.g., being able to call 5 instances per minute. There is a physical barrier of scaling the instances depending on each situation.

Furthermore, there is a case that the load balancer misjudges the health check of each connected server instance and the access control. This load balancer can accidentally call unwanted instances by falsely detecting as broken, deleted, or over-capacity or some errors of the monitoring tools and the metric/log information. In addition, there can also be a human error of typing the programmes of directing the traffic control or the security/monitoring setup. This may incur a considerable financial disadvantage of excess instances called by Autoscaling. 

All in all, the Autoscaling mechanism is still an attractive characteristic of using the public cloud to optimise the operational availability as well as the financial efficiency. Nevertheless, it must take an account of the dysfunctions of Autoscaling such as the latency of calling the instances and the extra possible costs caused by both machinery and human errors. On the top of what the salespersons and the textbooks indicate, the users had better refer to the actual experiences of its real application.

Let's be sceptical about Corporate Capitalism!

 

The current world socio-economic situation can be expressed by the quote of Friedrich Nietzsche "God is dead." as the invisible hand of God explained by Adam Smith no longer corrects the distribution flow of labour and capital in the spontaneous order of the laissez-faire market. The gravestone of its death is created out of the current gigantic economies of scale for the majority of existing industries. Moreover, the courage of individual economic agents is undermined in front of the staunch fortress fortified with allows and spikes of high skill-set requirements and the massive wall of the barriers to the market entrant imposed by bureaucracy and regulations protecting the corporate tycoons dominating their strong hold. 

The current form of the market economy is oligopolistic where a few numbers of elite oligarchies secure their dominance. This is because that they can take an advantage of their huge economies of scale basing their factors of production which enables them to drastically expand their quantity and brand name of their products superior to those smaller rivals. Although their offering goods and services with their high quality and fast speed are beneficial for the majority individuals to enjoy, the market entry for any new entrant to compete with these already established corporations has become significantly more discouraged than the past. In another word, the world socio-economy basing these individuals' life is then more dependent on these corporate oligarchies staying in the market for a long term. 

The social mobility of individuals nowadays is more discouraged than a few decades ago because there is a huge gap between those who are fortunate enough to obtain the skill-sets required by the market and the others not fortunate enough. Each individual's own competence, effort, and motivation are no longer enough to outperform in the current market competition because it requires the significantly higher financial and time costs to secure their competitive advantage than the past. It is not only the matter of material well-beings but also the accessible information available in their living community determine their fortune of acquiring their initiative. Therefore, it requires the public management to offer a certain degree of the equality in outcome to accomplish the equality in opportunity. 

The good old days of the laissez-faire free market capitalism are gone. Instead, the more static socioeconomic political form of the corporate capitalism has come. Rather than the free-minded courageous individual economic agents, the already established aristocrats called corporate shareholders and government bureaucrats secure their dominance. Majority individuals now belong to one big institute of either corporation or government. Even small/medium sized business owners are working under the subcontract with either a bigger corporation or government. The profit share of these corporations is heavily distributed to major shareholders and corporate executives instead of rewarding majority individual workforce members propping up the daily business activities. Therefore, the priority on rewording the merit of individual workforces tends to be undermined under the current socio-economic structure.

It sounds like being a big government advocate by claiming for more positive public interventions. However, its attempt is to avoid the excess centralisation of the capital flows monopolised by corporatist oligarchies and the unfair heavy regulations imposed by government bureaucrats protecting their interest. Without this intervention, the government will become even bigger under the influence of these corporate oligarchies as their political influence is overwhelming the others with relatively less advantages. This should be the intervention to decentralise the whole socio-economic structure to encourage more healthy and fair competitions which the laissez-faire capitalism of the good old days used to promote. 

What the big government advocates such as the orthodox Marxists should be criticised is their excess centralisation of the means of production. Even though they have an originally good will of deserving the majority, it often fails to deserve the majority because this centralised political system put higher priority on deserving those elite bureaucrats at first. This failure of the centralised means of production takes place under the current corporatist capitalism due to its excessively centralised flow of the capital. 

As John Maynard Keynes affirmed, the reform of optimising the balance of private and public sector with the positive intervention to the market with a right harmony is the key to enable the free as well as the fair market economy to survive. Yet, the Keynesian policy also contains the risk of failing into the paternalism by the central government conducting the intervention. Then, it will be necessary to spread the policy decision makings out to much smaller scale such as local authorities and cooperatives. 

The power weight of the public corporations over the private corporation is way more excess than the past. The dominance of the investors/shareholders of these public corporations induces the asymmetric distribution of their profit share which undermines the contribution by the majority individual workforces. The initiative attracting these investors is necessary whilst the distribution weight of the profit share provision is overweighted onto them nowadays. In order to appreciate the contribution by these majority individuals providing the actual workforces, their reward should be derived from not only the labour costs but also some pies from the profit share.

It should also take reviving small and medium sized enterprises into consideration. The oligopoly of the major private banks perpetuates the public corporations' dominance over the private corporations of small and medium sized businesses. This is another reason to shift the economic and political power to the local authority and cooperative which are able to monitor the business performance of their local enterprises as they are located close to each other. Instead of merely relying on the major private banks, rending and legal support from the local authority and cooperative should be more available. The initiative of expanding the decentralised public sector is to encourage more private businesses of not only the big public corporations but also the multiple numbers of the private corporations. 

All in all, it is the time to be sceptical about the big government of the market monopoly! Majority individuals need to capture the power by empowering the decentralised public managements to counter the centralised public body by the puppet government of these corporatist aristocrats. The grass-root political lobbying must take place to capture the socio-economic freedom of majority individuals!!