Velocity

Managing multiple sources of truth in distributed applications

Managing multiple sources of truth in distributed applications

November 30, 2019

When building distributed applications, it's highly desirable to maintain a single source of truth, such as a database, for all application state. Unfortunately, for some applications, multiple sources of truth are unavoidable. Adam Wolfe Gordon shares strategies, learned from real-world experience, for managing multiple sources of truth without sacrificing consistency and usability.
Migrating Spotify's runtime to Kubernetes

Migrating Spotify's runtime to Kubernetes

November 30, 2019

Spotify recently completed the migration of all services from running on bare-metal hardware to hosts in the cloud on GCP. Spotify is now in the exciting process of journeying from merely cloud hosted to cloud native via migrating the running of services to Kubernetes. James Wen discusses the work involved, lessons learned, and pitfalls encountered in moving services onto Kubernetes.
ML on code: Machine learning will change programming

ML on code: Machine learning will change programming

November 30, 2019

Machine learning has revolutionized many fields, from cancer detection to self-driving cars. And let's not forget about connected toilets that allow Alexa to flush at your command. Francesc Campoy Flores explores some of the techniques used and the most relevant research, focusing on use cases where machine learning can help developers be more efficient.
Pat Helland and me: How to build stateful distributed applications that can scale almost infinitely

Pat Helland and me: How to build stateful distributed applications that can scale almost infinitely

November 30, 2019

In 2007, Pat Helland published "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostates Opinion," in which he conducts a thought experiment on how to design a distributed database that can scale almost infinitely. While the paper explicitly addresses distributed database design, Sean Allen shows that the ideas are far more widely applicable, particularly in scaling stateful applications.
Performance anomaly detection at scale (sponsored by Salesforce)

Performance anomaly detection at scale (sponsored by Salesforce)

November 30, 2019

Automated anomaly detection in production using simple data science techniques enables you to more quickly identify an issue and reduce the time it takes to get customers out of an outage. Tuli Nivas shows how to apply simple statistics to change how performance data is viewed and how to easily and effectively identify issues in production.
Practical performance theory

Practical performance theory

November 30, 2019

Performance theory offers a rigorous and practical approach to performance tuning and capacity planning. Kavya Joshi dives into elegant results like Littles law and the Universal Scalability Law. You'll also discover how performance theory is used in real systems at companies like Facebook and learn how to leverage it to prepare your systems for flux and scale.
Rebuilding the airplane in flight. . .safely

Rebuilding the airplane in flight. . .safely

November 29, 2019

Rewriting the key software component of your platform from scratch is always intimidating. Shannon Weyrick and James Royalty discuss NS1's recent DNS server rewrite and outline the steps the company took to roll it out across its globally distributed network with no downtime.
Revisiting HTTP/2

Revisiting HTTP/2

November 29, 2019

Now that adoption is ramped up and HTTP/2 is being regularly used on the internet, it's a good time to revisit the protocol and its deployment. Hooman Beheshti reviews protocol basics and digs into core features such as interaction with TCP, server push, priorities and dependencies, and HPACK.
Sell cron, buy Airflow: Modern data pipelines in finance

Sell cron, buy Airflow: Modern data pipelines in finance

November 29, 2019

Quantopian integrates financial data from vendors around the globe. As the scope of its operations outgrew cron, the company turned to Apache Airflow, a distributed scheduler and task executor. James Meickle explains how in less than six months, Quantopian was able to rearchitect brittle crontabs into resilient, recoverable pipelines defined in code to which anyone could contribute.
Serverless APIs with AWS Lambda and API Gateway

Serverless APIs with AWS Lambda and API Gateway

November 29, 2019

Serverless architectures remove load from web servers and scale flawlessly to handle any volume while keeping you from paying for an instant of wasted idle time. Bill Boulden walks you through creating a functioning serverless API that coexists alongside conventionally served web pages using AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
SLO burn

SLO burn

November 29, 2019

Jamie Wilkinson offers a brief overview of SLOs, shares a practical guide to implementing sustainable SLO-based alerting for systems of any size, and outlines the tooling required to supplement the system in the absence of cause-based alerting.
Small-scale engineering

Small-scale engineering

November 29, 2019

Effie Mouzeli explains why small-scale engineering is just as challenging as large-scale engineering and offers ideas on how to survive technical debt, poor communication, and other everyday challenges.
Smart networking with service meshes

Smart networking with service meshes

November 29, 2019

Over the past year, service meshes have gained significant interest. Most service meshes have two components: a control plane and a data plane. Anubhav Mishra explains what it takes to build a scalable control and data plane. Anubhav also discusses how HashiCorp Consul provides many features like a distributed key-value store and service discovery that make it ideal for a control plane.
Smooth scaling: Slacks journey toward a new database

Smooth scaling: Slacks journey toward a new database

November 29, 2019

Slacks rapid growth over the last few years outpaced the original databases scaling capacity, which negatively impacted the company's customers and engineers. Ameet Kotian explains how a small team of engineers embarked on a journey for the right database solution, which eventually led them to Vitess, an open source cluster database.
Strategies for better technical interviews

Strategies for better technical interviews

November 29, 2019

Technical interviewing is profoundly important, but unfortunately, it's easy to do poorly and very difficult to do well. Moishe Lettvin outlines strategies for reducing bias and increasing the fidelity of your technical interviews.
Switching horses midstream: The challenges of migrating 150+ microservices to Kubernetes

Switching horses midstream: The challenges of migrating 150+ microservices to Kubernetes

November 29, 2019

The Financial Times recently migrated its content platform to Kubernetes. Join Sarah Wells to find out what it takes to migrate 150+ microservices from one container stack to another without affecting the existing production users and while the rest of your teams are working on delivering new functionality.
A practical guide to monitoring and alerting with time series at scale

A practical guide to monitoring and alerting with time series at scale

November 28, 2019

Monitoring only sucks when the cost of maintenance scales proportionally with the size of the system being monitored. Recently, tools have emerged that assist with scaling out monitoring configurations sublinearly with the size of the system. Jamie Wilkinson explores time series-based alerting and offers practical examples that can be employed in your environment today.
A young lady's illustrated primer to technical decision making

A young lady's illustrated primer to technical decision making

November 28, 2019

Charity Majors discusses making better choices with software. Whether you're selecting a new polyglot persistence layer, launching a startup from scratch, or modernizing a mature environment, there have never been more opportunities for chaos. Charity explains when you should use boring technology, when to take a flyer on the bleeding edge, and best practices for making solid technical decisions.
Test, measure, iterate: Balancing good enough and perfect in the critical path (sponsored by NS1)

Test, measure, iterate: Balancing good enough and perfect in the critical path (sponsored by NS1)

November 28, 2019

In critical path services such as DNS, stability is imperative above all else. Kris Beevers examines the trade-offs between risk and velocity faced by any high-growth, critical path technology business.
The simply complex task of implementing Kubernetes ingress: Lessons learned

The simply complex task of implementing Kubernetes ingress: Lessons learned

November 28, 2019

Getting traffic into a Kubernetes cluster should be simple, but its not. The range of options can be confusing, and implementing effective configuration is equally challenging. Richard Li discusses the evolution of ingress on Kubernetes, explains why ingress controllers arent necessarily the best approach, and shares a series of lessons learned about managing traffic ingress.
Tracing polyglot systems: An OpenTracing tutorial

Tracing polyglot systems: An OpenTracing tutorial

November 28, 2019

Priyanka Sharma and Yuri Shkuro demonstrate how distributed tracing works and how to employ it in the development and operations of your applications in the programming language of your choice: Java, Go, Python, Node.js, C#, or C++.
Troubleshooting Kubernetes applications

Troubleshooting Kubernetes applications

November 28, 2019

Michael Hausenblas walks you through troubleshooting applications running in Kubernetes, from application-level debugging to distributed tracing to chaos engineering.
Using distributed trace data to solve performance and operational challenges

Using distributed trace data to solve performance and operational challenges

November 28, 2019

Naoman Abbas offers an overview of tools Pinterest built to process trace data and the use cases theyve enabled and shares some real-world examples. Join in to learn how to apply these techniques to your own challenges.
Who guards the guardians? Designing for resilience in cluster orchestrators

Who guards the guardians? Designing for resilience in cluster orchestrators

November 28, 2019

Preetha Appan outlines various failure modes ranging from network failures to entire server failures in Nomad, an open source scheduler that supports heterogeneous workloads.
You've been arrested by the CAP; you have the right to remain consistent.

You've been arrested by the CAP; you have the right to remain consistent.

November 28, 2019

Aviran Mordo discusses the challenges and real-life use cases of handling data in a distributed environment.
Zero to Kubernetes in five minutes (sponsored by Mesosphere)

Zero to Kubernetes in five minutes (sponsored by Mesosphere)

November 28, 2019

Getting Kubernetes up and running is only half the battle. Now you need to get the supporting infrastructure in place. Dan Mennell shares a templated approach to deploying what is needed to get started with source control, CI/CD, and monitoring with Prometheus, along with other things.
Better bash: Unit and integration testing

Better bash: Unit and integration testing

November 27, 2019

C.J. Jameson explains how to test all the things, even your bash scripts. Using the BATS framework, it's cheap to write both high- and low-level tests to drive out more modular and readable bash scripts.
Building a system that never stops: New Relic at scale

Building a system that never stops: New Relic at scale

November 27, 2019

New Relic receives over half a trillion data points from customers that need to be processed, stored, and made available ASAP. Matthew Flaming explains why moving from a single application performance product to querying more than a billion events a second to serve multiple products has meant radically reinventing and re-architecting the whole platform multiple times.