All posts by Philip O'Toole

Come for the Features, Stay for the Uptime

I’ve been thinking  a lot recently about what makes computer services and products sticky — what makes users and customers come back again and again to what you’ve built. There are lots of ways to summarize it, but when it comes to systems that help technical people run their own systems, they come for the features, but they stay for the uptime.

Continue reading Come for the Features, Stay for the Uptime

Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006

c_0Bjarne Stroustrup has great paper on his website titled Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006. It provides fascinating insights on the development of the language, the challenges involved, and discusses interesting design ideas. If you have even a basic understanding of C++, it’s a such a worthwhile read.

Continue reading Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006

Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus

raft-logoSQLite is a “self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine”.  However, it doesn’t come with replication built in, so if you want to store mission-critical data in it, you better back it up. The usual approach is to continually copy the SQLite file on every change.

I wanted SQLite, I wanted it distributed, and I really wanted a more elegant solution for replication. So rqlite was born.

Continue reading Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus

Call me Definitely

The creator of the network monitoring system Riemann, Kyle Kingsbury, has put together a comprehensive series of blog posts, on the fault-tolerance, high-availability, and general correctness of number of database and storage technologies. Of the technologies discussed I am most familiar with — elasticsearch and Apache Kafka — I found the posts to be a great read.

If you haven’t read them yet, you should check them out on his site.

InfluxDB and Grafana HOWTO

This blog describes working with InfluxDB 0.8. InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.

grafanaI recently came across InfluxDB — it’s a time-series database built on LevelDB. It’s designed to support horizontal as well as vertical scaling and, best of all, it’s not written in Java — it’s written in Go. I was intrigued to say the least.

Continue reading InfluxDB and Grafana HOWTO