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.
Over 16 years, I’ve written software up-and-down the entire stack. Earliest in my career I wrote boot ROM software for specialized embedded devices. This kind of programming taught me so much about how computers really work.
Continue reading A Prayer for Distributed Systems Developers
This blog describes working with InfluxDB 0.8. InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.
I 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.
Java is the predominant language of Big Data technologies. HBase, Lucene, elasticsearch, Cassandra – all are written in Java and, of course, run inside a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There are some other important Big Data technologies, while not written in Java, also run inside a JVM.
Examples include Apache Storm, which is written in Clojure, and Apache Kafka, which is written in Scala. This makes basic knowledge of the JVM quite important when it comes to deploying and operating Big Data technologies.
In my last blog post I explained why writing design documents is such a powerful approach to building well-engineered systems. But what should one document?
Continue reading How you should write software design documents
Many software engineers never write design documents. Design documentation takes time, and implementations often proceed so far without any documentation that if it happens, it’s an act of recording what has been done — a tedious task at the best times.
Many software engineers argue “the code exists, it’s running, it’s working, let’s move on and build the next thing.”
Continue reading Why you should write software design documents
My father worked for many years in QA at Beckman, an American medical instruments firm. His job was to ensure that newly-manufactured centrifuge rotors would hold up when spun at thousands of RPMs. He used to tell me that the Beckman philosophy could be summarised in one sentence — “There is no substitute for quality”.
After 2 years at Loggly, tomorrow I start a new role at Jut. While I will miss the team at Loggly very much, and the wonderful product we built during my team there, I’m looking forward very much to working again with some old colleagues from Riverbed Technology.
I came across a very readable paper on distributed systems — Distributed systems for fun and profit. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about distributed systems, and the challenges involved with designing, building, and operating distributed systems.
Packt recently asked me to review their new publication Mastering ElasticSearch by Rafał Kuć and Marek Rogoziński. Since most of my experience with elasticsearch has been from a systems points of view — index management, cluster maintenance, indexing performance — I paid most attention to the chapters about those parts of elasticsearch.