Tag Archives: cloud

Meaningful Uptime Measurements for the Cloud

Another interesting paper came my way, thanks to the Morning Paper mailing list. Nines are Not Enough:Meaningful Metrics for Clouds discusses a topic that I deal with regularly in my role at Google.

SLIs, SLOs, and SLA are easy to discuss in a general sense, but surprisingly subtle to put into practise. This paper, authored by Google engineers, explores why this is so, and offers a new framework for thinking about them.

Drop, Throttle, or Buffer

Real-time — or near real-time — data pipelines are all the rage these days.  I’ve built one myself, and they are becoming key components of many SaaS platforms. SaaS Analytics, Operations, and Business Intelligence systems often involve moving large amounts of data, received over the public Internet, into complex backend systems. And managing the incoming flow of data to these pipelines is key.

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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.

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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 InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.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.

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Infrastructure at Scale: Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm and elasticsearch

storm_logoAWS have posted the video online of Jim Nisbet’s and my talk at AWS:reinvent 2013. In it, Jim and I describe the system we built at Loggly, which uses Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm, and elasticseach, to build a high-performance log aggregation and analytics SaaS solution, running on AWS EC2.

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