Tomorrow I join the team at InfluxDB, something I’m really excited about. I’m really looking forward to coding in Go full-time — it’s a language with real promise, a nice clean tool chain, and a very active community.
Continue reading Measure Everything
Tag Archives: distributed systems
Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus
SQLite 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.
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.
A Prayer for Distributed Systems Developers
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
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 InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.
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.
Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit
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.
Infrastructure at Scale: Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm and elasticsearch
AWS 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.
Continue reading Infrastructure at Scale: Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm and elasticsearch
Speaking at AWS re:Invent 2013
This past week I had the opportunity to speak, with my colleague Jim Nisbet, at AWS re:Invent 2013. Titled “Unmeltable Infrastructure at Scale: Using Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm, and Elastic Search on AWS“, Jim and I described the architecture of Loggly’s next-generation log aggregation and analytics Infrastructure, which went live 3 months ago, and runs on AWS EC2.
Avoiding elasticsearch split-brain
Loggly recently held an elasticsearch meetup, which was a great success. One question that was repeatedly asked was how to ensure elasticsearch does not suffer a partition — known as a split-brain.
This can be a particular problem in AWS EC2, where the network is subject to interruptions. It can also happen if the elasticsearch master node performs long garbage collection cycles.