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 InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.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.
Continue reading InfluxDB and Grafana HOWTO
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.
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
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.
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.
One configuration that is very effective at preventing this problem is described in this post.