I will be joining my colleague from Google, Nathen Harvey, to speak in Galway at devopsdays on November 18th and 19th.
I’m really looking forward to returning to my home town, and bringing my Monitorama Baltimore 2019 talk to the conference.
Tag Archives: operations
Observing Observability
Monitorama Baltimore 2019
was a great experience, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to speak. I spoke about why Observability and Monitoring sytems struggle to meet their goals, and why they are so hard to build.
The slides and video of the talk are now available.
Monitorama Baltimore 2019
I have been accepted to talk at Monitorama Baltimore this year. I’ll be speaking about my experience building Observability systems at many different companies, and how might those lessons be applicable to other teams and groups.
Check out the full schedule.
Continuing the WordPress bring-up on GCP
Following up on my earlier post, it has been pretty straightforward to so far to migrate this blog from Rackspace to GCP. It’s going pretty much as expected, but the architecture is going to be slightly different than I initially thought.
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.
Deploying Vallified on GCP
Since I recently joined Google Cloud Platform (GCP), I thought it’s time to get some practical experience with the platform. As a result I’m going to migrate this blog from Rackspace to GCP — specifically I’ll use GCE for WordPress, and Cloud SQL for the persistent database storage.
Monitoring: it’s not just for production
Monitoring — the measurement of your system, the gathering of telemetry, and alerting when it behaves anomalously — is key to running large-scale, modern computer systems. But what many developers today don’t realise is that monitoring can be a key part of your design cycle too.
Stop asking "how much data do you have?"
In every field there is a question that, while it sounds interesting, betrays a naiveté and lack of sophistication.
In my field — SaaS and data platforms — it’s how much data do you have?
rqlite v3: Globally replicating SQLite
rqlite is an open-source distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. rqlite is written in Go and uses Raft to achieve consensus across a set of SQLite databases. It gracefully handles leader election, and can tolerate machine failure.
With the v3 release series, rqlite can now replicate SQLite databases on a global scale, with very little effort. Let’s see it in action using the AWS EC2 cloud.
