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Measure Everything

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.

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…

Writing a Syslog Collector in Go

I’ve started coding in Go (golang), and I received some advice recently from Robert Griesemer, whom I was fortunate enough to sit beside at a recent Go Meetup. To learn Go, Robert suggested that I code a solution in Go…

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…

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.

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 InfluxDB 0.8 is no longer supported, and has been superseded by the 1.0 release.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

What I wish I’d been told about the JVM

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…

Always thinking of the next guy

My father worked for many years in Quality Assurance 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…

Welcome to your data

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…

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.

Book Review: Mastering ElasticSearch

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…

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…

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…

Loggly Generation 2 Released!

After 14 months of hard work, the next generation of Loggly has been released. It’s been a great time to be part of the Software Infrastructure team at Loggly and we have put together a superb log aggregation & real-time…

Technical Leadership through Testing

As technical lead at Loggly, responsibility for a well-engineered infrastructure ends with me. And one way to ensure the system is designed and implemented well is to stay as close as possible to the code, ensuring that the team and…

Using the Source

I have written another post for the Loggly blog — all about our guidelines for choosing and integrating open-source software and technology in your next project. Check it out here.

If you love your logs, set them free

I recently wrote my first post for the Loggly blog. It illustrates why host machines are often the worst place to store the logs those machines are generating. You can check it out here.

Monitoring Storm Kafka Spouts using Python

When running a large real-time processing system, monitoring is critical. But it does more than allow you to keep an eye on your system. During development it allows you test hypotheses about how it works, how it performs when certain…