Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
rqlite got a mention in an InfoWorld article. Titled 9 offbeat databases worth a look, I’m glad to see the author got the details right.
Be sure to check out the article.
I attended the RSA Conference 2020 last month. I wanted to understand the security market better, due to my work at Google.
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, with SQLite as its storage engine. Thanks to Katja Lutz there is a new knex.js library available.
Check it out on GitHub.
After reading an interesting paper on Let’s Encrypt, I finally decided to switch this website over to HTTPS. I was really impressed with how smoothly the whole conversion went.
With the help of Certbot from the EFF, it took less than 5 minutes and ran without error. Very impressive!
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, with SQLite as its storage engine. v5.1.0 is now out, and supports scaling reads via newly available read-only nodes.
This is a post following up on my Monitorama Baltimore 2019 talk.
Logging and Monitoring systems — Observability Systems, if you prefer — often seem to struggle to meet the needs of their users.
Continue reading “Logging and Monitoring systems are hard to code”
It was great to speak at devopsdays in Galway. I really enjoyed bringing my recent Monitorama 2019 talk to my home town.
A video of the talk has now been posted.
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.
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.
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.
rqlite
is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine. gorqlite is a Go client library, originally written by raindog308.
While the client library doesn’t adhere to the Go database standard, it is still starting to get some use. Therefore I decided to add CircleCI testing support, ensuring the code maintains a basic level of functionality.
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.
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database, with SQLite as its storage engine.
The 5.0 branch of rqlite now has standard dependency management. Thanks to Elliot Courant, this pull request adds go mod support.
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.
As an Engineering Manager at Google, I get a lot of email — everyone does. Google — at least my group — doesn’t make heavy use of IM-like tools internally, and I’m happy about that. Combined with traffic from the internal system, it all adds up to a lot in my Inbox.
So I was forced to really think about how I handle it all — and not miss anything important.
I recently came across a new paper co-authored by John Ousterhout, one of the original authors of the Raft protocol. In it John, and his co-author, describe an approach which can double the throughput of some popular replicated distributed key-value stores.
Continue reading “Using Commutativity for Faster Replication”
Sometime ago I was asked where to begin to learn data engineering. It was a broad question, and it took some to understand what exactly I was being asked.
The batching of data or computation amortizing a fixed cost over multiple units — is a very common pattern in many computers systems. It’s particularly prevalent in networking and CPU memory accesses.
But the implementation of batching includes many subtleties — in particular when to wait for more data, and when to transmit what you have.
I’m not old enough to remember Jimmy Carter in office, but I did see him speak once in 2013. With a B.Sc., and some training in nuclear power, his background was always somewhat interesting to me — particularly how someone with a technical education approached politics at the highest levels.
Continue reading “Jimmy Carter and the Failures of Management”