Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, utilizing SQLite as its storage engine. Version 7.16.0 has been released and now includes support for restoring your rqlite system automatically from AWS S3. With this in place you…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, utilizing SQLite as its storage engine. Version 7.15.0 has been released and now includes support for automated backups to Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3. This enhancement offers increased data…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Today sees the launch of a dedicated website for rqlite. I built it using Hugo and Docsy, and deployed to Netlify, which…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. 7.11.0 adds support for automatically reaping nodes, and a new convenient query response format. You can download the release from GitHub.
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I helped Replicated replace their use of PostgreSQL with rqlite. This brought much easier operation and high-availability to their Application Manager.
I recently started reading Building Secure and Reliable Systems, which was authored by various folks at Google (some of whom I know). Since my work is at the intersection of so much of this — reliable logging systems which must…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine and Raft for distributed consensus. Release 7.0 is out now and introduces the first wave of new Node Discovery and Automatic Clustering …
Sit down with any developer today, even those at pretty new software companies, and you’ll see them doing something that programmers have been doing for years — you’ll see them tailing log files. But why? Why are we still tailing…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. There have been a series of releases recently, which make deployment on Linux even easier, and significantly decrease the Docker footprint.
I want to make this WordPress deployment easier to replicate — both to make it much easier to recover from failure, and experiment with various configurations. To that end I finally got around to using Ansible to deploy it. It…
I recently took part in the GCP Podcast, along with my colleague Reed Taylor. On the podcast we spoke about Cloud Logging, which is GCP‘s centralized Logging product, and has released lots of new features to help customers meet their…
LowEndBox has written a good blog post on rqlite, the lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. You can check it out here.
I’ve finally completed the migration of this site from Rackspace to GCP. I switched over the DNS record this afternoon, and everything seems fully functional. I’m even using Cloud Logging and BigQuery to analyze my Apache access logs.
I recently took part in the GCP Podcast, along with my colleague Oscar Guerrero. On the podcast we spoke about Audit Logging, which is a critical security feature of GCP. Be sure to check out the podcast episode.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?