Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Big data, AI, machine learning, and numerous others are all buzzwords we seem to throw around lightly in recent years. Even though they are hugely different from one another, they all have one thing in common. Data! Huge amounts of data that need to be managed. The downside of that is that the more data you have the more of a headache it is to store, query, and make sense of.

I wanted to follow up Ron Miller’s article in TechCrunch about Netdata’s Series A funding last month with the story of Netdata’s inception. It all started when I got… pissed off.

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced a new feature for EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR). Normally, accessing data on new EBS volumes was quite slow as the data is lazy-loaded from S3. When Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) has been enabled on an EBS snapshot, new EBS volumes created from that snapshot will allow fast data access. While this feature is very good, it’s very expensive to keep enabled on an EBS snapshot for a long time.

As serverless application architectures have gained popularity, AWS Lambda has become the best-known service for running code on demand without having to manage the underlying compute instances. From an ops perspective, running code in Lambda is fundamentally different than running a traditional application. Most significantly from an observability standpoint, you cannot inspect system-level metrics from your application servers.

Queues are a very common piece of infrastructure. It offers First In, First Out (FIFO) message delivery to one or more competing consumers. As the queue grows the last item added to the queue typically must wait longer to be processed. Just like someone waiting in line to order food, the first one in line gets to order first. Microsoft Azure Service Bus (ASB) is Microsoft’s premier enterprise-level messaging technology that uses this principle of FIFO.

The last fifteen years have seen huge increases in developer productivity for several reasons, including the arrival of open source into the mainstream and the ability to better emulate target environments. In addition, the process of resetting a development environment back to the last known stable version has been vastly improved by Vagrant and then Docker.

Have you ever have that dream where you’re in a class on Classical Tibetan Algebra? And you haven’t done any homework all semester? AND it’s the final? That was me in this session: I was WAY in over my head with this one. Tod Golding’s material was so high-level that I got a nose bleed. Seriously. My nose started gushing 10 minutes in. This Portland dewdrop is NOT used to the dry desert and casino AC air.