Earlier this year we introduced the world to Grafana Mimir, a highly scalable open source time series database for Prometheus. One of Mimir’s guarantees is 100% compatibility with PromQL, which it achieves by reusing the Prometheus PromQL engine. However, the execution of a query in the Prometheus PromQL engine is only performed in a single thread, so no matter how many CPU cores you throw at it, it will only ever use one core to run a single query.
Reliability and chaos might seem like opposite ideas. But, as Netflix learned in 2010, introducing a bit of chaos—and carefully measuring the results of that chaos—can be a great recipe for reliability. Although most software is created in a tightly controlled environment and carefully tested before release, the production environment is harsher and much less controlled.
I’ve written extensively about the technical aspects to consider when expanding your horizons and embracing the Mac platform. What I haven’t covered much up to now is why. Why bother learning an entirely new skillset, targeted at supporting a minority platform, when you’ve got your hands full just keeping up with Windows?