It’s difficult to think about micro services without considering the large management overhead the goes with it. In many cases, a micro service architecture might even make technical sense and not business sense. These two are completely separate but very important considerations. Microservices comes with more technical management because they require actual components to deploy, …
By eric
There is a fairly large foundation of concepts in Chef that new adopters need to wrap their heads around. And even once they have done that, it doesn’t become any easier to find the right methodology to use when building your infrastructure. One of the main ideas that we have embraced at SimpleReach is pervasive …
By eric
I’ve been talking a lot about message systems in distributed architectures lately. And one of the slides I show in my talks is a slide about compressing messages before writes to the database. In other words, if you have 150k messages per second coming in which would translate 1:1 in writes and force your database(s) …
By eric
One of the new hotness features that Amazon added to their Elastic Load Balancers is cross zone load balancing. This offers the ability to have an unbalanced number of nodes per availability zone within an Amazon region. For instance, if you were load balances across us-east-1a, us-east-1b, and us-east-1c, then you needed to have the …
By eric
As with any system or application, there are upsides and downsides to using them. The two queueing systems that I want to explore are Resque and Amazon’s Simple Queuing Service. Resque is essentially a set of queuing APIs that run on Redis. Redis is an in-memory data store and is what actually handles the queues. …
By eric
While trying to clone a repository from Github the other day on one of my EC2 servers and I ran into an SSL verification issue. As it turns out, Github renewed their SSL certificate (as people who are responsible about their web presence do when their certificate is about to expire). As a result, I …
By eric
I have recently spent a few days getting up to speed with Flume, Cloudera‘s distributed log offering. If you haven’t seen this and deal with lots of logs, you are definitely missing out on a fantastic project. I’m not going to spend time talking about it because you can read more about it in the …
By eric
Since one of the core communication methods for my company amongst engineers is 37Signals Campfire and Nagios is one of our main monitoring tools for all of our applications and services, I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two. So with a few simple additions to the Nagios configuration and a …
By eric
One of my favorite things about Debian is its awesome package management system. Apt is one of the reasons I have used Debian for servers for so many years and eased my initial transition to Ubuntu (which as most people know was initially a Debian fork). Apt is a great tool as long as you …
By eric
I work with email and Postfix. On every mailing machine I have Postfix setup on, I have at least 2 instances, sometimes more (in fact, sometimes its as many as 6 instances). I was recently setting up a new set of mailers and decided to give Postfix multi-instance seutp a try. It was excellent. There …
By eric
