Bloomberg’s Standardization and Scaling of Its Monitoring Systems
One of the outcomes of Bloomberg’s adoption of SRE practices across its development teams is the monitoring system, backed by the Cassandra-based Metrictank time-series database, that they put in place.
Scaling Graphite at Criteo Using a Cassandra Backend
At last month's FOSDEM, a member of the Criteo SRE team delivered a talk on scaling their Graphite installation using Cassandra for storage. A custom Graphite plugin called BigGraphite written by the Criteo engineering team replaces the default WhisperDB with Cassandra to achieve fault tolerance and elastic scaling.
Microsoft Directly Challenges MongoDB and Cassandra with Cosmos DB
The term “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” is often thrown about whenever someone is upset with Microsoft. Superficially it describes any attempt by a technology company to attract users of a competitor’s product, but the actual strategy is more complicated than that. In this report will use Azure Cosmos DB to illustrate the concept.
QCon New York 2017: Scaling Event Sourcing for Netflix Downloads
Phillipa Avery, senior software engineer at Netflix, and Robert Reta, senior software engineer at Netflix, presented their Cassandra-backed event sourcing architecture at QCon New York 2017. Currently, it powers the download feature in Netflix, and was summarised as something which improved the flexibility, reliability, scalability and debuggability of their services.
Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference 2017: Day One Recap
Day One of the 12th annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference was held on Tuesday, April 18 in Philadelphia, PA. This two-day event included keynotes by Blair MacIntyre (augmented reality pioneer) and Scott Hanselman (podcaster), and featured speakers Monica Beckwith (JVM consultant at Oracle), Yehuda Katz (co-creator of Ember.js), and Jessica Kerr (lead engineer at Atomist).
Lightbend Speaks to InfoQ on Their Acquisition of OpsClarity
Nine months after acquiring BoldRadius, Lightbend announced their acquisition of OpsClarity, a company specializing in monitoring reactive applications. InfoQ interviewed Mark Brewer, president and CEO at Lightbend and Alan Ngai, co-founder of OpsClarity and now VP of cloud services at Lightbend to learn more about this new partnership.
Julien Le Dem on the Future of Column-Oriented Data Processing with Apache Arrow
Julien Le Dem, the PMC chair of the Apache Arrow project, presented on Data Eng Conf NY on the future of column-oriented data processing. Apache Arrow is an open-source standard for columnar in-memory execution. InfoQ interviewed Le Dem to find out the differences between Arrow and Parquet.
SQL Server 2016: Clustered Columnstore Index Enhancements
Clustered Columnstore Indexes were one of the two headline features for SQL Server 2014. Designed for tables with over 10 million rows, they allow for good performance on analytical queries without the need to explicitly specify indexes. With SQL Server 2016, they gain the ability to support secondary indexes.
SQL Server 2016: Updatable, Non-Clustered Columnstore Indexes
Non-clustered Columnstore Indexes are also getting some enhancements in SQL Server 2016. The most notable of these enhancements is the ability to be updated.
SQL Server 2016: In-Memory Columnstore Indexes
New for SQL Server 2016 is the ability to place a Columnstore Index on an In-Memory Table.
Google Offers Bigtable in the Cloud
Google is making available to customers Cloud Bigtable, their own database used for more than a decade for services such as Search, GMail, Maps or YouTube. While they are not open sourcing Bigtable as they did with other products, the new cloud service is accessible through an open source interface, the Apache HBase 1.0.1 API.
Mashape Open Sources API Gateway Kong
Mashape has open sourced their API Layer called Kong.
Apache HBase Hits 1.0
After three developer previews, six release candidates and over 1500 closed tickets the Apache foundation has announced version 1.0 of Apache HBase, a NoSQL database in the Hadoop ecosystem. After more than 7 years of active development, the team behind HBase felt that the project had matured and stabilized enough to warrant a 1.0 version.
How Twitter Answers Handles Five Billion Sessions a Day
Twitter's Answers is an analytics service for mobile apps that has come to see five billion sessions per day. Ed Solovey, software engineer at Twitter, has described how their system works to provide "reliable, real-time, and actionable" data based on hundreds of millions of mobile devices sending millions of events every second.
How Netflix Handled the Reboot of 218 Cassandra Nodes
Amazon performed a major maintenance update at the end of September in order to patch a security vulnerability in a Xen hypervisor affecting about 10% of their global fleet of cloud servers. This update involved the rebooting of those servers, with consequences for AWS users and the services they provide, including one of their largest clients, Netflix.
