Posts

I found this book by accident through a recommendation on Twitter. The book beautifully captures the mayhem and mismanagement that is all too familiar to IT folks who are part of an org where IT is a support system, and not seen as a core competency. Written at a time when Dev & Ops had a wide chasm between them, the story of the Phoenix Team and their enlightening struggle to reel in Dev and Ops into a single unit provides an accessible narrative that conveys the enormity of the benefits that DevOps entails. ...

If all you have is a hammer… Organizational choices and system architecture sometimes forces you to use sub-optimal tools for a problem. In fact, this is part of the challenge that work throws at you - having to retrofit or abuse tools to get the job done. If you always had the right set of tools, what fun would life be? This is one such problem. The Problem We had an antiquated use case which allowed customers to create a deferred list of jobs. These jobs would then be processed based on API requests from the customer’s end. These lists would usually range from about 100 - 100000 jobs. We also provided a provision whereby the customer could trigger multiple requests in parallel to enable concurrent processing of these jobs. The original design dumped these jobs into MySQL, given that these jobs had to be persisted indefinitely until a trigger was detected. ...

It all started with a deployment to the production cluster. It always does. The worst things happen when you deploy to prod. Background In our production cluster, we use Aerospike as the primary data store, with data being synced to MySQL for long term storage. For the uninitiated, Aerospike is a high speed, distributed key-value NoSQL database which provides a lot of cool features. Check it out if you haven’t already. In our cluster, all transactional data gets written to or read from AS, with MySQL being used only as a fallback option. We have a dedicated service that sync data from AS to MySQL and keeps things in check. The speed of access and the ability to scale by adding new nodes helps us keep the pressure off our central MySQL datastore. ...

Hello! Is there anybody out there? Nod if you can hear me This blog is my poor attempt to document all the werid bugs I have encountered in production and the valuable lessons they’ve taught me. It took me 5 attempts just to get this page up and running. Hmm. There must be story here that I can stretch to a blog post.

An epic of gargantuan proportions, Musashi follows the life of the legendary Japanese samurai Miyamoto Musashi. Eiji Yoshikawa paints a serene picture of feudal Japan with a particular emphasis on the Samurai way of life. I cannot help but compare this book to The Shogun, since it deals with the same time period and the same events. The Shogun chooses to focus on the unimportant cultural frivolities and paints the Japanese as a mysterious group of people who’d jump to commit seppuku at the slightest provocation. Musashi delves deeper beyond the superficialities and presents a detailed breakdown of the Japanese psyche. Even the unadorned language is evocative of the simplistic Japanese way of life. ...