Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture The post Google Early Days with John Looney appeared first on Software En...

Kubernetes makes it easier for engineering teams to manage their distributed systems architecture. But it’s still not simple to deploy and operate a Kubernetes cluster. Google Container Engine (GKE) is a managed control plane for Kubernetes. Just as developers can use Google App Engine to easily deploy monolithic apps against a platform as a service, The post Container Engines with David Aronchick...

DNS stands for domain name system. This is the naming system that maps the entire internet. It associates information with domain names. More specifically, DNS specifies mappings between numerical IP addresses and domain names. Most engineers know these basic facts about DNS, but they may not know how much engineering a complex company like Etsy The post DNS with Phil Stanhope appeared first on So...

On January 31st 2017, GitLab experienced a major outage of their online repository hosting service. The primary database server experienced data loss due to a combination of malicious spam attacks and engineering mistakes that occurred while trying to respond to those spam attacks. GitLab responded to the event transparently. The company put up a postmortem The post GitLab with Pablo Carranza appe...

Healthcare is a complex business. Oscar is a company that wanted to build a new insurance provider–but realized that healthcare is so interconnected that in order to build a new insurance provider, realized it actually needed to build an entire healthcare business too, complete with patient management and facilities. Since Oscar is a modern technology The post Healthcare Engineering with Isa...

Many companies are transitioning from a monolith to microservices architecture. Tools for cloud computing, containerization, and continuous delivery are making this easier. But there are still technological and organizational challenges that a company will encounter while making this transition. Cassandra Shum is an engineer with ThoughtWorks. She has worked with major financial institutions and o...

Firebase is a backend-as-a-service. The key efficiency of a backend-as-a-service is that it enables developers to go from having a 3-tier architecture (client, server, database) to a 2-tier architecture (client, backend-as-a-service). The team who started Firebase built it as a pivot. They had started a social network, and then they realized there wasn’t a good The post Firebase with Doug Stevenso...

Spring Framework is an application framework for Java and JVM languages. Spring was originally built around dependency injection, but grew to become an entire ecosystem of tools and plugins for Java developers. Spring was originally released 15 years ago, and since then a lot has changed around application development. For example, many engineers deploy applications The post Spring Boot with Josh...

The word “microservices” started getting used after a series of events–companies were moving to cloud virtual machines. Those VMs got broken up into containers, and the containers can fit to the size of the service. Services that are more narrowly defined take up smaller containers, and can be packed more densely into the virtual machines–hence The post Microservices Practitioners with...

Search is a common building block for applications. Whether we are searching Wikipedia or our log files, the behavior is similar: a query is entered and the most relevant documents are returned. The core data structure for search is an inverted index. Elasticsearch is a scalable, resilient search tool that shards and replicates a search The post Elasticsearch with Philipp Krenn appeared first on S...

There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs).  These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API. Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses.  He has made standardization of The post API Design Standards with And...

Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without The post Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus appeared first on Software Eng...

Designers and software engineers need to communicate with each other. From Apple to Slack to Uber, the emphasis on visual design within a product is rising in importance. Much like development and operations siloes have been bridged with the DevOps movement, design and engineering teams are working more closely together to align the vision of The post Software Psychology with Bjorn Freeman Benson...

If you are building a service that processes payments, your software architecture has a lot of requirements. Not only do you need to be highly available, consistent, and fast–you need to be PCI compliant. In this episode, we explore the infrastructure of Stripe with Evan Broder, who has been with the company for five years. The post Stripe Infrastructure with Evan Broder appeared first on So...

Observability allows engineers to understand what is going on inside their systems. In its most raw form, observability comes from log data. Modern systems have many layers of logs–virtualized cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, the container runtime itself, and the application logic running within the container. With all of these layers, it is not practical for The post Stripe Ob...

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is a powerful concept that has the potential to make for reliable and maintainable systems.  It is also broadly misunderstood and means different things to different people. Derek Comartin learned about the idea after viewing some talks by Greg Young and has since successfully applied the approach with great success The post Using CQRS to Make Contro...

Load testing measures performance of a system undergoing a large volume of requests. Before an application is pushed to production, engineers will often load test their software to ensure it is resilient in the face of high traffic. As web applications have changed, the requirements around load testing have changed as well. External APIs, internal The post Load Testing with Mark Gilbert appeared f...

Parse was a backend as a service company built in 2011 before being acquired by Facebook in 2013. Building a backend as a service for developers requires walking a thin line between giving engineers lots of control and preventing those engineers from shooting themselves in the foot. While she was at Parse, Charity Majors learned The post Parse and Operations with Charity Majors appeared first on S...

When an application is using all of its available resources, that application needs to be scaled. Scaling an application means giving it more resources–typically servers. Autoscaling is an engineering practice where an application is automatically given more or less resources based on how healthy the application performance is at a given time. Applications on Heroku The post Heroku Autoscali...

In the mid 90s, data warehousing might have meant “using an Oracle database.” Today, it means a wide variety of things. You could be stitching together a big data pipeline using Kafka, Hadoop, and Spark. You could be using managed tools like BigQuery from Google. How did we get from the simple days of Oracle The post Data Warehousing with Mark Rittman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service The post Se...

Infrastructure is a term that can mean many different things: your physical computer, the data center of your Amazon EC2 cluster, the virtualization layer, the container layer–on and on. In today’s episode, podcasters Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks discuss the past, present, and future of infrastructure with me. Ethan and Chris host Datanauts, a podcast The post Infrastructure with Datanauts’ Ch...

Giphy is a search engine for gifs, the short animated graphics that we see around the Internet. Giphy is also a creative platform where people create new gifs. Every search engine requires the construction of a search index, which is a data structure that responds to search queries efficiently. Since Giphy is a search engine The post Giphy Engineering with Anthony Johnson appeared first on Softwar...

Back in 2008, the range of tools that engineers could use to connect computer systems together were getting quite good. Cloud computing was democratizing access to servers. But the telephony ecosystem was still inaccessible to the average developer. If you needed your program to make a phone call and connect a user to a customer The post Twilio Engineering with Pat Malatack appeared first on Softw...

A company like Pinterest has millions of transactional emails to send to people. The scalability challenges of sending high volumes of email mean that it makes more sense for most companies to use an email as a service product rather than building their own. Chris McFadden is the VP of engineering and cloud operations at SparkPost The post Email Infrastructure with Chris McFadden appeared first on...