In the era of ubiquitous cloud services and an increasingly growing PaaS and serverless-oriented approach, performance and resources seem to be becoming less and less important. After all, we can scale horizontally and vertically at any time, without worrying about potential performance challenges that the business may introduce.
Hardware is always hard. The amount of operations, maintenance and planning that goes into supporting a data center is a daunting challenge for any enterprise. Though often unseen, without hardware there is no software.
Cloud providers like to brag about high availability and unlimited scaling of their services – and they are correct, as these features are indeed significant advantages of cloud solutions. Their computational power is so high that for most use cases, it’s almost unlimited. In this blog post, I would like to tell you about our experiences with Azure Cosmos DB and batch processing.
We run over 800 microservices in our on-premise and public clouds. They are developed by hundreds of engineers in various technologies: from the most popular Java and Kotlin, through Scala, Clojure, Python, NodeJS, Golang, to less mainstream like Elixir or Swift. All these applications need to handle common technical concerns: logging, monitoring, service discovery, tracing, internationalization, security and more. How to provide common solutions to these requirements in such a heterogeneous setup? In this post I’m going to explain how we originally solved this problem with common libraries and how we are currently changing our runtime environment to make things even easier.
Configuration management is one of the key challenges you have to face when you decide to build an application as a distributed system based on microservices deployed to the Cloud. There are multiple ways of addressing different aspects of this problem, using several tools such as Spring Cloud Config Server or Hashicorp Consul. However, this article will focus on the tools that Google Cloud Platform offers out of the box. The approaches mentioned should be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
We messed up. On July 18th, 2018, at noon, Allegro went down and was unavailable for twenty minutes. The direct cause was a special offer in which one hundred Honor 7C phones whose regular price is around PLN 850 (about € 200), were offered at a price of PLN 1 (less than € 1). This attracted more traffic than we anticipated and at the same time triggered a configuration error in the way services are scaled out. This caused the site to go down despite there being plenty of CPUs, RAM, and network capacity available in our data centers.
Two weeks ago we attended AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas. Our company was represented by Wojciech Lesicki (Product Owner of our cloud infrastructure), Sebastian Pietrowski (Head of Architecture and Operations) and Mateusz Gajewski (Solutions Architect). This post summarises new product announcements made during the keynotes, our impressions on breakout sessions, bootcamps and conference itself.
