“You need to be visible and influence more to grow in your career” was the gist of feedback that I had received and ignored a few times during my career as an individual contributor. I didn’t find such feedback useful the first few times, as I didn’t really understand what it means to influence, why it matters, or how to influence.
We’re living in interesting times. Till 4–5 years ago, infrastructure used to be locked by review boards and tickets. Open source has been slowly changing this world. Take OpenStack, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, you name it. ...
It’s been just over three years since I started working on building a fairly large cloud infrastructure at eBay. Our initial focus was to make infrastructure programmable and to enable agility through self-service APIs with some checks and balances for efficiency, security and availability. ...
At eBay and PayPal, we been a power user of OpenStack to provide infrastructure building blocks via OpenStack services. I had the opportunity to share details of our OpenStack journey during a keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver on May 19, 2015. Here is the video and the slides.
Scanning the list of OpenStack projectson github, here is my pick of projects in alphabetical order that don’t need to be there at present in their current location.
Treat infra as code. This is one of the key maxims told in the devops circles. This principle advocates to treat infrastructure as code, to automate everything and to apply the same engineering processes and principles as you would apply to software development. ...
OpenStack is a loosely coupled distributed system. Given the number of moving parts in OpenStack, the particular configuration of an OpenStack deployment, and the underlying layers in the data plane, ...
Given the modular architecture of OpenStack as a cloud controller software, operators of OpenStack based private clouds have many choices on how to shape cloud as a service. ...
In recent weeks, I’ve heard a number of opinions about OpenStack. Some want OpenStack to get compatible with AWS while others don’t care. Some say that you need vendor-built
The act of performing systems administration and configuration by pointing and clicking on proprietary tools. ClickOps engineers usually receive requests to perform operations via ticketing systems, queue them for hours to days, and perform those operations in sequence. ...
Code the infra. There is no other way to make operations predictable and repeatable. The opposite of coding the infra is what I call as “box hugging”. If you log into boxes to configure, install packages, start/stop services, or do any maintenance, you are a box hugger. ...
We often see “hello world” style apps used for benchmarking servers. A “hello world” app can produce low-latency responses under several thousands of concurrent connections, but such tests do not help make choices for building real world apps. Here is a test I did at eBay recently comparing a front-end app built using two different stacks
A while ago I showed how chatty some well-known apps are on my iPhone. But this issue is neither new nor unique to apps on phones and similar devices. Efficient data retrieval from distributed/decentralized servers is a well-recognized problem in distributed computing.
HTTP pipelining is often suggested as a way to dramatically improve page load times, or to solve multi-GET use cases for RESTful applications. Whether pipelining can achieve the intended effect or not truly depends on what gets pipelined and how the server implements pipelining.
