Recently I merged a pull request into Prometheus that adds support to create past data for new recording rules. This work was for Prometheus Issue 11 which was created back in January 2013! Only 8 years later and this issue is finally implemented. This post explains how to use this…

I came across this tweet that asked what are the top 3 tools every Kubernetes cluster should have… I liked this question a lot, however I think there are more than 3 that every Kubernetes cluster should have. …

Four minute papers (inspired by fourminutebooks.com) aims to condense computing white papers down to a four minute summary. Here goes nothing…four minute paper for MapReduce (original white paper). High level what is MapReduce: A programming model and an implementation for processing large data sets. The problem MapReduce solves: Handle the…

There are a bunch of different databases out there. For example, check out this database of databases created by Carnegie Mellon University. At the time of writing it shows 665 different DBMS! When a new database is created, often it’s an iteration of something that already exists, but with a…

Many people ask “What is the difference between a VM and a container?”, but in my opinion a more interesting question is … “What is the difference between a process and a container?” When containers started gaining popularity back in 2013, it was common to hear “Containers are like mini…

Using GKE and Stackdriver Metrics — Autoscaling deployments in Kubernetes is more exciting since HorizontalPodAutoscaler can scale on custom and external metrics instead of simply CPU and memory like before. In this post I will go over how HPAs work, whats up with the custom and external metric API, and then go through an example where…

Did you ever dream of the day where there would be free TLS certs that were automatically created and renewed when a new service shows up? Well that day has arrived. If you’ve jumped on the cool train and are running Kubernetes in production, then cert-manager is a must have…

AWS + Kops — Intro Most all communication in the kubernetes (k8s) cluster goes through the k8s api server. In order to access the k8s api server, first you need to be authorized to do so. There are a number of different authentication methods to choose from. Here I will review the steps I took…