Infrastructure-as-code tools are used to define the architecture of software systems. Common infrastructure-as-code tools include Terraform and AWS CloudFormation.  When infrastructure is defined as code, we can use static analysis tools to analyze that code for configuration mistakes, just as we could analyze a programming language with traditional static analysis tools. When a developer writes

Social distancing has been imposed across the United States. We are running an experiment unlike anything before it in history, and it is likely to have a lasting impact on human behavior. By looking at location data of how people are moving around today, we can examine the real-world impacts of social distancing. SafeGraph is

Dropbox is a consumer storage product with petabytes of data. Dropbox was originally started on the cloud, backed by S3. Once there was a high enough volume of data, Dropbox created its own data centers, designing hardware for the express purpose of storing user files.  Over the last 13 years, Dropbox’s infrastructure has developed hardware,

“Data stream” is a word that can be used in multiple ways. A stream can refer to data in motion or data at rest.  When a stream is data in motion, an endpoint is receiving new pieces of data on a continual basis. Each new data point is sent over the wire and captured by

Redis is an in-memory object storage system that is commonly used as a cache for web applications. This core primitive of in-memory object storage has created a larger ecosystem encompassing a broad set of tools. Redis is also used for creating objects such as queues, streams, and probabilistic data structures. Machine learning systems also need

For many applications, a transactional MySQL database is the source of truth. To make a MySQL database scale, some developers deploy their database using Vitess, a sharding system built on top of Kubernetes.  Jiten Vaidya and Anthony Yeh work at PlanetScale, a company that focuses on building and supporting MySQL databases sharded with Vitess. Their

We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats. Isolation is not a normal

A data warehouse is a system for performing fast queries on large amounts of data. A data lake is a system for storing high volumes of data in a format that is slow to access. A typical workflow for a data engineer is to pull data sets from this slow data lake storage into the

A content management system (CMS) defines how the content on a website is arranged and presented. The most widely used CMS is WordPress, the open source tool that is written in PHP. A large percentage of the web consists of WordPress sites, and WordPress has a huge ecosystem of plugins and templates. Despite the success

A data workflow scheduler is a tool used for connecting multiple systems together in order to build pipelines for processing data. A data pipeline might include a Hadoop task for ETL, a Spark task for stream processing, and a TensorFlow task to train a machine learning model.  The workflow scheduler manages the tasks in that