Software Engineering Daily

Oliver Gould worked at Twitter from 2010 to 2014. Twitter’s popularity was taking off, and the engineering team was learning how to scale the product. During that time, Twitter adopted Apache Mesos, and began breaking up its monolithic architecture into different services. As more and more services were deployed, engineers at Twitter decided to standardize communications between those services with a tool called a service proxy. A service proxy providesContinue reading...

Modern applications store most of their data on hosted storage solutions. We use hosted block storage to back databases, hosted object storage for objects such as videos, and hosted file storage for file systems. Using a cloud provider for these storage systems can simplify scalability, durability, and availability–it can be less painful than taking care of storage yourself. One downside: the storage systems offered by the cloud providers are notContinue reading...

A common problem in a distributed system: how do you take a snapshot of the global state of that system? Snapshot is difficult because you need to tell every node in the system to simultaneously record its state. There are several reasons to take a snapshot. You might want to take a picture of the global state for the purposes of debugging. Or you might want to take a comprehensiveContinue reading...

In the last four years, CoreOS has been at the center of enterprise adoption of containers. During that time, Brian Harrington (or “Redbeard”) has seen a lot of deployments. In this episode, Brian discusses the patterns he has seen among successful Kubernetes deployments–and the pitfalls of the less successful. How should you manage configuration? How can you avoid IP address overlap between containers? How should you log and monitor yourContinue reading...

A backend application can have hundreds of services written in different programming frameworks and languages. Across these different languages, log messages are produced in different formats. Some logging is produced in XML, some is produced in JSON, some is in other formats. These logs need to be unified into a common format, and centralized for any developer who wants to debug. The popularity of Kubernetes is making it easier forContinue reading...

Kubernetes has become the standard way of deploying new distributed applications. Most new internet businesses started in the foreseeable future will leverage Kubernetes (whether they realize it or not). Many old applications are migrating to Kubernetes too. Before Kubernetes, there was no standardization around a specific distributed systems platform. Just like Linux became the standard server-side operating system for a single node, Kubernetes has become the standard way to orchestrateContinue reading...

You are requesting a car from a ridesharing service such as Lyft. Your request hits the Lyft servers and begins trying to get you a car. It takes your geolocation, and passes the geolocation to a service that finds cars that are nearby, and puts all those cars into a list. The list of nearby cars is sent to another service, which sorts the list of cars by how closeContinue reading...

Since Kubernetes came out, engineers have been deploying clusters to Amazon. In the early years of Kubernetes, deploying to AWS meant that you had to manage the availability of the cluster yourself. You needed to configure etcd and your master nodes in a way that avoided having a single point of failure. Deploying Kubernetes on AWS became simpler with an open-source tool called kops (short for Kubernetes Operations). Kops automatesContinue reading...

A single user request hits Google’s servers. A user is looking for search results. In order to deliver those search results, that request will have to hit several different internal services on the way to getting a response. These different services work together to satisfy the user request. All of these services need to communicate efficiently, they need to scale, and they need to be secure. Services need to haveContinue reading...

Docker was released in 2013, and popularized the use of containers. A container is an abstraction for isolating a well-defined portion of an operating system. Developers quickly latched onto containers as a way to cut down on the cost of virtual machines–as well as isolate code and simplify deployments. Developers began deploying so many containers that they needed a centralized way to manage the containers.      Then came the riseContinue reading...