Software Engineering Daily

A self-driving car needs to be able to quickly respond to changes in driving conditions. A factory needs to be able to quickly respond to changes in workplace safety. For these kinds of applications, we need processing power closer to the user of the application. If we put all of our application logic in the cloud, we will have to make a network round trip for every request.

Servers in the cloud are powerful, but so are the computers at the edge–smartphones, sensors, drones, cars, and on-prem servers. Edge computing is giving us more computation outside the data center.

Olivier Bloch works on Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, a set of services for edge computing. Azure IoT Edge includes on-prem versions of Microsoft Azure technologies. Tools that were previously accessible only in the cloud can be deployed and hosted on premise.

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John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another.

In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture that has made Google so successful. He has very entertaining stories about clusterops and site-reliability engineering.

Google’s success in engineering is due to extremely high standards, and a culture of intellectual honesty. With the volume of data and throughput that Google responds to, 1-in-a-million events are likely to occur. There isn’t room for sloppy practices.

John now works at Intercom, where he is adjusting to the modern world of Google infrastructure for everyone. This conversation made me feel quite grateful to be an engineer in a time where everything is so much cheaper, so much easier, and so much more performant than it was in the days when Google first built everything from scratch.

I had a great time talking to John, and hope he comes back on the show again in the future because it felt like we were just scratching the surface of his experience.

Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: [email protected]

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Kubernetes makes it easier for engineering teams to manage their distributed systems architecture. But it’s still not simple to deploy and operate a Kubernetes cluster. Google Container Engine (GKE) is a managed control plane for Kubernetes. Just as developers can use Google App Engine to easily deploy monolithic apps against a platform as a service, we can use Google Container Engine to deploy microservices against a platform as a service.

David Aronchick and Chen Goldberg work on Google Container Engine, and they join the show to explain why platform as a service container engines are useful. Google is not the only cloud provider with a container engine–Amazon ECS and Azure Container Engine also allow you to run containers in a managed fashion.

Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: [email protected]

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DNS stands for domain name system. This is the naming system that maps the entire internet. It associates information with domain names. More specifically, DNS specifies mappings between numerical IP addresses and domain names.

Most engineers know these basic facts about DNS, but they may not know how much engineering a complex company like Etsy or Zappos puts into their DNS configuration. Dynamic DNS allows for intelligent response, so that a resource is served from the most efficient place–even in the face of a DDoS attack, or just routine failure of cloud servers.

Phil Stanhope is the VP of technology at Oracle Dyn and he joins the show to explain how modern DNS works and the role of a DNS provider. Full disclosure: Dyn is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

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On January 31st 2017, GitLab experienced a major outage of their online repository hosting service. The primary database server experienced data loss due to a combination of malicious spam attacks and engineering mistakes that occurred while trying to respond to those spam attacks.

GitLab responded to the event transparently. The company put up a postmortem describing the event in detail. In subsequent posts, GitLab expressed sympathy for the employee who made engineering mistakes that led to the deletion of data. The employee was not judged or disciplined for an understandable error.

The response from the developer community was very positive. Engineers know that building cloud services is hard. Engineering is as much about avoiding errors as it is about appropriately responding to the inevitable mistakes.

GitLab is a developer platform that combines repository hosting with several other features–issue tracking, code review, and CD. Today’s guest is Pablo Carranza, who works on infrastructure at GitLab. In this episode, he walks us through GitLab’s product, the engineering stack, and a postmortem of the outage. We also discuss working at Amazon, and the importance of postmortems, which I first encountered at Amazon.

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