Alternatives to Equinix Metal

Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

Functionally, Amplitude and Mixpanel are incredibly similar. They both offer almost all the same functionality around tracking and visualizing user actions for analytics. You can track A/B test results in both. We ended up going with Amplitude at BaseDash because it has a more generous free tier for our uses (10 million actions per month, versus Mixpanel's 1000 monthly tracked users).

Segment isn't meant to compete with these tools, but instead acts as an API to send actions to them, and other analytics tools. If you're just sending event data to one of these tools, you probably don't need Segment. If you're using other analytics tools like Google Analytics and FullStory, Segment makes it easy to send events to all your tools at once.

LaunchDarkly is almost a five year old company, and our methodology for deploying was state of the art... for 2014. We recently undertook a project to modernize the way we #deploy our software, moving from Ansible-based deploy scripts that executed on our local machines, to using Spinnaker (along with Terraform and Packer) as the basis of our deployment system. We've been using Armory's enterprise Spinnaker offering to make this project a reality.

Using Webpack is one of the best decision ever. I have used to Grunt and gulp previously, but the experience is not the same, and despite I know there are other bundlers like Parcel, Webpack gives me the perfect balance between automatization and configuration. The ecosystem of tools and loaders is amazing, and with WebPack #merge, you can modularize your build and define standard pieces to assemble different build configurations. I don't like processes where you cannot see their guts, and you have to trust in magic a little bit too much for my taste. But also I don't want to reinvent the wheel and lose too much time configuring my build processes. And of course, I love #WebPackDevServer and hot reloading.

To provide employees with the critical need of interactive querying, we’ve worked with Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine, over the years. Operating Presto at Pinterest’s scale has involved resolving quite a few challenges like, supporting deeply nested and huge thrift schemas, slow/ bad worker detection and remediation, auto-scaling cluster, graceful cluster shutdown and impersonation support for ldap authenticator.

Our infrastructure is built on top of Amazon EC2 and we leverage Amazon S3 for storing our data. This separates compute and storage layers, and allows multiple compute clusters to share the S3 data.

We have hundreds of petabytes of data and tens of thousands of Apache Hive tables. Our Presto clusters are comprised of a fleet of 450 r4.8xl EC2 instances. Presto clusters together have over 100 TBs of memory and 14K vcpu cores. Within Pinterest, we have close to more than 1,000 monthly active users (out of total 1,600+ Pinterest employees) using Presto, who run about 400K queries on these clusters per month.

Each query submitted to Presto cluster is logged to a Kafka topic via Singer. Singer is a logging agent built at Pinterest and we talked about it in a previous post. Each query is logged when it is submitted and when it finishes. When a Presto cluster crashes, we will have query submitted events without corresponding query finished events. These events enable us to capture the effect of cluster crashes over time.

Each Presto cluster at Pinterest has workers on a mix of dedicated AWS EC2 instances and Kubernetes pods. Kubernetes platform provides us with the capability to add and remove workers from a Presto cluster very quickly. The best-case latency on bringing up a new worker on Kubernetes is less than a minute. However, when the Kubernetes cluster itself is out of resources and needs to scale up, it can take up to ten minutes. Some other advantages of deploying on Kubernetes platform is that our Presto deployment becomes agnostic of cloud vendor, instance types, OS, etc.

#BigData #AWS #DataScience #DataEngineering

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

• GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
• Respectively Git as revision control system
• SourceTree as Git GUI
• Visual Studio Code as IDE
• CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
• Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
• SonarQube as quality gate
• Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
• VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
• Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
• Heroku for deploying in test environments
• nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
• SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
• Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
• PostgreSQL as preferred database system
• Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

• Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
• Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
• Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
• Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
• Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
• Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

We are hardcore Kubernetes users and contributors. We loved the automation it provides. However, as our team grew and added more clusters and microservices, capacity and resources management becomes a massive pain to us. We started suffering from a lot of outages and unexpected behavior as we promote our code from dev to production environments. Luckily we were working on our AI-powered tools to understand different dependencies, predict usage, and calculate the right resources and configurations that should be applied to our infrastructure and microservices. We dogfooded our agent (http://github.com/magalixcorp/magalix-agent) and were able to stabilize as the #autopilot continuously recovered any miscalculations we made or because of unexpected changes in workloads. We are open sourcing our agent in a few days. Check it out and let us know what you think! We run workloads on Microsoft Azure Google Kubernetes Engine and Amazon EC2 and we're all about Go and Python!

CodeFactor being a #SAAS product, our goal was to run on a cloud-native infrastructure since day one. We wanted to stay product focused, rather than having to work on the infrastructure that supports the application. We needed a cloud-hosting provider that would be reliable, economical and most efficient for our product.

CodeFactor.io aims to provide an automated and frictionless code review service for software developers. That requires agility, instant provisioning, autoscaling, security, availability and compliance management features. We looked at the top three #IAAS providers that take up the majority of market share: Amazon's Amazon EC2 , Microsoft's Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

AWS has been available since 2006 and has developed the most extensive services ant tools variety at a massive scale. Azure and GCP are about half the AWS age, but also satisfied our technical requirements.

It is worth noting that even though all three providers support Docker containerization services, GCP has the most robust offering due to their investments in Kubernetes. Also, if you are a Microsoft shop, and develop in .NET - Visual Studio Azure shines at integration there and all your existing .NET code works seamlessly on Azure. All three providers have serverless computing offerings (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions). Additionally, all three providers have machine learning tools, but GCP appears to be the most developer-friendly, intuitive and complete when it comes to #Machinelearning and #AI.

The prices between providers are competitive across the board. For our requirements, AWS would have been the most expensive, GCP the least expensive and Azure was in the middle. Plus, if you #Autoscale frequently with large deltas, note that Azure and GCP have per minute billing, where AWS bills you per hour. We also applied for the #Startup programs with all three providers, and this is where Azure shined. While AWS and GCP for startups would have covered us for about one year of infrastructure costs, Azure Sponsorship would cover about two years of CodeFactor's hosting costs. Moreover, Azure Team was terrific - I felt that they wanted to work with us where for AWS and GCP we were just another startup.

In summary, we were leaning towards GCP. GCP's advantages in containerization, automation toolset, #Devops mindset, and pricing were the driving factors there. Nevertheless, we could not say no to Azure's financial incentives and a strong sense of partnership and support throughout the process.

Bottom line is, IAAS offerings with AWS, Azure, and GCP are evolving fast. At CodeFactor, we aim to be platform agnostic where it is practical and retain the flexibility to cherry-pick the best products across providers.

I am currently working on a long term mobile app project. Current stack: Frontend: Dart/Flutter Backend: Go, AWS Resources (AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, etc.) Since there are only two developers and we have limited time and resources, we are looking for a BAAS like Firebase or AWS Amplify to handle auth and push notifications for now. We are prioritizing developing speed so we can iterate quickly. The only problem is that AWS amplify support for flutter is in developer preview and has limited capabilities (We have tested it out in our app). Firebase is the more mature option. It has great support for flutter and has more than we need for auth, notifications, etc. My question is that, if we choose firebase, we would be stuck with using two different cloud providers. Is this bad, or is this even a problem? I am willing to change anything on the backend architecture wise, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I am somewhat unfamiliar with Google Cloud Platform. Thank you.

I have started using AWS Batch for some long ML inference jobs. So far it's working well and giving a decent performance. Since it is fully managed, it saves a lot of extra work as well. But Batch takes a good amount of time to create a new cluster and then load the job based on the priority of the queue. Going forward would love to put effort into something which is fast to start and give more flexibility as well. What other tools you would suggest for long-running backend jobs which can scale well. I am not looking for something fully managed so ignore the options similar to batch in Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure, Looking for open-source alternatives here. Do you think Kubernetes, RabbitMQ/Kafka will be a good fit or just overkill for my problem. Usually w we get 1000s of requests in parallel and each job might take 20-30 mins in a 2 vCPU system.

Hello, I'm currently writing an e-commerce website with Laravel and Laravel Nova (as an admin panel). I want to start deploying the app and created a DigitalOcean account. After some searches about the deployment process, I saw that the setup via DigitalOcean (using Droplets) isn't very easy for beginners. Now I'm not sure how to deploy my app. I am in between Laravel Forge and DigitalOcean (?Apps Platform or Droplets?). I've read that Heroku and Laravel Vapor are a bit expensive. That's why I didn't consider them yet. I'd be happy to read your opinions on that topic!

Hi, I'm a beginner at using MySQL, I currently deployed my crud app on Heroku using the ClearDB add-on. I didn't see that coming, but the increased value of the primary key instead of being 1 is set to 10, and I cannot find a way to change it. Now I`m considering switching and deploying the full app and MySql to DigitalOcean any advice on that? Will I get the same issue? Thanks in advance!