Kubernetes

We recently implemented Thanos alongside Prometheus into our Kubernetes clusters, we had previously used a variety of different metrics systems and we wanted to make life simpler for everyone by just picking one.

Prometheus seemed like an obvious choice due to its powerful querying language, native Kubernetes support and great community. However we found it somewhat lacking when it came to being highly available, something that would be very important if we wanted this to be the single source of all our metrics.

Thanos came along and solved a lot of these problems. It allowed us to run multiple Prometheis without duplicating metrics, query multiple Prometheus clusters at once, and easily back up data and then query it. Now we have a single place to go if you want to view metrics across all our clusters, with many layers of redundancy to make sure this monitoring solution is as reliable and resilient as we could reasonably make it.

If you're interested in a bit more detail feel free to check out the blog I wrote on the subject that's linked.

I started using .NET in the early 2000s. Ever since version .NET 3.5 (and even .NET 2.0 if we take a proper generics implementation into account), C# was dominating in the feature battle against its rival, yet wasn't advancing significantly in the product coverage due to its platform dependency.

Thus I was very excited to hear the news about plans to develop an open-sourced cross-platform .NET Core framework. We started using .NET Core in production from version 1.1, and a global decision to migrate the entire solution to .NET Core was made with the release of .NET Core 2.0. Now we have more than 100 .NET Core (micro)services running on Linux containers inside Kubernetes, using Kafka for reactive communications and a number of open-source relational and NoSQL storage engines.

Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...

So, the shift from Amazon EC2 to Google App Engine and generally #AWS to #GCP was a long decision and in the end, it's one that we've taken with eyes open and that we reserve the right to modify at any time. And to be clear, we continue to do a lot of stuff with AWS. But, by default, the content of the decision was, for our consumer-facing products, we're going to use GCP first. And if there's some reason why we don't think that's going to work out great, then we'll happily use AWS. In practice, that hasn't really happened. We've been able to meet almost 100% of our needs in GCP.

So it's basically mostly Google Kubernetes Engine , we're mostly running stuff on Kubernetes right now.

#AWStoGCPmigration #cloudmigration #migration

We are moving all of our infrastructure to Amazon EKS on Kubernetes from our our Amazon EC2 hosts. This gives less management overhead, host security and networking and aides a lot of compliance headaches since it's a Serverless architecture.

Stitch is run entirely on AWS. All of our transactional databases are run with Amazon RDS, and we rely on Amazon S3 for data persistence in various stages of our pipeline. Our product integrates with Amazon Redshift as a data destination, and we also use Redshift as an internal data warehouse (powered by Stitch, of course).

The majority of our services run on stateless Amazon EC2 instances that are managed by AWS OpsWorks. We recently introduced Kubernetes into our infrastructure to run the scheduled jobs that execute Singer code to extract data from various sources. Although we tend to be wary of shiny new toys, Kubernetes has proven to be a good fit for this problem, and its stability, strong community and helpful tooling have made it easy for us to incorporate into our operations.

While we continue to be happy with Clojure for our internal services, we felt that its relatively narrow adoption could impede Singer's growth. We chose Python both because it is well suited to the task, and it seems to have reached critical mass among data engineers. All that being said, the Singer spec is language agnostic, and integrations and libraries have been developed in JavaScript, Go, and Clojure.

Since we deployed our very first lines of Python code more than 2 years ago we are happy users of Heroku. It lets us focus on building features rather than maintaining infrastructure, has super-easy scaling capabilities, and the support team is always happy to help (in the rare case you need them).

We played with the thought of moving our computational needs over to barebone Amazon EC2 instances or a container-management solution like Kubernetes a couple of times, but the added costs of maintaining this architecture and the ease-of-use of Heroku have kept us from moving forward so far.

Running independent services for different needs of our features gives us the flexibility to choose whatever data storage is best for the given task.

#PlatformAsAService #ContainerTools

At Shopify, over the years, we moved from shards to the concept of "pods". A pod is a fully isolated instance of Shopify with its own datastores like MySQL, Redis, Memcached. A pod can be spawned in any region. This approach has helped us eliminate global outages. As of today, we have more than a hundred pods, and since moving to this architecture we haven't had any major outages that affected all of Shopify. An outage today only affects a single pod or region.

As we grew into hundreds of shards and pods, it became clear that we needed a solution to orchestrate those deployments. Today, we use Docker, Kubernetes, and Google Kubernetes Engine to make it easy to bootstrap resources for new Shopify Pods.