Month: August 2018

  • My build is slow: understanding resource limits and steal time in the cloudy world of cloud

    My build is slow: understanding resource limits and steal time in the cloudy world of cloud

    I earlier wrote about steal time, the concept of “my image wants to use time but its not available due to some unknown noisy neighbour stealing it”.  In a nutshell, you have a server with X resources. You then ‘sell’ 10X to your users, making it 10:1 oversubscribed. The Internet industry of late has been…

  • Tales from the road: the pantless seat-mate

    Tales from the road: the pantless seat-mate

    This happened a couple of years ago, and I thought I would share it with the crowd. I’m on a flight (British Midland, BMI) from Amsterdam to London. I have an aisle seat nearish the back of the plane. For those who haven’t flown this route, its usually full of hungover British lads on their…

  • History in photos: my new office

    History in photos: my new office

    So I’ve been schlepping a new business off the ground. And this time I’m taking a more incremental approach (cuz I’m a lot older and have less energy!). One of the strategies I’ve taken is to work in a ‘coworking’ space. And I’ve chosen one of the premier ones in our region, the Communitech Data…

  • Ceph in the city: introducing my local Kubernetes to my ‘big’ Ceph cluster

    Ceph in the city: introducing my local Kubernetes to my ‘big’ Ceph cluster

    Ceph has long been a favourite technology of mine. Its a storage mechanism that just scales out forever. Gone are the days of raids and complex sizing / setup. Chuck all your disks into whatever number of servers, and let ceph take care of it. Want more read speed? Let it have more read replicas.…

  • Downward scaling the cloud

    Downward scaling the cloud

    One of the things you will find as you go on your journey through the cloud is that the downward-scalability is very poor. Cloud is designed for a high upfront cost (people time and equipment $$$). But after that, it scales very linearly for a long way. This is great if you are a cog…