Tales from the road: great expectations and the cheese sandwich that wasn’t
Its been a long journey, I’ve arrived at the site of a potential customer in Mumbai. We arrive at the gate (the site is enormous, many buildings spread out over a multi-km complex). Sadly, our hosts have forgotten to arrange transport for us. So we hang off the side of one of the ‘worker busses’…
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
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
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 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.…