Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Host choice and the process of identifying the right data center for your company’s web hosting needs is one of the most challenging but essential decisions that you’ll have to make. It will depend a bit on how important the web component of your company is, but, in the modern era, it is highly likely that web will play a huge part of your company’s operations.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that can also provide service discovery for microservice-based applications. It’s the default DNS server in Kubernetes, providing name resolution and service discovery for the services operating in the cluster. CoreDNS is easily customizable, so you can define how it should act on each request beyond simply executing a DNS lookup.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona last week, Weaveworks’ Bryan Boreham and I did a deep-dive session on Cortex, an OSS Apache-licensed CNCF Sandbox project. A horizontally scalable, highly available, long term storage for Prometheus, Cortex powers Grafana Cloud’s hosted Prometheus. During our talk, we focused on the steps that we’ve taken to make Cortex’s query performance awesome.

In the digital era, state and local government and education (SLED) agencies are increasingly leveraging new technological advances such as mobility, the cloud, and big data to better serve constituents while achieving cost efficiencies.

By 2021, IDC’s Worldwide CIO Agenda 2019 Predictions expects that 70% of CIOs will invest in machine learning and data science techniques for greater agility and innovation in IT operations management. In an AI-enabled future, enterprises will increasingly rely on advanced analytics to address a variety of IT operations use cases, including problem recognition, impact analysis, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and incident resolution.

We’ve all been in the situation where suddenly you are the lone developer on call while everyone is out of pocket. Or in the case of Grafana Labs Director of UX David Kaltschmidt, his then business partner, Grafana Labs VP of Product Tom Wilkie, was checking out for a weekend music fest. “Tom and I founded a company a couple of years ago, and I’m more of a frontend person. Tom did all the backend and devops stuff,” explained Kaltschimdt.

Last week I rolled out a simple patch that decimated the response time of a Postgres query crucial to Checkly. It quite literally went from an average of ~100ms with peaks to 1 second to a steady 1ms to 10ms. However, that patch was just the last step of a longer journey. This post details those steps and all the stuff I learned along the way. We'll look at how I analyzed performance issues, tested fixes and how simple Postgres optimizations can have spectacular results.