Tag Archives: cloud

Automatically restarting GNU/Linux hosts upon hung storage

We recently experienced a weird and frustrating problem with storage reliability on our RabbitMQ cluster running on AWS c5-series EC2 instances with EBS storage and Ubuntu LTS 16.04. One of our three-node RabbitMQ cluster instances will experience an issue that … Continue reading

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Scaling backend infrastructure to handle millions of phones (Mobile Refresh 2018)

I recently had the pleasure to speak at the 2018 Mobile Refresh conference held here in Wellington and did a talk introducing how we run some parts of the Sailthru Mobile platform, along with recommendations and advice to anyone else … Continue reading

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Deep Dive into ECS

I spent a fair bit of time in 2017 re-architecting the carnival.io platform onto Amazon ECS, including working to handle some tricky autoscaling challenges brought on by the nature of the sudden high-load spikes experienced when we deliver push messages to customers. … Continue reading

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Puppet Autosigning & Cloud Recommendations

I was over in Sydney this week attending linux.conf.au 2018 and made a short presentation at the Sysadmin miniconf regarding deploying Puppet in cloud environments. The majority of this talk covers the Puppet autosigning process which is a big potential … Continue reading

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Detectatron

I recently installed security cameras around my house which are doing an awesome job of recording all the events that take place around my house and grounds (generally of the feline variety). Unfortunately the motion capture tends to be overly trigger happy … Continue reading

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Fairfax’s Cloud Journey at Auckland AWS Summit 2016

I recently presented at the 2016 AWS Summit Auckland about Fairfax’s cloud journey as part of the business stream “Key Steps for Setting up your AWS Journey for Success” alongside two excellent Amazon engineers. It’s a bit different from my usual … Continue reading

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AWS Cost Control at Fairfax

Earlier this month I was invited to speak at the AWS Wellington User Group around how we’ve been handling cost control at Fairfax including our use of spot pricing. I’ve now processed the video and got a recording up online for … Continue reading

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How much swap should I use on my VM?

Lately a couple people have asked me about how much swap space is “right” for their servers – especially in the context of running low spec machines like AWS t2.nano/t2.micro or Digital Ocean boxes with low allocations like 1GB or 512MB … Continue reading

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The Proprietary Renaissance

noun, re·nais·sance often attributive \ˌre-nə-ˈsän(t)s, -ˈzän(t)s, -ˈsäⁿs, -ˈzäⁿs, ˈre-nə-ˌ, chiefly British ri-ˈnā-sən(t)s\ : a situation or period of time when there is a new interest in something that has not been popular in a long time : a period of … Continue reading

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Your cloud pricing isn’t webscale

Thankfully in 2015 most (but not all) proprietary software providers have moved away from the archaic ideology of software being licensed by the CPU core – a concept that reflected the value and importance of systems back when you were buying … Continue reading

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