Quite often people ask me what I actually do. I have a hard time giving a short answer. Even to colleagues and friends in the industry.

Here I will try to show and tell how I spent an evening digging around in a system I helped build for a client.

There seems to exist a database for every niche, mood or emotion. And they seem to change just as fast.

How do you balance the urge for the new and shiny but without risking too much headache down the road?

This post is an attempt to lay out the rough landscape of databases that you might encounter or consider as of late 2020.

There will be broad generalizations for brevity.

The goal is not to be exhaustive or take all possible precautions. Consider it a starting point for further research and planning.

We discovered today that some implicit assumptions we had about AKS at smaller scales were incorrect.

Suddenly new workloads and jobs in our Radix CI/CD could not start due to insufficient resources (CPU & memory).

Even though it only caused problems in development environments with smaller node sizes it still surprised some of our developers, since we expected the size of development clusters to have enough resources.

I thought it would be a good chance to go a bit deeper and verify some of our assumptions and also learn more about various components that usually “just works” and isn’t really given much thought.

Understanding the characteristics of disk performance of a platform might be more important than you think. If disk resources are not correctly matched to your workload, your performance will suffer and might lead you to incorrectly diagnose a problem as being related to CPU or memory.

The defaults might also not give you the performance you expect.

In this first post on troubleshooting some disk performance issues on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) we will benchmark Azure Premium SSD to find how workloads affect performance and which metrics to monitor to know when troubleshooting potential disk issues.

A few days ago I wrote a walkthrough of setting up Azure Container Service (AKS) in Norwegian. Someone asked me for an English version of that, and here it is.

Kubernetes(K8s) is becoming the de-facto standard for deploying container-based applications and workloads. Microsoft is currently in preview of their managed Kubernetes offering (Azure Kubernetes Service, AKS) which makes it easy to create a Kubernetes cluster and deploy workloads without the skill and time required to manage day-to-day operations of a Kubernetes-cluster, which today can be complex and time consuming.

In this post we will set up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch using Azure CLI.

Update 29. Dec: There is an English version of this post here.

Kubernetes (K8s) er i ferd med å bli de-facto standard for deployments av kontainer-baserte applikasjoner. Microsoft har nå preview av deres managed Kubernetes tjeneste (Azure Kubernetes Service, AKS) som gjør det enkelt å opprette et Kubernetes cluster og rulle ut tjenester uten å måtte ha kompetanse og tid til den daglige driften av selve Kubernetes-clusteret, som per i dag kan være relativt komplisert og tidkrevende.

I denne posten setter vi opp et Kubernetes cluster fra scratch ved bruk av Azure CLI.

In this paper we will provide a step by step guide on how to install a single-instance of OpenTSDB using the latest versions of the underlying technology, Hadoop and HBase. We will also provide some background on the state of existing monitoring solutions.