HPI Issue #11: Edge Compute Automation and Distributed Database Observability

Resource

Blog

Topic

Edge Compute

Date

May 18, 2020

Author

If you run into challenges while deploying new infrastructure, chances are there’s a tool or tutorial available to help you. This issue of High Performance infrastructure is dedicated to the resources that help us when we’re in a snag.

In this issue, we present new tools and tutorials you can use to automate package installation for edge VMs, discover unknowns within distributed databases, and easily monitor the performance of your websites and web apps (yup, yet another cool webperf tool).

If you enjoy this issue, you can subscribe to receive future issues via email below.

Edge Compute Resource Management with Ansible and Terraform (StackPath)
This three-part series shows you how to use Ansible and Terraform to manage edge compute instances created on StackPath more efficiently.

  • In part one, use Ansible to automate the installation of a LEMP stack on an edge VM instance.
  • In part two, use Terraform’s StackPath provider to provision an edge VM instance.
  • In part three, use Ansible to automate multiple edge VM instances created with Terraform.

Key Visualizer: Observe Distributed Databases to Discover Unknowns (PingCAP)
The builders of TiDB, an open-source distributed SQL database that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) workloads, created this new open source tool.

  • Key Visualizer is an open-source project located in the TiDB Dashboard.
  • It uses heatmaps to display read and write traffic volume.
  • In the heatmap below, the x-axis represents time, the y-axis represents the key ranges, and the colors represent the read or write volume of key ranges (the brighter the color, the higher the read or write volume).

Fast or Slow: Global Website Speed Profiler (Wordfence)
When’s the last time you checked the speed of your website or web app? If it’s been a while you should check this out.

  • The tool provides a website speed test and audit for 18 global locations.
  • You can subscribe to receive weekly performance monitoring updates for a specified URL.
  • Reports come with a color-coded request map that identifies speeds for different locations.

Other Worthy Reads

Debugging Distributed Systems (Association for Computing Machinery)
This 20-page PDF describes bugging challenges that differentiate distributed systems from other kinds of software. It also presents tools and ongoing research available for resolving these challenges.

SwimOS: A Distributed Software Platform (GitHub)
This distributed open source software can be used to build stateful, massively real-time streaming applications.

The Original Cookie Specification from 1997 was GDPR Compliant (Baekdal)
According to the author, it’s only later that the ad tech industry completely messed everything up.

The Mystical, Magical World of Distributed Computing (DevOps.com)
The latest cartoon from ROELBOB on distributed computing.

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