Jaeger primarily supports two backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Here at Grafana Labs we use Scylla, an open source Cassandra-compatible backend. In this post we’ll look at how we run Scylla at scale and share some techniques to reduce load while ingesting even more spans. We’ll also share some internal metrics about Jaeger load and Scylla backend performance. Special thanks to the Scylla team for spending some time with us to talk about performance and configuration!

Automation is a key component in the management of the entire software release lifecycle. While we know it is critical to the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery process, it is now becoming equally essential to the underlying infrastructure you depend on. As automation has increased, a new principle for managing infrastructure has emerged to prevent environment drift and ensure your infrastructure is consistently and reliably provisioned.

As an ad publisher, your revenue depends on two main factors: traffic to your site and ad optimization. A lot of the focus goes into the practice and processes of driving traffic to your site from an SEO perspective, but what if when visitors get to your site, they have a less than ideal experience? All the effort and time that went into creating and driving traffic to your site would be for nothing if the visitor lands on your page and doesn’t take any action.

Cyberattacks are the “buzz word” that you hear when a company’s data has been breached. Sometimes the breach results in data being released on the internet. Other times, the hacker holds the data ransom in exchange for a large monetary payout. Data loss prevention and protection should be at the top of your list. Your data, after all, should be considered one of your most valuable business assets.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people say they don’t like working with security teams. Security teams often have ridiculous requirements, and it can be painful for everyone when releases get delayed. I’ve been guilty of thinking the same thing, so when I was approached at my job at Doximity to build a security team (without prior experience doing so), I knew I wanted to take a different approach.

The five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday is known as the Cyber Five Weekend (also known as Cyber 5). Forbes estimates that people spent $3.7 billion on Thanksgiving Day in 2018. They approximate that over 165 million people shopped over the entire weekend. This is a 16.5% increase year over year. On Black Friday, people spent $6.2 billion online, with a 23.6% year-over-year growth.

Troubleshoot your IP addresses and switch ports faster and smarter! Managing and troubleshooting your network IPs and ports effectively can become difficult if hands-on network monitoring by your IT team is required at all times. Ever wondered if you can monitor your IPs and endpoints on the go? If yes, the solution you need is the OpUtils mobile app.

An acquaintance of mine works for a company that still uses Windows XP to manage some internal applications. The higher ups of the company refuse to adopt the new versions, given costs and technical gaps, and it’s created something of a Pandora’s box for employee turnover. With no strong internal reference documentation, each new departure leaves IT wondering two things. This rather amusing conundrum is apparently not an isolated incident.

Few things are more frustrating than slow, flaky test suites. You're ready to deploy, wait 20 minutes for CI to run, only to find that a test failure in code you've never touched is blocking you. You dig into the source and find the problem: an external API call. It works (slowly) most of the time. But sometimes the network glitches and it fails. What do you do? In this article, José Manuel shows us several techniques for removing external API dependencies from our tests.