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.

For eight years, Codemania has brought developers and technology enthusiasts together in Auckland. This year, 500 developers arrived to network, share ideas, and solve problems with an impressive speaker lineup that included developers, authors, and global tech leaders. As the day unfolded, we learned how Apple appears to achieve the impossible with their short product development lifecycles.

The NiCE VMware Management Pack delivers first-rate monitoring for your business critical, highly dynamical virtualized environments. Taming the beast of VMware service outages has never been easier. Leverage your existing investment, reduce costs, save time and build efficiencies that will last beyond your expectations.

Elasticsearch is the living heart of what is today’s the most popular log analytics platform — the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana). The role played by Elasticsearch is so central that it has become synonymous with the name of the stack itself. Used primarily for search and log analysis, Elasticsearch is today one of the most popular database systems available today.

The CFEngine engineering team has recently discovered a severe security issue in the CFEngine Enterprise product. CFEngine is using some internal secrets for authentication to the Mission Portal API and the PostgreSQL database when running background maintenance tasks. These internal secrets are randomly generated during the installation process and stored in files which only the root user has access to.

Secure access to your own private registry helps control who has access to your images. Compared to usage-based services such as Docker Hub and Quay, a Cycle hosted private registry only consumes the resources you give it access to, yielding a more cost-effective deployment. Let’s take a look at how simple it is to deploy a private Docker registry on Cycle.

DevOps is a very data-driven practice. After the right cultural changes take place within an organization to adopt DevOps, teams often rely heavily on monitoring, measurement, and continuous improvement to keep their projects on track. The best teams use KPIs to benchmark their performance and report up to management. However, there’s one metric your DevOps team might not be tracking: The cloud cost of their engineering decisions.

The global data supply reached 4.4 zettabytes (ZB) in 2013 – or 4.4 trillion GB – but less than five percent of that data was actually analyzed, according to the seventh Digital Universe report by the IDC. Approximately 22 percent of all existing data would actually be useful if tagged and analyzed.

“Oh, they’ll never pay for that.” It’s a phrase Leigh Wood, the Director of Node IT Solutions, hears a lot from his fellow MSPs. It’s easy to understand why. When you’re used to hearing price push-back on every contract, selling something beyond your basic managed services agreement seems impossible.

We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. While it was a great way to bootstrap a new Rails app with a significant amount of Javascript we encountered some serious performance problems that we felt really impacted our productivity. We build our application images after every git push and we’d like to be able to deploy them quickly.