This is a short follow up to last week's story on Stripe Billing as a reader on Hackernews commented that it seemed we didn't handle VAT. We do, but I just left it out of the story. For those not familiar with handling EU VAT for SaaS companies: It's a bit of counter intuitive jungle. At least that's what some dedicated SaaS startups make you believe. Also, Stripe does not handle it at all. They give you a { taxRate: null } field for you to fill.

This post demonstrates a *basic* example of how to build a deep learning model with Keras, serve it as REST API with Flask, and deploy it using Docker and Kubernetes. This is NOT a robust, production example. This is a quick guide for anyone out there who has heard about Kubernetes but hasn’t tried it out yet. To that end, I use Google Cloud for every step of this process.

Business innovators are embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) to reinvent and enhance the customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and develop new business models. But the IoT brings a host of new IT challenges.

When I started Checkly, all the typical SaaS things around billing, credit cards and prorating confused the hell out of me. I understood them from an intellectual point of view, but not really from an implementation point of view.

Open source software adoption continues to grow within enterprises (even for legacy applications), beyond just startups and born-in-the-cloud software. In this second part of our Kafka monitoring series (see the first part discussing Kafka metrics to monitor), we’ll take a look at some open source tools available to monitor Kafka clusters. We’ll explore what it takes to install, configure, and actually use each tool in a meaningful way.

If you run a SaaS, you probably want to show your users when they are almost running out of widgets. Or that they can get some cool feature on a more expensive plan. Or, in other words, how can you be nice and commercial in dealing with plan limits. Last week we already looked at how we manage plans & features for Checkly. That write up was very back end focused, so this week I wanted to dive deeper into how we actually show this to our users in a friendly way.

Where we left off: AWS had taken the Elasticsearch software and launched their own cloud offering in 2015, and Elastic N.V. had doubled down on an “open core strategy.” Once AWS decides to offer a project like Elasticsearch, it immediately becomes a truly formidable competitor to anyone trying to do the same, even the company behind the software itself. AWS has huge scale, operational expertise, and various network effects that really compound.

As mobile and IoT deployments play an increasing role in enterprise networks, organizations are looking to more appropriate architecture—such as edge computing—to relieve their security and device management burdens. Edge computing is still in its relative infancy, and the platforms and services needed to orchestrate edge deployments are evolving themselves. In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the issues and available options.