The Internet of Things has transformed people’s lives, enabling everything from “smart homes” to remote health monitoring. And now a startup called AMMP Technologies is using IoT – and Grafana – to help bring electricity to rural Africa. Hendrik Broering, COO and cofounder of AMMP, told the audience at GrafanaCon L.A. about a village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of about 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017.

Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. This post is about what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation.

As industries shift to a microservices approach of deploying applications using containers, data scientists can reap the benefits. Data Scientists use specific frameworks and operating systems that can often conflict with the requirements of a production system. This has led to many clashes between IT and R&D departments. IT is not going to change the OS to meet the needs of a model that needs a specific framework that won’t run on RHEL 7.2.

In Parts One and Two of this blog, we looked back at the ongoing open source licensing wars, focusing on the evolving situation between Elastic N.V. and AWS. In this final installment, we’ll offer some opinions on the situation, as well as share our own views on how we’re reacting at Grafana Labs.

A common sentiment among our prospects after they see our demo for the first time is: “That’s it? It can’t be that simple!”. The truth is – yes it can be, and it should be. ML and AI should make IT Ops simpler, and a big part of that is usability. If your ML & AI powered IT Ops tools take months to set up and weeks to learn, and then don’t provide a substantially improved user experience, you’re obviously using the wrong tools.

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.