Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.