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Major cloud platform outages used to be rare events. As the amount of global data increases exponentially, however (90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone!) significant outages are becoming increasingly common. The potential user impact of cloud service provider (CSP) outages hits both deep and wide. For example, GCP’s europe-west9 full-region outage in April 2023 and AWS’s us-east-1 outage in June 2023 each temporarily disrupted operations for the businesses, schools, hospitals, and even government agencies relying on their services in those regions. And these are but two among many recent CSP downtime events: Data shows a steady rise in total observed global network outages in 2023 so far. The growing frequency of outages like these keeps the world’s government officials up at night. One of their deepest concerns is for the potentially catastrophic impact a major CSP failure could have on financial institutions — and the very real-world damage this could do to their economies. Concern is increasingly turning to action as different countries propose technical requirements aimed at ensuring operational resilience for their financial institutions (as well as other critical services like utilities, transportation, and healthcare). Technical requirements that are already becoming formal government regulations in some countries, with many more on the horizon. What does this mean for all organizations right now, and what can they do to prepare?

Michelle Gienow

August 24, 2023

[This post was originally published in October 2022. It has been updated to reflect current product offerings.] Traditionally, one of the stickiest decisions developers need to make when creating a database is choosing how many servers to use based on expected application traffic. Guess too low and your db could fall over under load, causing an outage. Guess too high, you pay for servers that just sit idle most of the time. Spiky loads? Uh oh, gotta overprovision to make sure those surges get handled even if it means wasted capacity 90%+ of the time.

Michelle Gienow

August 18, 2023

Indexes can have a significant impact on database performance. Let’s take a look at one type that’s especially important for searching text: the inverted index.

Charlie Custer

August 17, 2023

In my experience as a software engineer (and generally as a human, come to think of it), it seems to be universally easier to go from 2 to 3 of something, than it is to go from 1 to 2. For example, if your application already supports 2 languages, adding a 3rd is simple; whereas, if your application only supports 1 language, you need to build support for internationalization, before you can add the 2nd. The same holds true for application architecture; adding a 3rd region to an application that’s already distributed and supports multiple regions is much easier than making a single region application distributed (can run across multiple machines) and then multi-region (region/locality awareness).

Rob Reid

August 14, 2023

Everyone loves a dramatic finish. And with past winners the United States now eliminated from the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, some drama is guaranteed. Will England’s women bring it home for the first time ever? Will the Netherlands avenge their 2019 finals loss? Will a nation that has never made the finals – perhaps Australia, playing at home for this tournament, or Jamaica in their first-ever survival round – grab a surprise win?

Charlie Custer

August 7, 2023

Dealing with distributed database performance issues? Let’s talk about CDNs. Even though they’re at different levels of your tech stack, distributed databases and content delivery networks often share a similar goal: improving the availability and speed between your service and your user.

Migrating to a new database is an exciting and daunting challenge. There is tremendous upside for applications and operations at the end of the migration process, but all too often the migration takes longer than expected or is left in a partially complete state. Many technical challenges are well solved but stakeholders have different goals that complicate completing the migration successfully and on time. You can avoid common pitfalls and get your new database completely serving production data on a reliable timeline by asking and answering the following five questions:

A data pipeline is a piece of software that ingests data from one or more sources, and moves that data to one or more destinations. Often, the data is transformed as part of this process to ensure that it meets the requirements of the system or systems it is being sent to.

Charlie Custer

August 2, 2023

Surviving a hackathon as a sponsor without becoming a complete zombie is no joke. To start, you’ll have plenty of practical, technical concerns that have to be sorted (How do you get people to try your product? Will the hackers be familiar with your application’s language?). But once you’ve got the technical issues taken care of, you’ll likely have nearly as many questions about how to keep your team as sane and functional as possible––despite running on limited sleep, consuming excessive caffeine, and likely being completely out of their comfort zones.

Jessica Edwards

July 31, 2023