12 posts tagged with "platform-engineering"

Now that OpenTelemetry has gained such significant traction, it's starting to attract a lot of attention beyond the hardcore observability community. While most of what I read about OTel is pretty positive, it also draws its fair share of shade.

Honestly, I get it. As a big user of OTel, I've spent plenty of hours rage debugging OTTL filters in OTel collectors, desperately searching for SDK examples that actually work, or pulling my hair out trying to figure out which version of a protobuf schema changed and broke telemetry from my Swift clients. And like a lot of the haters, I also get frustrated that the overall level of complexity in the specifications leaks into the implementation details of every part of the project.

All that said, I'm incredibly thankful that OTel exists. While it's still in its awkward teenage years, it's already changing the industry dramatically. Despite the challenges that currently exist, I think OpenTelemetry is the only reasonable path forward for observability.

At SimpliSafe, we manage a pretty large system of microservices. Because we're entrusted by our customers to protect their homes and families, we take reliability of our systems pretty seriously, so observability is pretty important to us.

Like most companies today, our observability strategy is built around the "three pillars" approach: metrics, logs, and traces. Of the three, we're currently the most dissatisfied with our logging tooling, and have been working on finding a better product.

We're already a Honeycomb customer, and in our conversation with them, they ended up making a pretty interesting case that we should consider a new approach: ditch the three pillars and make traces the center of our strategy. We had up to this point been thinking very incrementally, and here was Honeycomb, coming in hot with a bold and revolutionary vision: Observability 2.0.

AWS's Graviton is a 64 bit ARM-based CPU available on EC2. Why, you ask, would one want to use Graviton-based instances when trusty old x86 instances have served us so well in the past?

Well, for one, you'ds see a roughly 30% improvement in price/performance versus instances with x86 chips. This performance difference is even more pronounced at higher utilization, because unlike x86 chips, a Graviton vCPU is an actual CPU core, NOT a hyperthread you're sharing on a core with some rando. This should allow you to scale down, increase CPU utilization more than would be safe with hyperthreads, and still handle the same load.

At my work, we've been struggling a bit over the past few years with decisions made (almost 10 years ago now) about our AWS network design. While we have a full class A private network (16,777,216 IPv4 addresses), we've managed to paint ourselves into the very sad corner of looming IP address exhaustion.

There's a few reasons:

• Our integration with cell network carriers (to support our home security systems) requires a huge chunk of our IP space
• Our decision to use a multi-account architecture in AWS, and that we chose to use a flat IP space across our accounts. This means our IP space is fragmented across accounts, regions, and availability zones, making a lot of that address space effectively unusable.

Even with all of this, we might have been fine... until we went big on Kubernetes.

As a platform engineer, I enjoy the benefits of working in a field with a vibrant ecosystem of open source infrastructure and developer tools. I've spent much of the last decade building developer platforms by curating and assembling these tools, and after a number of iterations, I seem to have hit on something that's working really well for my current company (SimpliSafe).

As our platform's adoption has grown, we've gotten more and more frequent, really positive, heartwarming feedback from our developers who really like it. This is absolutely freaking delightful, and honestly never stops surprising me.

I often get asked by our developers if we should consider open-sourcing the platform. I've spent some cycles entertaining the idea, but I usually don't get very far before it seems unworkable.

This post is an experiment in thinking in public; I'd like to brain dump my thoughts on the challenges of building an open-source developer PaaS, in the hopes that the platform engineering community might provide some insight to get me past this block.

Over the past 15 years, I've been working on one form or another of internal developer platform. Even long before, while working at small startups, I inevitably ended up building (or curating) some little web framework, a build system, and slapping together scripts to package and deploy our stuff reliably. No one ever told me to do this, it was just obviously necessary.

In these cases, I was building a product for myself and my immediate team members, so it was a pretty tight feedback loop with the customer. I'd put a little extra effort to make things nice for other developers on my team, and also out of a bit of pride in making something that felt elegant.

At work, we're in the process of rebuilding our metrics pipeline, as we've outgrown our old self-managed TIG (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) solution. We've had this solution in place for many years, and it's served us well. Especially given the increasingly predatory pricing models of observability vendors, it's been extraordinarily cost-effective.

But over the last couple years, as we've grown, we've started to hit the limits of what we can handle with a single, vertically scaled instance of InfluxDB (especially using InfluxDB v1). It was increasingly stressful to keep it running smoothly, and we had to be very vigilant about cardinality, as it's very easy to accidentally introduce a cardinality explosion that can bring down the entire database.

As part of an evaluation of Prometheus compatible monitoring solutions, I found the need to push our use of the OTEL Collector to handle some use cases like creating metrics allowlists, renaming metrics, or adding and modifying labels.

Here's some examples, based on what I learned, of the crazy and powerful things you can do with OTEL collector processors to manipulate metrics.

It was 2004, and I had a huge chip on my shoulder.

When learning a new recipe, especially when dabbling in cuisine from different cultures, I find it really important to make sure one is really precise in their understanding the words used in the recipe. I've had a few unfortunate misunderstandings that resulted in... gastronomic disaster.

Similarly, I find that I can't responsibly use the word "DevOps" without testing that the person I'm talking to know which meaning I'm using. Here's some examples of what someone may think I mean when I say "DevOps":