News

Dockter: A Docker image builder for researchers

Dependency hell is ubiquitous in the world of software for research, and this affects research transparency and reproducibility. Containerization is one solution to this problem, but it creates new challenges for researchers. Docker is gaining popularity in the research community—but using it efficiently requires solid Dockerfile writing skills.

Jaeger integration in Kiali

Kiali has the ability to show traces obtained from Istio. Jaeger collects traces for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems, and both Istio and Kiali use the data that Jaeger provides. Originally this was done via a separate tab in the UI.

Lyft’s Envoy dashboards

I’ve given quite a few talks about observability in the age of the service mesh (most recent slides, unfortunately this talk series has not been recorded yet). Visibility into the inherently unstable network is one of the most important thing that Envoy provides and I’m asked repeatedly for the source of the dashboards that we use at Lyft. In the interest of “shipping” and getting something out there that can help folks, we are releasing a snapshot of our internal Envoy dashboards.

Optimising Prometheus 2.6.0 Memory Usage with pprof

There have been some reportsthat compaction was causing larger memory spikes than was desirable. I dug into this and improved it for Prometheus 2.6.0, so let’s see how. Firstly I wrote a test setup that created some samples for 100k time series, in a way that would require compaction.

Help! Something is wrong with my Jaeger installation!

Jaeger is composed of different components, each potentially running in its own host. It might be the case that one of these moving parts isn’t working properly, causing spans to not be processed and stored. When something goes wrong, make sure to check the items listed here.

Automating Datacenter Operations at Dropbox

Switch provisioning at Dropbox is handled by a Pirlo component called the TOR Starter. The TOR Starter is responsible for validating and configuring switches in our datacenter server racks, PoP server racks, and at the different layers of our datacenter fabric that connect racks in the same facility together. Writing the TOR Starter on top of the ClusterOps queue provides us with a basic manager-worker queuing service.

Container Storage Interface (CSI) for Kubernetes GA

The Kubernetes implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) has been promoted to GA in the Kubernetes v1.13 release. Support for CSI was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.9 release, and promoted to beta in the Kubernetes v1.10 release. The GA milestone indicates that Kubernetes users may depend on the feature and its API without fear of backwards incompatible changes in future causing regressions.

Manifold: A Model-Agnostic Visual Debugging Tool for Machine Learning at Uber

APIServer dry-run and kubectl diff

Declarative configuration management, also known as configuration-as-code, is one of the key strengths of Kubernetes. It allows users to commit the desired state of the cluster, and to keep track of the different versions, improve auditing and automation through CI/CD pipelines. The Apply working-group is working on fixing some of the gaps, and is happy to announce that Kubernetes 1.13 promoted server-side dry-run and kubectl diff to beta.

Sidestepping Dependency Ordering with AppSwitch

We are going through an interesting cycle of application decomposition and recomposition. While the microservice paradigm is driving monolithic applications to be broken into separate individual services, the service mesh approach is helping them to be connected back together into well-structured applications. As such, microservices are logically separate but not independent.