Developer Analytics with Calvin French-Owen

03/25/16 • 51 min

Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

“Its sort of like the old joke in computer science – what do you do when you have a problem? Well, add a layer of abstraction.”

Today’s guest is Calvin French-Owen, the CTO of Segment, a tool that companies use to aggregate their analytics into once place. As Segment has scaled, the company has had to restructure its etire technical architecture. Microservices, containers, Amazon Web Services, and dev ops are a few of the topics that Calvin and I explore in our conversation, so this is a great episode for anyone who is trying to understand the relationships between those different subjects.

Segment’s product unifies analytics from different services and puts them into one centralized place. Full disclosure: Segment is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. For most of this episode, we don’t even talk about the product, we talk about the back end engineering behind the product.

Questions

What tools are used to transfer data to analytics systems?
Why is it useful to have a single API to fan out into all the different analytics processed
Why did you embrace microservices at Segment, and why was it different from the reasons other companies have adopted them?
Why are process level monitoring and program level monitoring worth differentiating?
Could you explain the nuance between microservices and microworkers?
How do you determine when to write a brand new microservice versus adding new functionality to an old one?
How did you do an architectural rebuild while still running the business day-to-day?
How should software engineering teams decide whether to build or buy certain aspects of their product?

Links

The post Developer Analytics with Calvin French-Owen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Its sort of like the old joke in computer science – what do you do when you have a problem? Well, add a layer of abstraction.”

Questions

What tools are used to transfer data to analytics systems?
Why is it useful to have a single API to fan out into all the different analytics processed
Why did you embrace microservices at Segment, and why was it different from the reasons other companies have adopted them?
Why are process level monitoring and program level monitoring worth differentiating?
Could you explain the nuance between microservices and microworkers?
How do you determine when to write a brand new microservice versus adding new functionality to an old one?
How did you do an architectural rebuild while still running the business day-to-day?
How should software engineering teams decide whether to build or buy certain aspects of their product?

Links

The post Developer Analytics with Calvin French-Owen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Previous Episode

Continuous Delivery and Test Automation with Flo Motlik

“It’s Friday night and you’re basically out of the office on your way to meet with friends. And you just merge this thing and put it into production because you have that trust – that the system will capture any kind of problem.”

Continuous integration and deployment are important tools for modern software development. With continuous integration and deployment, individual engineers can push code without waiting to synchronize with the rest of the team on a big software release.

Today on Software Engineering Daily, Flo Motlik, the CTO of Codeship, joins us to discuss continuous integration, dev ops, and microservices. In full disclosure, Codeship is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, but we would be doing this interview whether or not that was the case, because Flo has a lot to say about software engineering. In this show, we get into conversations and case studies of how software teams take continuous deployment from theory into practice.

Questions

How does an organization without continuous integration or delivery compare to one with these processes?
How should testing strategy be structured to work with a continuous deployment infrastructure?
What is a continuous deployment pipeline, and why is it so important?
How do you define DevOps?
Where did you get the idea to start Codeship?
What are the performance benefits of parallelizing tests?

Next Episode

Bootstrapping a SaaS for Developers with Itai Lahan

“It’s an amazing era for software developers – we have all this amazing infrastructure behind the scenes that we can build upon.”

Ten years ago, building a highly scalable image delivery service would require millions of dollars in upfront costs, and hours of work configuring hardware server infrastructure. Today, it is possible to bootstrap this type of service, with minimal investment.

Today’s episode is about building a content delivery network for images and video. Today’s guest is Itai Lahan, CEO of Cloudinary. We discuss Cloudinary’s early product infrastructure, and how they have evolved as a company since then. We also talk in detail about the venture capital landscape of Silicon Valley today, and how to strategize about raising money. Full disclosure, Cloudinary is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

Questions

How did you begin working on an image CDN?
What are the common problems developers have when they are trying to serve images?
What did the first architecture of Cloudinary look like?
What are the challenges of building APIs and integrations for a variety of different platforms that use your service?
What were the first scalability bottlenecks that you hit in the early days?
Why did you switch from AWS Cloudfront to Akamai?
How do you monitor system health and how are your operational teams segmented?
What was the rationale behind bootstrapping your company?