Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering - Grafana’s "Big Tent" idea

Grafana’s "Big Tent" idea

07/30/21 • 63 min

Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering

Gerhard talks to Tom Wilkie, VP of Product for Grafana Labs. They talk about Loki, Tempo, and how can Grafana Cloud offer such a generous free tier. The solution is in the Cortex architecture, which was used in Loki and in Tempo too. Yes, Tom is the Cortex co-author. We recommend that you listen to this episode in combination with episodes 3 and 11. That’s the best way to get a more complete picture of the topics that we discuss today.

Lastly, would you like to watch Gerhard & Tom pair-up and build Grafana dashboards like pros? Tom has this really interesting approach that Gerhard would like to learn too. We can either have a live YouTube stream, or record and then publish the video. Let us know your preference via our Changelog Slack, or just plain Twitter.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Fly – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Tom Wilkie – GitHub, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Fly – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
Cockroach Labs – Scale fast, survive anything, thrive everywhere! CockroachDB is most highly evolved database on the planet. Build and scale fast with CockroachCloud (CockroachDB hosted as a service) where a team of world-class SREs maintains and manages your database infrastructure, so you can focus less on ops and more on code. Get started for free their 30-day trial or try their forever-free tier. Learn more at cockroachlabs.com/changelog.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Tom Wilkie – GitHub, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Previous Episode

Honeycomb's secret to high-performing teams

Gerhard talks with Charity Majors, ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io about high-performing teams, why “15 minutes or bust,” and how we should start using Honeycomb in our own monolithic Phoenix app that runs changelog.com. There is just one step, and it’s actually really simple! They also talk about how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to learn about Honeycomb, which is one of Gerhard’s favorite questions. As for key take-aways, deploying straight into production is really important, but not as important as optimising for humans - which are not replaceable cogs, that learn and share their learnings continuously. That is the secret to making things easy and happy for everyone.

Next Episode

A monorepo of serverless microservices

In this episode, Gerhard talks to his Skyhook Adventure friends: Alan Cooney, Saul Cullen & Wycliffe Maina. They are the ones that introduced Gerhard to the world of serverless in the context of Amazon Web Services. Gerhard shared his experience with remote work, how to ship software with confidence and consistency, and what to look for in infrastructure as code.

At the heart of Skyhook Adventure are adventure trips, and 2020 was not a good one for this business. As you can already tell, code and infrastructure was not the biggest challenge for this team. Having said that, serverless, microservices, a monorepo and the event-based architecture played a big part in successfully navigating the challenges.

This is a story about what happens when a good team allows itself to be guided by solid experience and keeps doing the right thing, long-term. It’s fun, real, and it applies to many.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email [email protected] for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend. Use the code SHIPIT and get the team plan free for three months.
Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.

Featuring:

Alan Cooney – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn
Saul Cullen – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Wycliffe Maina – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

Skyhook Adventure - the end-result that this team ships many times per day
📚Welcome to the Experience Economy (the book that @saulgcullen mentioned)

The skyhookadventure.com 2021 setup:

AWS Lambda - serverless functions
AWS Event Bridge - serverless events
AWS DynamoDB - serverless document based database
AWS CDK - infrastructure as code
Vercel - server-side rendered frontend hosting
GitHub - version control

Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering - Grafana’s "Big Tent" idea

Transcript

Transcript for Ship It! #12 Gerhard Lazu:

The last time that we spoke, Tom, was at KubeCon 2019 North America. That was actually my first KubeCon, in San Diego, and it was an amazing one. I loved it. This was actually Changelog \#375, and again, it was one of my favorites. That was almost two years ago. I know that a lot of things have changed. First of all, Grafana was at version 6 back then. Now it's at version 8, which is a massive improvement from version 7, which was a mass