It’s been a year since we launched blitz.io, an awesome multi-tenant application performance testing/monitoring platform running on AWS and Heroku. Looking back at the year, it’s been an amazing ride and we’ve helped a pretty diverse class of users that have no intent on becoming performance experts to really understand the difference between concurrency and hits. But I’m pretty disillusioned right now. Not to mention bored. And I think its the cloud.
Archive for Cloud
NoOps, ShmoOps and Somebody Else’s Problem
This week there’s been much talk about NoOps with posts from @adrianco, @allspaw and @krishnan, to name a few. It all started with this infographic from @appfog. The challenge is that the combination of the words No and Ops is wide open for [mis]-interpretation.
blitz.io: Using Redis Transactions with CouchDB
At blitz.io, for a while there, we were only relying on CouchDB clusters as the primary NoSQL database with some in-memory caching. As we grow (rapidly) and scale out, there are aspects of what we collect and store that are transient and real-time. While CouchDB is awesome for the map/reduce, replication and incremental view indexes, the real-time queues (emails, counters, stats, etc) natural lend themselves to, yup, redis. We are in the process of rolling out geo-located redis instances as part of our global infrastructure.
Dear Angry Nerds, meet Blitz the Bird Thrower
This is a repost of my Atlassian’s guest blog, announcing a Bamboo plugin for blitz.io.
The pig of a problem
We all know what happens when your app performs like a pig. You lose users, customers and revenue. Your app is slow, the failing pigs don’t amuse your customers and you hear about it as the trending topic on Twitter. In most cases you don’t even know that it’s slow until you push the app into production, multiple times a day. How can you identify performance bottlenecks earlier in the cycle? And, if you don’t discover them how to you find and fix them as fast as possible?
Enter Blitz – a performance testing tool, built by Nerds that were angry at how the existing tools weren’t keeping pace with the new Application Development Lifecycle that has Continuous Integration as its center piece.
Mu App Quadrant #3 – Skype Voice on Mac (OS X) Expends at Least 28% More for Consumers and Operator Networks than on Other Devices
In the previous versions of the Mu App Quadrant we first compared the most popular video services, and then specifically focused on Netflix across multiple endpoints. Now, in this third edition we have looked at Skype. Not only is it one of the most popular voice apps on the internet with over 30 million users online at peak times, it’s also one of the biggest bandwidth guzzlers, due in part to the P2P nature of its architecture.
blitz.io: Geo-located Traceroutes with Heroku, AWS and CouchDB
Okay, not the greatest, ground-breaking, coolest, earth-shattering feature ever. Let’s just get that out of the way. But, in the process of troubleshooting various latency issues for our customers, we found ourselves logging on to various EC2 instances of blitz.io to run traceroutes to our users sites/apps to diagnose problems. We are developers, hanging out in TextMate, vim and our terminals and the ability to take a local Unix command and run it remotely while staying in our zone (shell) was important. So …
Driving Real Application Traffic Through Junosphere Virtual Infrastructure
Today, Juniper announced Junosphere™ Lab, an innovative on-demand service that gives service providers and enterprises immediate and low cost access to a virtualized environment for designing and testing networks. Very cool stuff – leveraging the power of the cloud and helping customers dramatically reduce their TCO while accelerating the time to model networks.
Real Traffic in a Virtual Environment
So when you spin up a network environment and model a production topology, you’ll then need a way to create realistic application traffic to understand its impact across the network. That’s where we come in.
Mu Studio Performance has been integrated into the Junosphere Lab so you can just as easily spin up (and tear down) virtual instances of our performance testing solution to quickly and accurately recreate a mix of applications that represent the production environment – that is, real users on real devices, running real applications.
Categories: Cloud, DPI, EC2, Firewall, iPhone, IPS, Performance, Scalability, Scale, Studio, Testing, Uncategorized
blitz.io is now available as a CloudFlare app!
We are super excited to bring blitz.io to CloudFlare‘s users. We’ve been slow rolling this over the course of the week and it has been pretty amazing to see CloudFlare users using blitz.io against their direct domain/origin server to see the benefits of performance and security provided by CloudFlare. CloudFlare is now the 7th blitz.io partner, in a growing list of ecosystem partnerships. In the era of PaaS, DevOps and Continuous Deployment, blitz.io makes load and performance testing a fun sport with no scripting and affordable self-service, utility pricing.
blitz.io – Path-finding with CouchDB
blitz.io went down for a short duration yesterday morning. It was an interesting day uncovering and identifying issues we hadn’t encountered before with multi-region CouchDB clusters that are doing multi-master continuous replication. In a lot of ways, we are path-finding and pushing CouchDB to its limits given that we are a write-heavy app. In the process, we are making up our own best practices and working around issues. Some of these issues are already addressed in trunk, but I wanted to document what we went through today and what we can do about this. Any ways, if you are running a large CouchDB cluster in production, would love to hear from you.
Mu Dynamics – Now A Cloud Company!
Here’s the news.. Mu has in many ways transformed itself into a Cloud company. This may seem surprising since the shift has happened at many levels and not always in a synchronized or premeditated manner. But the shift has already happened and it is both profound and exciting at the same time. Here’s why…
Categories: Cloud
