We are super excited to announce that our blitz.io add-on for Heroku is now in GA. This really brings load and performance testing to the app developers in a very easy and affordable way. More importantly, load testing can now be seamlessly integrated into continuous deployment.
Archive for Cloud
blitz.io: How we use Heroku, AWS and CouchDB
I put together this prezi a few weeks ago as a quick way to describe the internals of blitz.io. This blog is an expansion of this to go into further details on the internals. We launched blitz.io a few months ago to really bring load and performance testing to developers, as part of the continuous integration. Last week we released multiple API clients in various languages to make this possible. We realize that most cloud-based load testing tools are heavy and are geared towards experts and cost significant time and $$$ to do performance testing. With the rise of PaaS, it’s imperative that this type of testing is easy, affordable to the developers and really part of dev and test, not a one off expensive event that happens once a year.
Continuous Integration with blitz.io
Short blog, this one. At blitz.io we take continuous integration very seriously, in a fun sporty kinda way. In the era of polyglot programmers, we realize that all of us have our own favorites on programming languages for the specific app in mind. With the rise of PaaS and our ability to deploy apps faster than ever, we strive to bring load and performance testing to developers into the CI cycle, in your language of choice.
blitz.io wins the best CouchDB App at CouchConf
So I head up to the High Sierras for a week switched off from the grid and on the way back stop at a Chinese restaurant for lunch. My fortune cookie says “You will be pleasantly surprised” or some such thing. I kid you not. Turns out blitz.io has won the best CouchDB App at CouchConf and we are super excited about this. While I don’t know exactly the criteria used by the panel, I sure do know that blitz.io pushes CouchDB to the limits in many ways. Beyond just the map/reduce, we use lots of other cool things about CouchDB in production, making blitz.io the first multi-tenant load testing solution targeted at app developers.
Creating an Application Mix to Model the Production Network
Video and P2P Rule!
The traffic making up today’s networks is in a rapid state of flux. Just last week Sandvine, in their Spring 2011 Global Phenomena Report, noted that real-time entertainment continues to increase, and within North America represents almost 50% of peak fixed access traffic (much of this of course is due to Netflix). P2P traffic also continues to carve out a sizeable piece of the pie at around 20%. The rest is a mix of voice, business apps, games, Facebook and chat.
What’s interesting though is that the relative amount of traffic that isn’t application-level is tiny – all the stuff that makes networks run like DNS, ICMP, BGP and so on.
blitz.io: How many dynos do I need on Heroku?
Whatever PaaS offering you are using, this is a very common capacity-planning question: How many dynos/instances of my app do I really need in order to support x concurrent users at any given time. Auto-scaling and elastic-load-balancers are awesome, but you still need to know what you are up against. With the ruby gem from blitz.io, this is super easy to iterate and find out for yourself before you go live!
Website Performance Optimization – It’s just half the battle
There’s a new set of emerging technologies around Website Performance Optimization (or WPO). Most of these focus on the browser side of the problem and have all sorts of rules to suggest how best to inline your images, compress and minify your JavaScript and CSS, using CDN’s for static data and so on. But with the explosion of RESTful APIs on the cloud and the proliferation of mobile apps on iPhone and Android, WPO is really a misnomer. We should probably call it WebPage Performance Optimization.
Easy Application Monitoring with blitz.io and Tropo
Been chatting with @chrismatthieu about getting a Tropo app going and especially with the EC2 outage, thought might be interesting to combine the Ruby Gem for blitz.io with the Tropo API to create a dead simple application monitor that I can run anywhere with any frequency.
The day DevOps became NoOps
The Internet haz gone down, at least parts of it. Last night, the Virginia EC2 region started experiencing all sorts of issues with their EBS storage (some suspect it’s the bandwidth) and we are still feeling the impact. For blitz.io (which is down, BTW), we use Heroku that runs off of the Virginia region. When we first architected blitz.io, we were afraid of regional failures and the database bottlenecks and ended up deploying an entire CouchDB cluster across multiple regions with master to master replication.
Mu App Quadrant #1 – Not all video streaming apps are created equal…
There’s been a lot of debate recently about the impact of video apps on the network. According to Nielsen, Netflix alone now accounts for 20% of downstream traffic during peak times in the United States. In a previous blog Kowsik explained the behind-the-scenes interactions that are happening unbeknownst to you when you watch a Netflix movie. So that got us thinking – are all the popular video apps as network-intensive as Netflix? Are some video apps more user-friendly with their bandwidth consumption than others? Are some video apps more operator-friendly with their consumption of networking resources?
