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.
Archive for Scalability
Using real apps to test billing and charging on 4G/LTE networks
The hype, and in many cases concern around DPI has always been strong. It has triggered provocative debate on the Internet around privacy, end user rights, the role of the operator, and the extent to which they can monitor what applications we send and receive on the Internet.
The truth is that DPI isn’t just an emerging technology; it’s actually a reality, showing up on traditional fixed line networks, enterprise networks and most recently on mobile networks. Recently, Telefonica announced the deployment of Sandvine’s network policy control solutions to provide visibility across the network for some 250 million subscribers across 20 countries.
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.
Help CouchDB break the C10K barrier
Over the weekend, I was experimenting with CouchDB to see if it can pass the C10K barrier. Some of the performance optimizations I made along the way are really OS-level optimizations that affect MochiWeb (erlang web server) and fairly well documented in many blogs. This one by @metabrew in particular is a pretty good read, since it focuses on Erlang and MochiWeb. While I am a performance junkie, I am not an Erlang hacker. So this is a call for help to the CouchDB hackers for recommendations on scaling out CouchDB.
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.
Scaling out Drupal apps with Acquia and blitz.io
We are super excited to announce that Mu Dynamics has partnered with Acquia to bring blitz.io into the Acquia Network. This is immediately available to all Acquia customers to instantly and continuously integrate load testing as part of their Drupal deployment. Load testing web sites used to be a once-a-year, pre-holiday-season undertaking that cost significant $$$, time and resources. Given the complexity of existing tools and solutions, these types of tests could only be run by performance experts. blitz.io changes all of that to make load and performance testing a fun, affordable sport!
blitz.io: How we use Heroku, AWS and CouchDB
I put together this prezi a few weeks ago as a quick way to describe the internals of blitz.io. This blog is an expansion of this to go into further details on the internals. We launched blitz.io a few months ago to really bring load and performance testing to developers, as part of the continuous integration. Last week we released multiple API clients in various languages to make this possible. We realize that most cloud-based load testing tools are heavy and are geared towards experts and cost significant time and $$$ 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.
