Cloudworker  –  A local Cloudflare Worker Runner

Cloudworker  -  A local Cloudflare Worker Runner

This is a guest post by Hank Jacobs, who is the Lead Software Engineer for Platform Services & Tools at Dollar Shave Club. This post originally appeared on the DSC Engineering blog.

Cloudworker  -  A local Cloudflare Worker Runner

At Dollar Shave Club, we continuously look for ways to improve how we build and ship code. Improving the time it takes for engineers to ship code is key. Providing engineers with a development environment that closely mirrors production really helps.

Earlier this year, we began evaluating Cloudflare Workers as a replacement for our legacy edge routing and caching layers. Cloudflare Workers brings the power of Javascript to Cloudflare’s Edge. Developers can write and deploy Javacript that gets executed for every HTTP request that passes through Cloudflare. This capability excited us but a critical thing was missing — a way to run Worker code locally. We couldn’t find a suitable solution, so we started to build our own. Luckily, Workers uses the open Service Workers API so we had documentation to consult. Within a few weeks, Cloudworker was born.

Cloudworker  -  A local Cloudflare Worker Runner

Cloudworker

Cloudworker is a local Cloudflare Worker runtime. With it, you can run Cloudflare Worker scripts locally (or anywhere you can run a Docker image). Our primary goal with Continue reading

Does IoT come with that burger?

When I think of restaurant technology, I think of stoves and dishwashers and maybe fancy molecular gastronomy gadgets like the stuff that former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold likes to talk about.Apparently, however, even this kind of “Modernist Cuisine” is now old school when it comes to restaurant tech. The new, new thing is combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize the front-of-the-house systems in order to predict demand, track inventory, and improve order and billing accuracy. Overall, IoT promises to help restaurants leverage IoT and AI to streamline operations, boost employee happiness, and innovate in areas beyond creating delicious new dishes.To read this article in full, please click here

New Opportunities, Different perspectives…

Today we are launching our partnership with FS.com and with that comes an opportunity to engage our customers in a new and unique way. FS.com has been providing networking solutions since 2009. The joint partnership of Cumulus and FS.com allows a new way for our collective customers to achieve web-scale networking solutions in a convenient and timely manner. FS.com’s commitment to fast response times and comprehensive networking solutions brings a layer of convenience we feel our clients will appreciate.

Cumulus Networks is driven to provide flexibility, choice and affordability when it comes to building out the next generation of network infrastructures.  By adding FS.com as an additional option to our portfolio we continue that commitment to our customers. It is exciting to see how this space will evolve and the new ways in which customers will source network infrastructure moving forward.  

Whether you are looking for Data Center TOR solutions with Enterprise feature set corporate buying behavior is evolving as our consumer buying habits blend more into our corporate lives.  This method of sourcing and buying consumer goods has grown significantly over the past decade as our consumer selves buy more and more of Continue reading

Oracle introduces hybrid cloud solution – for its own cloud

I’m beginning to understand why Thomas Kurian left Oracle to try and right the foundering ship that is Google Cloud Platform. He reportedly butted heads with the boss (that would be Larry Ellison) over a desire to make Oracle products more readily available on competitive cloud platforms, and this announcement reflects that. It’s a nice bit of news if you are an Oracle customer, but not if you use a competitive product.Last week at KubeCon, the company announced the Oracle Cloud Native Framework, which is designed for organizations looking to build hybrid cloud architectures across both public cloud and on-premises infrastructure.It’s something all of the competition is doing, of course. Oracle’s efforts are best compared to Microsoft and IBM, since they also had legacy systems and customers to move to the cloud as well.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle introduces hybrid cloud solution — for its own cloud

I’m beginning to understand why Thomas Kurian left Oracle to try and right the foundering ship that is Google Cloud Platform. He reportedly butted heads with the boss (that would be Larry Ellison) over a desire to make Oracle products more readily available on competitive cloud platforms, and this announcement reflects that. It’s a nice bit of news if you are an Oracle customer, but not if you use a competitive product.Last week at KubeCon, the company announced the Oracle Cloud Native Framework, which is designed for organizations looking to build hybrid cloud architectures across both public cloud and on-premises infrastructure.It’s something all of the competition is doing, of course. Oracle’s efforts are best compared to Microsoft and IBM, since they also had legacy systems and customers to move to the cloud as well.To read this article in full, please click here

Running Fedora on my Mac Pro

I’ve been working on migrating off macOS for a couple of years (10+ years on a single OS isn’t undone quickly or easily). I won’t go into all the gory details here; see this post for some background and then see this update from last October that summarized my previous efforts to migrate to Linux (Fedora, specifically) as my primary desktop operating system. (What I haven’t blogged about is the success I had switching to Fedora full-time when I joined Heptio.) I took another big step forward in my efforts this past week, when I rebuilt my 2011-era Mac Pro workstation to run Fedora.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, a few people asked the question every parent dreads hearing: “Why?” (If you’ve been a parent for more than a couple years you’ll understand this.) The motivation for using Linux is something I’ve already discussed. As for the hardware, it’s simple: the hardware for the Mac Pro is very good (see the base specs here), so why not re-use the hardware for use with Linux? I mean, if I’ve already decided on running Linux (which I have), then why spend money on new hardware Continue reading

Identifying impactful service system problems via log analysis

Identifying impactful service system problems via log analysis He et al., ESEC/FSE’18

If something is going wrong in your system, chances are you’ve got two main sources to help you detect and resolve the issue: logs and metrics. You’re unlikely to be able to get to the bottom of a problem using metrics alone (though you might well detect one that way), so that leaves logs as the primary diagnosis tool. The online service at Microsoft used as the main case study in the paper produces dozens of Terabytes of logs every day.

Logs play a crucial role in the diagnosis of modern cloud-based online service systems. Clearly, manual problem diagnosis is very time-consuming and error-prone due to the increasing scale and complexity of large-scale systems.

Log3C analyses logs to look for indications of impactful problems, using correlated KPIs as a guide. It finds these needles in the haystack with an average precision of 0.877 and an average recall of 0.883. A distributed version of Log3C has been deployed and used in production at Microsoft for several years, both to support a massive online service (we are not told which one), and integrated into “Product B” where Continue reading

How to pick an off-site data-backup method

Everyone agrees that backups should be sent off site, but not everyone agrees on how that should be accomplished. The decision about which method to use will affect your recovery-time objective (RTO), recovery-point objective (RPO), risk level, and cost – so it’s rather important.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Sponsored Post: pMD, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr

Who's Hiring?

  • pMD is a fast­ growinghighly rated health care technology company that has been recognized as a Best Place to Work by SF Business Times, Modern Healthcare, and Inc. Senior DevOps Engineer: Your engineering work will focus on using your deep knowledge of the web stack including firewalls, web applications, caches and data stores ­ to create innovative infrastructure architectures that are resilient, scalable, and blazingly fast. You will bring best practices for automating the provisioning and patching of servers, replicating and versioning configuration changes, monitoring and alerting, deploying application and data store updates, and high availability / disaster recovery. Please apply here.

  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services


  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use Continue reading

The Importance of Container Visibility

Containers are unlike any other compute infrastructure. Prior to containers, compute infrastructure was composed of a set of brittle technologies that often took weeks to deploy. Containers made the automation of workload deployment mainstream, and brought workload deployment down to minutes, if not seconds.

Now, to be perfectly clear, containers themselves aren’t some sort of magical automation sauce that changed everything. Containers are something of a totem for IT operations automation, for a few different reasons.

Unlike the Virtual Machines (VMs) that preceded them, containers don’t require a full operating system for every workload. A single operating system can host hundreds or even thousands of containers, moving the necessary per-workload RAM requirement from several gigabytes to a few dozen megabytes. Similarly, containerized workloads share certain basic functions – libraries, for instance – from the host operating system, which can make maintaining key aspects of the container operating environment easier. When you update the underlying host, you update all the containers running on it.

Unlike VMs, however, containers are feature poor. For example, they have no resiliency: traditional vMotion-like workload migration doesn’t exist, and we’re only just now – several years after containers went mainstream – starting to get decent persistent Continue reading