Splitting light Season 2 Episode 19 Bandwidth waves If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe At every step we would test the performance. Crude methods at first. Sowing together scripts would enable us to get more kick out of the performance testing. The more performance we wanted to extract, the harder it was to do the tests. At first one powerful machine was enough to generate the request and traffic. Then we needed two of them. Then twenty… Then a hundred. We...
9 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 18 Controlling latency If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We didn't only increase our scope in iteration phases to reduce risk or go faster. We also did it for customer facing metrics. One specifically required some tradeoffs; it was latency. To be more precise, time to first byte. Object storage is a generic way of storing and fetching data. The maximum data you could store in a single object at the time was 5 terabytes but...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 17 Increasing scope If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Just as we were iterating to reduce risk and gain experience. We were also increasing the scope of our work as the iterations went. We didn’t expect to have to handle the hardware. Yet we learned how to choose it. How many servers we wanted per rack and why. Measuring the actual power load at full usage. With the help of the network team, choosing the right routers and...
23 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 16 Iterative process If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe All throughout these first few months, from December 2017 to May 2018, we did iterations on object storage. This was both necessary to pick the skills and also reduce risks. The work to bring up an object storage is a subset to making a public facing object storage product. In the first case you control everything, in the second, you control much less. Quentin working in...
30 days ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 15 Internal identification If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe End of May 2018 had arrived. I had an appointment. After doing a tattoo on my arm, I continued to look into tattoo art. Looking at different things and identifying more symbolism that I wanted. I remember reading Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, a mix between new space opera and pirates of the caribbean. Spaceships with light sales. I finally contacted the tattoo...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 14 Access key If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We were now at a stage where we had to no longer have hardcoded credentials. We needed to be plugged to Scaleway’s authentication database. Historically Scaleway, the cloud computing division, had decided to design their own API. They used a mechanism called Json Web Token (JWT) to authentify. This system only required a secret credential. On our side, S3 required two things. A...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 13 Pouring the foundation slab If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We had the green light to continue. Now it was time to use these plans and experiments to build a product. We started pouring the foundation slabs. We wrote salt stack deployment code. Reusing the same tool we had used for provisioning Carbon14 in the bunker. The casts room, where the storage team 💾 worked a lot (1) We went full in with diskless boots. The...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 12 You are not working at Google If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe We had our product, the business, the software and hardware architecture ready. We had tested some elements on our laptops. We had tested individual servers. We were ready. The only missing thing was an approval stamp from the SRE team. At the time, the buzz was a book from Google, The SRE one. It was taken for absolute knowledge. Scaleway’s SRE had been...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 11 The bunker If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe When we had launched Carbon14 a year and half back, Arnaud had decided to buy a specific building in Paris to build a new datacenter inside. This building was very particular as it used to be a ministry building and most importantly exactly 30 meters underneath the building was a nuclear strike proof bunker that had been built in the 1960. Its purpose was to safeguard...
2 months ago • 3 min read