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...
14 days 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...
21 days 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...
28 days 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...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 10 Finding someone If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe It’s hard to explain everything that led to meeting this person. From my side you could sum it up to: I let go. I let myself feel the tide instead of trying to control it. As it rose and fell back, I would meet people. I was more comfortable with myself. I enjoyed myself more. This was the change that, for me, made this happen and work. I met Djazia in February 2018....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 09 Redundancy is key If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Around February 2018, as we moved forward and validated individual hardware pieces, we now had to bring everything together. This is where my experience in the lab had a lot of impact, coupled with the experience we had gathered maintaining the existing storage products. What most software engineers fail to realize when working with hardware is that the time flows...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 08 Compiling knowledge If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe To be able to use OpenIO and offer it as a public facing product we had to amass quite a large amount of knowledge. We had to understand how it worked in detail. We had to understand the hardware requirements as well as how we wanted to make it filled and cabled. We had to understand how Scaleway’s information system worked and how we would connect to it. Skunk Works:...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 07 Future growth If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe To bring object storage the fastest and safest way would be to use existing software. At the time we reevaluated the solutions that had been selected beforehand. There were three of them. Ceph, an open source industry standard, OpenIO a provider of an open source object storage, and Scality a provider of a closed source product. There were multiple criteria to take into...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 06 Object storage If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Object storage was our first priority. Many existing and future products depended on having an object storage product. We looked at the state of the art. There were a few competing protocols. Amazon S3 was the oldest but there was also Blackblaze B2, Openstack SWIFT, Google GCS and lastly Azure Blob storage. When we looked into how object storage was used, where it was used...
2 months ago • 2 min read