Can we simulate outages?

Hello 👋🏽

Welcome to Dev Shorts. Issue #18 talks about Service Outages, another OSS BaaS project, and more!

Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp suffered an outage of six hours approximately. The outage disrupted casual conversation between people to large businesses which depend on them for promoting their products.

Social Networks today are as important as stock exchanges and financial institutions. When the message isn’t delivered, people are worried. You can see that in the below WhatsApp post from a father to a son.

As an SRE, outages are no fun. They directly impact your company’s brand value, market capitalization. For example, Facebook lost 7 billion for the six-hour outage it suffered.

In this case, FB lost access to the servers to apply a fix, and they had to visit their Datacenters to make changes physically. Facebook has also released an update here & here. I expect more to come in the months to come by as well as probably an OSS project 😅

How do you Detect, Debug & root cause an outage like this?

For starters, it is hard to detect what could go wrong with increasing complexity in the products we use and the designs that we use.

You could use several monitoring tools to detect changes happening in your network. Some of them are proactive in reporting a change.

Apart from these, proper Chaos Engineering practices would help in detecting probable process, design, product level bugs. FB calls these “storm” drills.

How can you do these “storm” drills at your org? Are these available in a templatized form to detect common issues in architecture?

You can refer to ChaosMonkey, LitmusChaos. Especially, LitmusChaos has a fantastic community, designed with Kubernetes in mind.

Elasticsearch JavaScript client is rewritten in TypeScript and now ships a type definition for all APIs.

MySQL might be boring, but it works! - says GitHub.

Cindy Sridharan, a famous technologist, shared the best talks from 2020. She makes up this list from academic conferences like OSDI, VLSD, SOSP, SIGCOMM, Eurosys, ICFP, USENIX, and other popular developer conferences.

Firebase has been a popular goto NoSQL datastore for android developers for years. It is also a popular Backend as a service on Google Cloud. However, BaaS has been so popular recently with many OSS alternatives to Firebase (..Supabase). Appwrite is one such OSS project.

Ending this week’s newsletter with an interesting meme on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

If you like this week’s newsletter, rate it with “thumbs up/down.”

Sincerely,

Aravind Putrevu 👋🏽