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Lawrence Jones

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How we compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money

December 29, 2020

Compression is a trick that can be used to solve a load of problems. Outside of well known use cases, there are a variety of opportunities to improve efficiency or save money by leveraging compression.

This post covers one such opportunity, where a tiny change allowed us to save >$30k per year in infrastructure cost, along with a few other big-savers from judicious application of compression.

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Connected data: Using BigQuery to analyse user behaviour in response to webhooks

November 8, 2020

Your company probably has a lot of data. When you expose all of these different sources under a tool that makes complex analysis as fast as thought, you'll create a load of opportunities to make data-driven decisions.

By sharing an example where 2hrs of analysis helped prioritse 2-4 weeks of engineering work, I'm going to try convincing you that the value of a connected dataset is far more than the sum of its parts.

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An incident response starter-pack: how do you handle production outages?

October 27, 2020

Tips-and-tricks to better handle incidents, learned over years of dealing with production issues. Included are opinions on strategy, process, tools and how to handle the all-important human element.

Read this if you're new to incident response and want a starter-pack of advice, or to contrast your own perspective with another.

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Why you need a service registry

September 28, 2020

As a team's infrastructure estate grows, it becomes increasingly beneficial to create a global registry of all people, services, and components. Once you do, you can integrate with tools like terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes to help provision your infrastructure according to a single authoritative source.

This post explains how GoCardless built their registry, and some of the uses we’ve put it to.

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Avoid time-of-measurement bias with Prometheus

July 10, 2019

Most Prometheus metrics recording durations are subject to a time-of-measurement bias, causing misleading graphs that can derail investigations. See how an open-source Tracer can help solve this problem.

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