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Context & Contingency: Patterns for choosing go...

Aaron Suggs
October 07, 2016

Context & Contingency: Patterns for choosing good tools

DevOpsDays Raleigh 2016

At Kickstarter, the Ops Engineering team recently deployed Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana to centralize application logs. I’ll use our implementation of the ELK stack as a case-study to examine our process for choosing tools, particularly:

when to build vs. buy
what features we need in the initial version, and what can wait until later
when to invest effort in an elegant solution, or when to get by with a hack.
This talk will discuss what factors influenced our decisions (context); and what future changes could lead to a different choice (contingency).

By capturing the context and contingency of our choices, we can more easily adapt to changes in our organization and the tech community.

I’ll show how our implementation decisions impacted the processes and behaviors of our team; which in turn influenced and reflected our organization’s culture.

https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2016-raleigh/program/aaron-suggs/

Aaron Suggs

October 07, 2016
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Transcript

  1. ELK

  2. App logs Vendor logs lograge S3 Event filebeat SQS worker

    logstash (+S3) logstash AWS Elasticsearch Service (with Kibana)
  3. !

  4. Trivia Time! Why might a disk be 100% full after

    you delete several large files?
  5. AWS Elasticsearch DIY on EC2 Less dev attention* More dev

    attention Less flexible Flexible, adaptable ✅
  6. AWS Elasticsearch DIY on EC2 Less dev attention* More dev

    attention Less flexible Flexible, adaptable ✅ ✅
  7. AWS Elasticsearch DIY on EC2 Less dev attention* More dev

    attention Less flexible Flexible, adaptable Hard to debug Lots of visibility ✅ ✅
  8. AWS Elasticsearch DIY on EC2 Less dev attention* More dev

    attention Less flexible Flexible, adaptable Hard to debug Lots of visibility ✅ ✅ ✅
  9. AWS Elasticsearch DIY on EC2 Less dev attention* More dev

    attention Less flexible Flexible, adaptable Hard to debug Lots of visibility Aligned w/ our use ✅ ✅ ✅
  10. AWS Elasticsearch DIY on EC2 Less dev attention* More dev

    attention Less flexible Flexible, adaptable Hard to debug Lots of visibility Aligned w/ our use ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
  11. Summary 1. Mind the skills of your team 2. Know

    the next-best alternative 3. Consider a tool’s community