njpatel

I'm not sure the log message v structured message comparison makes sense - most log and trace events are batched and compressed before being transported, and so the size difference isn't really an issue. On the receiving side most services have some kind of column store as their main datastore and so there's no issue there either. The benefits of structured logging are worth it.

Regarding pricing - there is an option for every kind of usage out there, it's mostly a solved problem that comes with choosing two of large scale, low cost, low latency. For instance we serve large scale and low cost.

We use KQL to for axiom too (well, a version of it) - it's a great query language and very flexible for unstructured + structured data.

I was the lead developer of Unity and the creator of Ubuntu Netbook Remix and can also confirm the article isn’t slightly true.

(co-founder here) Try axiom.co - we support splunk-like query syntax, dashboards, monitors, unlimited sources/hosts/etc, and you get 500GB/mo ingest + 30 days retention on the free plan.

And that resulting in compromises such as high amounts of sampling, ignoring a facet of data altogether because "we won't need it if something goes wrong...", and/or using some kind of log stream processor to divert large amounts of data in S3 instead of allowing it be queried whenever you want.

In the case of Axiom & Vercel, you'll only be paying for ingest (if you need over 2GB/day) and no bandwidth costs. I believe the latter is the case with all of Vercel's observability partners (and with most services providing a log-drains service).

It's a fair point, though...at some point, and with enough TBs of traffic, it could get expensive to provide the log drain support. One thing we've been working on (and more on this in the coming weeks), is putting together a benchmark of log-drain mechanisms to try and work out what would be the most efficient combo of compression/cpu/mem to use for log-drain providers.

Our hope is we can work on making it efficient enough that we can encourage more services to provide log-drains (and therefore allow us to make great experiences around those logs!).

Neil here, CEO of Axiom, glad it’s working out for you! Would love to hear what custom alerts you’ve set up.

Our goal is to provide some out-of-the-box alerting tuned to Vercel deployments as we learn more about how devs are using Axiom & Vercel!

Who watches the Watchmen?

The solution goes - Splunk is too expensive, let's ditch logs altogether and hope we capture some metrics and plot them in nice dashboards. Instead of dumping the logs highly compressed into cheap s3 and running some Snowflake or Spark on it later.

I don't usually promote on HN but this is exactly why we built https://axiom.co! We've been working on this problem for some time, essentially allowing schema-less/index-free ingest, S3-based storage in a highly-efficient format, and then querying with a Splunk-like (specifically Kusto-inspired) language via serverless functions.

We built it because we also realised we would avoid or think too much about logging (cost, scaling, retention, etc) which led to compromises either in our monitoring or later when we wanted to dive in and try and draw some insights/analytics from that kind of data.

It's harder to find Discord communities than IRC channels. You only had to join a few IRC servers to get huge lists of often-related channels.

I was responsible for writing a lot of the Unity shell for Ubuntu with my team, taking it from Ubuntu Netbook Remix -> Unity (Mutter) -> Unity (Compiz).

During that period I feel like my team and I wrote a lot of important code, but the fact that Unity survived for so long and was used by so many people makes it stand out.

I'd say a close second was Avant Window Navigator (AWN - a Linux dock), because it got me enough attention to be offered a job working on Open Source full time!

In banking/government terms, yes, but in general terms NRI is used much wider to describe a person of Indian origin. At least in West India.

Fwiw, there seems to be a push from VCs to bring you in talking about a 'normal' seed round (a smallish figure, debt-financing or simple equity-financing), but then try and talk up doing a large Series A immediately (with all the complexity that brings).

The idea being that you then have enough money to go and do whatever you want, at any cost, and work your way to a Series B. In the mean time, the VC(s) get their share and have some/all board control.

Hi all - grpcc is a simple cli tool for running interactive or non-interactive rpc calls against gRPC services.

I posted a big update today with some nifty features and thought it could be useful for others too.

In interactive mode, I mostly use it for debugging & exploring services. It has a full nodejs repl so you can get as complex as you like.

In non-interactive mode, it's useful to run scripts against gRPC services and have the output printed to stdout - great for scripting/testing.

Cheers!

In 2007 I was working on an open source dock for Linux called AWN (https://launchpad.net/awn).

It helped me get my first job at OpenedHand, working on free and open source software full time. I didn't have any previous experience nor a degree in CS.

I've been using this recently for a pretty complex SPA and it's been great.

It's clear what's happening, without a tons of boilerplate code, and it has some nice dev tools as well (trace element updates & events, great for debugging). It also has very useful error messages in development mode (which is a godsend).

On top of that, I think the docs are pretty good, they seem to be quite active on GitHub and, from every piece of the puzzle that comes together to make a 2016 web frontend (react, web pack, babel, flow, ui kit, etc, etc), it's given the least trouble for me so far.

I've raved about Echo before on HN, but I'll do it again because it's is one of those frameworks that are just lovely to use. Very easy to keep API mapped in your head, code is simple and straight-forward, performance is great, and it plays nicely with standard handlers.

Thank you to all that worked on this release!

Agreed - those two points, and the general simplicity of the Echo codebase, were why I ended up using it over the (many) other options for Go. Honestly haven't had the desire to check anything else out since, it's just always worked very well.

Have been using this for quite some time - it has a nice API and is solid in production. I love the simplicity and it's small enough a codebase to quickly read and start hacking around.

Some more details are available at http://seif.codes/skizze-behind-the-scenes-of-alpha-2/ and https://njp.io/skizze-alpha-release/ , including what's coming up in future releases.

We're really excited to be working on solving real-world problems we've come across with Skizze, hopefully others will find it useful too as it matures!

Technical Lead, Xamarin Insights (https://xamarin.com/insights)

Side Projects: https://github.com/skizzehq/skizze - High-throughput probalistic data structure service. Also working on it's Golang and Node.js client bindings (see the org.)

https://github.com/njpatel/grpcc - a nice-to-use gRPC CLI for testing/debugging gRPC services

https://github.com/njpatel/HiveKit - a British gas Hive Heating -> HomeKit bridge

Also working on another little utility for devs around sending files between machines, should be out by the weekend!

"brits are as a whole a pretty depressed bunch" - have you been watching TV again?

Probably the lack of power going to the iMacs, which could also explain why they have to use their mobile devices instead... :)

I was going to do a blog post but never got around to it! I copy-and-pasted the DNS one we use into a gist (removing specific bits of our setup). We use DO, but this should get you to a point where all the bits are working and then you can do as you wish.

Excuse the Python code...I'm very much not a Python guy! https://gist.github.com/njpatel/8603816

At Ayatii we use Salt both for initial configuration and scaling. It's very easy to get setup, and the concepts of States, Pillars and Reactors are easy enough to grasp and start hacking useful utilities for your deployment.

For instance, with a couple lines of Python, I was able to 'react' to any new DigitalOcean instance that was created and able to update DNS records or Nginx config (if it was a certain type of instance). As someone is more of a developer than a infrastructure person, Salt saved me a lot of time.

For me, Windows 8.1 'made sense' after I installed a third-party utility called ModernMix (https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/). It allows you to run all or some metro apps on the desktop in normal windows.

This was the turning point, as I could use apps from the Windows Store (mostly media consuming apps) when I wanted to, as I wanted to. I didn't have to leave my desktop or have a SoundCloud app take up all 27" of my monitor, and the Store apps are much nicer to use and look at when you're in the mood for consuming media. On the opposite sense, I still had Putty/Office/etc right next to them.

This really fixed Windows 8.1 for me, and I think Microsoft should consider having it as an option in 9.

(disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Stardock, just a huge fan of ModernMix)

I can urinate much higher than you can.

Absolutely beautiful, lost a few minutes just playing around with it. Would be great as slow, randomised, background or screensaver.

Can ssh into some of the instances (and from there contact all the instances internally), but http/https ports definitely don't work. I think it's only NY1.

I realised, it would be great for cloudflare to optionally allow us to show a better 'down' page for non-static sites like dashboards etc. Right now it's showing the same page with a bar on top (and obviously login etc won't work), ideally it would show a static page where we could explain something is wrong, without login boxes etc.