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Hi, I’m Darrien, and I’m building a distributed, near-real time, “OSINT data reconnaissance” system. For this system, I’ll be using CockroachDB for its distributed nature, and connecting it to a .NET Core API via NPoco and Npgsql. In this post, I'll give a walkthrough of how I'm building the system, and how these connections work, so you can use them too.

``` Django includes a full-featured ORM that simplifies interactions with a database--it’s one of the reasons it’s become one of the most popular web frameworks. Even so, you’re still left to manage scale yourself, and ensure the database is resilient and always on. That can be really hard to do with common Django databases like Postgres, SQLite, and MySQL. And that’s why today, we’re excited to announce a new CockroachDB backend for the Django ORM. ``` Using CockroachDB and Django gives you the ease of writing in Python while getting all the benefits of an open source, distributed SQL database. CockroachDB shards automatically, is naturally resilient, and is highly available. Here’s how to get started:

Cloud services abstract away a lot of complexities involved in data center provisioning. Usually, we think of this as a good thing. It’s a huge boon to developer productivity, lowers overhead costs, and allows individual developers and small companies to experiment and grow like never before. But as Rob Reid spoke about at ESCAPE/19, this abstraction obfuscates some darker elements of data center provisioning. Like it or not, cloud computing has real ethical costs attached to it, and due to the “service” part of “cloud services”, we won’t see those costs unless we actively look for them. Reid is a principal engineer at LUSH Digital, and his team has been actively looking at those costs for quite some time now. While he doesn’t purport to have all the answers, his talk on what he’s calling “The Ethical Cloud” invites companies to start asking some of the thornier questions, he spoke openly about these abstractions at ESCAPE/19.

Working at a startup presents a number of challenges for hiring. You have limited resources, you’re lesser-known to those outside of your industry, and you innovate at breakneck speed, making it difficult to articulate what you do. In an industry where candidates are inundated with information, cutting through the noise requires new, ever-evolving strategy.

This article was originally posted on the Kelda.io blog by CEO and Founder, Ethan J. Jackson. Kelda is Docker compose for Kubernetes. It allows you to quickly test your code changes in a remote environment that matches production, without the complexity of interacting with Kubernetes directly. I recently had the pleasure of speaking about Kelda at ESCAPE/19 - the multi-cloud conference, in New York City. It was a fantastic event packed full of sharp folks with interesting perspectives. The talk, How Microservices Enable Multi-Cloud at the Expense of Developers, describes how microservices and CI/CD led to the development of Kubernetes which itself promises to make multi-cloud viable for the first time. However, these advantages are not without costs, particularly for developer productivity. The talk is summarized below.

An often overlooked privilege of building database technology is the opportunity to team up with companies that are making a positive impact in the world. For Cockroach Labs, EF (Education First) is one of those companies. Since 1965, Education First has offered a range of educational programs including study abroad, student exchange, educational travel courses and language classes; all in an effort to "open the world through education." Currently, Education First has 612 offices and schools in over 50 different countries. In 2019 it launched a digital learning platform to remove the distance between teachers and students in different countries. The services that Education First provides help to grow the work and travel possibilities for people of all ages from all countries.

Dan Kelly

December 17, 2019

Since 2017, Cockroach Labs has run thousands of benchmark tests across dozens of machine types with the goal of better understanding performance across cloud providers. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our experiments, it’s this: benchmarking the clouds is a continuous process. Since results fluctuate as the clouds adopt new hardware, it’s important to regularly re-evaluate your configuration (and cloud vendor).

Andy Woods

December 11, 2019

This year, as every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday stressed e-commerce systems to their breaking points. Major companies like H&M, Nordstrom Rack, and other retailers experienced the kinds of costly outages that keep SREs up at night. Multi-cloud infrastructure is sometimes offered as a panacea to these kinds of outages. But multi-cloud deployments are not a band-aid. In fact, they often introduce new complexities into the system that need to be sniffed out. But sniffing out bugs in multi-cloud environments is, by nature, complicated. Ana Medina, a chaos engineer from Gremlin, spoke at ESCAPE/19 about how to do it, including a detailed list of the kinds of errors to search for and checklists of questions to ask.

Dan Kelly

December 9, 2019

This article was originally posted on the personal blog of the Peewee ORM founder, Charles Leifer. Peewee is a simple and small Python ORM. It has few (but expressive) concepts, making it easy to learn and intuitive to use. And as of Peewee's most recent release (3.13.0), it supports CockroachDB!