Recently I’ve been working with the combination of Reactive Streams (in the form of Akka Streams) and Kafka, as it’s a good fit for some of the systems we’re building at work. I hope it’ll be beneficial to others to share a particular nuance I discovered whilst working with this combintion, in particular a problem with slow downstream consumers. To give a brief overview, we were taking messages from a Kafka topic and then sending them as the body of http post requests. This was working fine for the majority of the time, as we only get a message every...
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Road to Continuous Deployment Part 1 – Performance Testing
The next set of Articles are documenting a presentation I’m working on to demonstrate Continuous Delivery, and how in a world where CD is desired, it’s becoming increasingly important for the appropriate level of testing to happen. I’ll be breaking them down to tackle one topic at a time, finally building up to a full demo on how I feel CD can work. Firstly, I’m going to start with a problem CI/CD can address – Performance Testing. Not so much on how to performance test or how CI/CD can build systems that don’t require it, but how a continuous delivery pipeline...
Continue reading...Monitoring Solutions for Scakka Applications
Over the past few days I have been looking into monitoring Scala and Akka applications, as a number of new integration projects at work are using this framework. Scakka is designed to allow easy building of concurrent applications, and is a great middle-ground for transitioning from OOP to a functional-based approach. The choices within this first investigation were between AppDynamics and a combination of Kamon, StatsD, Graphite and Graphana. So what are the two: AppDynamics (http://www.appdynamics.com): An Application Performance Management tool, capable of providing detailed analytics of a system, not just for the JVM but a variety of technologies, single...
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