2015

There is so much to love about Elastic Search. If you, like me, end up creating more than one cluster, you start to think about automating the task whole task including infrastructure.

Cloudformation and ansible scripts can make this tedious job super simple.

Application monitoring and service metrics

If you don’t track it, you can’t measure it. Realtime service and business metrics should be part of any production application. Knowing how is the app performing is as important as measuring whether the product impact of your changes.

A good set of service metrics lets you effectively monitor the impact of your changes on the app performance. Has your change to multi-threading really achieved the times x throughput? Has the last dependency injection change caused a slow memory leak? Are there levels of response codes you’re not expecting in your app?

Logging visibility when scaling

Every decent app produces some kind of logging. Traditionally, this has been achieved by wrapper such as log4net, slf4j log4j and many others. The information it produces is invaluable as it’s usually the only source of information when troubleshooting issues.

Over the years, I’ve used several providers and techniques to send out email. I used IIS, AWS and few key email providers. And out of them all, I’ve been most happy with Sendgrid - and no, they are not paying me to say that.

The bottom line is, the more email you send, the more you want to rely on a 3rd party to take that burden from your hands.