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Designing Astradot's Cloud Platform, Part 2: Terraform

Designing Astradot's Cloud Platform, Part 2: Terraform

In our previous blog post, we delved into our AWS architecture. Today, we will discuss the challenges we encountered while fully adopting Infrastructure-as-Code. In this post, we will outline some of the issues we faced with our Terraform setup, including enhancing developer efficiency, improving runtime performance, ensuring security, and reducing

Designing Astradot's Cloud Platform, Part 1: AWS

Designing Astradot's Cloud Platform, Part 1: AWS

At Astradot, we understand that building a robust and scalable cloud infrastructure is crucial for us to move forward quickly and efficiently. That's why we recently made the decision to rebuild our AWS setup to be truly 'enterprise' grade. During our journey, we realized that while many startups have shared

Journey to Monorepo and Bazel

Journey to Monorepo and Bazel

Around the middle of this year, we noticed the number of repositories in our Github account had reached 3 digits. Just understanding what was deployed to each environment (production vs staging) or who was working on what and in which branch was getting tougher and tougher as the number of

Adopting Remote Boxes for Development

We recently started using cloud machines running Linux across our development team. We call these ‘code boxes’. Reasons for using remote codes boxes: * Our codebase requires Linux. We tried using Linux as a desktop OS, but it was not a good experience. Using Mac or Windows WSL was not an

Astradot is now SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

At Astradot, security is foundational. It is a fundamental part of our platform and is essential to our business. It is not a responsibility that we take lightly. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Astradot is SOC2 Type II compliant! It is a significant security milestone for a young

Service Maps are a lie

Service Maps are a common feature of APM solutions today. They are marketed as tools to help you understand the communication graph of your services. However, the reality is that they simply lack the context to give you accurate information and can even lead you to misunderstand the flow of

3 minor enhancements could greatly improve Java usability

The enhancements described below are fully backward compatible with existing java code. 1. Default package and class name for main() method While Java requires that the 'entrypoint' point is called main() it needs you to specify the class name containing that method in the MANIFEST.MF file or on the

Continuous Delivery makes JVM JIT an antipattern

The JVM JIT compiler has long been sold as the way Java is able to compete with the performance of compiled languages like C/C++. Every benchmark for Java will tell you to first run your code many times for 'warmup' before you measure its performance, so that its JITed

Why we moved from Kotlin & Spring Boot to Go

Our product completely supports Java and we love Java developers. However, internally for our own code, we believe the era of the JVM is coming to an end [https://movingfulcrum.com/the-era-of-the-jvm-is-coming-to-an-end/]. We found these 3 things initially attractive about Go: 1. Instant compile times and program startup for faster

Why we moved from Gradle to Maven

Lets get one thing out of the way, declaring dependencies like this: implementation 'org.apache.tapestry:commons:5.5.0' is waaaaay better than declaring them like this: org.apache.tapestry commons 5.5.0 This is where the positives for Gradle end. First off, you cannot not learn Maven.

Why we use JOOQ instead of Hibernate

Choosing Hibernate when your Java code interacts with SQL databases is widely considered the default choice. We however use the JOOQ code generator instead. Here are some of the reasons why we think it's a better choice. Schema Definition In an ideal case, you write the schema for your database

kafka-schema-sync : Keep your Kafka topics synced

Today we are open sourcing one of our internal tools kafka-schema-sync [https://github.com/astradot/kafka-schema-sync]. One of the problems we face at Astradot is keeping our staging and prod environments in sync with respect to Kafka topics. Engineers can create tons of Kafka topics, with different configurations for each.

Using CloudFlare with AWS results in increased latency

Setup Our infrastucture is deployed in AWS us-east-1 region. Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is used for API endpoints. CNAME records were created in CloudFlare DNS to point to ELB instance. Test We used Datadog Synthetic Monitoring to test our endpoints. Synthetics Monitoring hits an endpoint periodically from around the world.