In a surprise move Amazon today released a bunch of new features to its cloudwatch service, some of which, till now, were provided by third party service providers. Basic Monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge. Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks -Auto Scaling can now be instructed to automatically replace [...]

Graphite is an extremely promising system and resource graphing tool which tries to take RRD to the next level. Here are some of the most interesting features of graphite which I liked. Updates can happen to records in the past (RRD doesn’t allow this I think) Creation of new datasets is trivial with whisper/carbon ( [...]

Most software engineering organizations build applications with some hooks in place to allow functional tests. Some organizations continuously build and test all software automatically at check-in. And then there are those who have learnt from mistakes, and have built a suite of tests which get triggered at startup to look for problems which could indicate [...]