Cloud – 10 articles

How to: validate your app’s metrics on a local Grafana instance

Rogier Lommers, on 16-06-2021
Category: Cloud, Infrastructure, Development Tags: Grafana monitoring prometheus

Monitoring your infrastructure is key for keeping production workloads healthy and to debug issues when things are going bad. And like Peter Drucker once said: “if you can measure, you can manage”. At bol.com, we make use of the well-known Prometheus / Grafana stack. Recently I needed to add new metrics to my application. So I opened my visual studio code instance and added a few new measurements. After this, I had the need to validate them, but then I realised I had to push my code changes up to…

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HPA: how it can save you headaches and money

Alexandra Egher, on 12-03-2021
Category: Cloud, Development Tags: cloud kubernetes gcp hpa google shopping

In this blog, we show you how to automatically scale your application resources according to either the CPU consumption or to the incoming load of your application.  Background As humans, we are capable of adapting to variable inputs and situations. Some of us are slower, whereas others easily adapt to change. In dynamic environments, flexibility has become one of the most valued skills. As engineers, we also thrive for adaptability. We embrace new technologies, new responsibilities, and new ways of working together. We want to build future proof solutions that react quickly…

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Moving to the cloud? Don’t let your application become a downer!

Richard Deurwaarder, on 12-02-2021
Category: Blog, Cloud, Infrastructure, Development Tags: Resilience cloud kubernetes gcp

Introduction At bol.com we have two main ways of running our applications. We can deploy them in a Datacenter (DC) managed by us or we can run them on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Many applications are being migrated from DC to the GCP to take advantage of the different products available in GCP. Switching to the cloud isn’t just a matter of lift ‘n shifting your application though, there are several changes that you should take into account. One of those changes is, how the behavior of the underlying platform…

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Spaces Talk #5: Super Mario’s Dive Through The Gitlab Pipelines

Patrick van Dissel, on 5-10-2020
Category: Cloud, Development, Testing Tags: Gitlab Spaces Summit CI/CD

Spaces Summit is our annual internal bol.com conference for IT, by IT, and friends: Two fun days of inspiration, knowledge sharing, bragging, and community. This year, our 4th edition, was our first digital version of the summit. All our summits are recorded and published on YouTube, free to watch for everyone. Check https://spacessummit.bol.com for all info on all our summits and their recordings. As one of the organizers of Spaces Summit 2019 and 2018, as well as mentor of the 2020 organizers, I’m proud that we were able to very…

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Spaces Talk #4: From prototype to production. A real-life cloud story.

Quiran Storey, on 24-08-2020
Category: Architecture, Cloud, Infrastructure, Development Tags: Event Spaces Summit

This year the bol.com Spaces Summit was held virtually and Anastasija and myself, Quiran Storey, presented a talk on a topic that is close to our daily work “From prototype to production. A real-life cloud story.” About the talk All things start out as ideas, or prototypes, and our R2D2 is no different. In this talk we will give you a glimpse of how bol.com’s self-service cloud provisioning tool came to be. But also how it is constantly evolving from a proof of concept to a full-on production system. We…

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Introducing Stanley: bol.com highway to (heaven) BigQuery

Deepank Gupta, Sourygna Luangsay, on 19-11-2019
Category: Architecture, Cloud, Business Intelligence, Development

Yes, it’s confirmed! Bol.com is going to the Cloud! The contract with Google has been recently signed, which gives us about 1 year to migrate from Platfora (our BI visualization tool), before it stops having support.   1 year thus to migrate many datasets and dashboards to the Cloud. The tools in Google Cloud are great, and our colleagues are too; so, what could possibly go wrong?… At least this is what we thought in 2017… Our Big Data situation in 2017 Bol.com was storing its Big Data on Hadoop…

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Meetup: René Feiner (MessageBird) & Maarten Dirkse (bol.com) – Migrating to the cloud

Leon van Tegelen, on 9-05-2019
Category: Cloud, Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event cloud Migration

On Wednesday the 15th of May bol.com will host a meetup about migrating from on-prem to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). After dinner is served, René Feiner, director of engineering at MessageBird will kick off the evening and talk about how and why they moved from their datacenter to GCP. Then, after a short break, Maarten Dirkse, cloud advocate at bol.com, will discuss bol.com’s ongoing migration to GCP and what lessons they have learned along the way. So if you’re interested in why companies migrate to the cloud and how…

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Meetup: Maarten Dirkse & Tariq Ettaji – CI/CD @ bol.com & Xebia

Sjors van Berkel, on 16-01-2019
Category: Cloud, Events Tags: Meetup Event cloud CI/CD

During this meetup we will focus on modern CI/CD practices! Maarten Dirkse, cloud advocate at bol.com, will update us on the migration of bol.com from their in-house data center to the cloud. After a short break, we will continue with the next part of the evening, in which Tariq Ettaji will show us how to run a CI/CD stack using CloudFormation completely free of charge!

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Part 1: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

Sjors van Berkel, on 8-07-2018
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Cloud, Development Tags: Event cloud

Last June, Spaces Summit was organized by and for bol.com employees. At Techlab, we want to celebrate this event by highlighting two presentations every month. This month, we will look at the challenges of moving our server infrastructure to the cloud, and, also important, how to use the cloud for pouring cold beer. Talk #1: Going to the cloud: Forget EVERYTHING you know! Speaker: Maarten Dirkse Genre: Way of working Slides Abstract: bol.com is moving to the cloud. When you’re doing so, what should you care about? Can you handle the…

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Software Circus Interview – The move to the public cloud

Maarten Dirkse, on 13-09-2017
Category: Architecture, Culture, Cloud, Development Tags: Event Architecture Software Cloudbusting cloud

IT infrastructure transitions can be hard. Obviously there are technical challenges to overcome. But what do you do when internal disagreement about the way forward leads to a halt in innovation?

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