March 2018 Summaries

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for describing and provisioning infrastructure resources in a cloud environment. It allows users to create whole environments of AWS services using a simple text file, which serves as the single source of truth for the cloud environment. This post aims to help readers understand how to use CloudFormation to launch complex environments with just a few clicks. The key features of CloudFormation include Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Change Sets, Rollback on failure, Stack policies, Nested stacks, Drift detection, and debugging in JSON and scripting languages such as BASH or PowerShell.

With 10 successful years under its belt, New Relic continues to expand globally, opening offices in various cities including San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix, Sydney, Melbourne, Dublin, London, Barcelona, Munich, and Zürich. The company is now announcing the opening of an East Coast Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, which will provide better coverage to customers on the Eastern Seaboard and access to new talent sources. Atlanta's growing tech scene, major travel hub, and vibrant culture make it an attractive location for New Relic's business, employees, and culture. The new office will be located in WeWork Colony Square Coworking Office in Midtown, offering great views and proximity to good eats, Piedmont Park, and public transportation options. New Relic is now hiring for open roles in Atlanta, inviting talented individuals to join the team.

New Relic, a company with a decade of success, is expanding its global presence by establishing an East Coast headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. This strategic move aims to enhance customer service on the Eastern Seaboard, tap into the region's diverse talent pool, and leverage Atlanta's burgeoning tech scene, which has been highlighted as a future tech hub by Forbes. The new office, located at WeWork Colony Square in Midtown, provides convenient access to transportation, dining, and cultural amenities, reflecting New Relic's commitment to integrating into vibrant local communities. Atlanta's status as a major travel hub and home to numerous Fortune 1000 companies and prestigious universities further supports New Relic's growth ambitions. The company is actively recruiting for its Atlanta team, inviting interested candidates to explore career opportunities as they prepare to become part of this dynamic market.

New Relic has built a scalable Kafka pipeline to process event data from microservices. The pipeline uses Kafka topics to move data between services, allowing for decoupling and scalability. It includes a chain of stream processing services that operate on event data in series, with each service producing messages onto a topic for the next service to consume. This allows for efficient processing of fine-grained monitoring data. New Relic also uses Kafka as a changelog, storing and reloading state using durable caching. The system is designed to be high-throughput and real-time, with features such as log compaction and manual de-duplication. To achieve concurrency, the team uses the disruptor pattern, which allows for efficient parallelization of processing data from multiple partitions. As the business scales, New Relic continues to refine its Kafka strategies to increase scalability, reduce dependencies, and improve code maintainability.

New Relic, an early adopter of Apache Kafka, utilizes the platform to build scalable, high-throughput, real-time streaming systems that efficiently manage data streams through microservices. By leveraging Kafka's capabilities, New Relic's Events Pipeline team processes "event data"—fine-grained monitoring information—through a chain of services connected via Kafka topics, enabling asynchronous communication that decouples services and allows dynamic scaling based on traffic. Kafka serves as both a changelog and a "durable cache," facilitating state storage and retrieval, which aids in rebuilding application states without additional database dependencies. The system incorporates the LMAX disruptor pattern to handle high concurrency and throughput, ensuring efficient data processing across multiple handlers. This approach reduces complexity and maintains scalability as New Relic continues to evolve its data infrastructure, demonstrating the platform's flexibility and power in supporting distributed systems.

New Relic's Alliances and Channels team is helping customers and partners with digital transformation, application modernization, and cloud adoption. The company's partners are critical to its success, enabling teams to move faster than ever before by providing the proper blend of people, process, and technology. New Relic has launched a Navigators Partner Program to help organizations use the platform for cloud migration best practices, tailored dashboards, enhanced revenue sharing, new training and enablement offerings, and a certification program through New Relic University. The initial group of Navigators has been recognized for meeting the qualifications and completing a 90-day onboarding program, including companies like Claranet, DigitasLBi UK, KCOM, ProtoSecurity, and Webiscope. These partners are expected to drive tremendous success with New Relic and will be part of an exclusive community that includes cutting-edge innovators helping their customers through game-changing transformations.

New Relic's Alliances and Channels team is leveraging partnerships to support organizations in digital transformation, application modernization, and cloud adoption, offering full-stack visibility and enhancing speed and efficiency in digital initiatives. The Navigators Partner Program, launched at FutureStack: New York, aims to drive cloud migration best practices, providing tailored dashboards, revenue-sharing, and training, with partners undergoing a 90-day onboarding to become New Relic Certified Performance Pros. The initial success of this program is highlighted by the inclusion of Advanced Navigators like Relus Cloud and Slalom, along with new members Claranet, DigitasLBi UK, and others, who are recognized for their commitment to integrating New Relic's capabilities into cloud services. Todd Osborne, Vice President of Alliances and Channels, emphasizes the program's potential for growth and invites further interest in the program through New Relic's platform.