Identifying fraud and suspicious activity on the Internet is all about data. iovation protects its customers by analyzing devices performing high value transactions and recommending an action in real-time based on past activity. Apache Cassandra can consume and analyze a ridiculous amount of data while keeping costs low.

At iovation an implementation using Cassandra currently supports 10,000 read/write operations per second on a cluster storing over 1 billion rows in 500GB, Cassandra makes this solution horizontally scalable, highly available, recoverable, and cheap (under $20k).

In this presentation Darin will cover some of the other options his team explored, hardware choices that were made, and the more interesting tunables Cassandra offers that allow you to squeeze IOPS out of your cluster.

Presenter: Darin Glatt, Principal Application Architec, iovation Darin Glatt is software developer with over 10 years experience working with large-scale distributed systems. He is currently the Application Architect for iovation where he helps fight fraud, account take over, and identity theft on the Internet by tracking device reputation and suspicious activity in real-time. Prior to taking on the bad guys of the Internet, Darin helped build a massively multi-player blackjack game for the UltimateBet platform and developed MetroOnes nationwide VoIP network, the backbone of their 411 offering.

The focus of this meeting will be the local users of Cassandra. In an effort to 'bootstrap' the group there will be a presentation of some of the ways iovation uses Cassandra in our various tests. Please come with additional thoughts about ways you might want to see your user group shape itself.

Apache Cassandra in use at Urban Airship

An Introduction To Data Modeling Techniques in Cassandra

Steve will discuss NOSQL, CAP Theorem, eventual consistency, and data modeling techniques in Cassandra. Following that will be a demonstration of some shell commands to create and query tables. We will discuss wide and narrow rows in Cassandra, storage options, and capacity planning. We will take a brief look at Titan, a graph database that can use Cassandra as a backing store. We will take a look at partition keys, clustering columns, time series data, and how these choices affect the storage and performance of the solution. We will discuss some of the real world challenges that come up, the trade offs associated with materialized views, plus compare and contrast this to a typical relational model. Time permitting we will discuss some real world use cases, and how Nike Social is using Cassandra to meet them.

Speaker

Steve Hall is a software engineer with over 15 years of experience. Steve is currently a full time engineer with Nike Digital, where he focuses on REST, social networks, and social network integration.

For this meetup, we are going to be doing a joint meetup with the DataStax Cassandra Portland Users group.

Archaic database technologies just don't scale under the always on, distributed demands ​of modern IOT, mobile and web applications. We'll start this Intro to Cassandra by discussing how its approach is different and why so many awesome companies have migrated from the cold clutches of the relational world into the warm embrace of peer to peer architecture. After this high-level opening discussion, we'll briefly unpack the following:

• Cassandra's internal architecture and distribution model
• Cassandra's Data Model
• Reads and Writes ​​ You'll go home with enough Cassandra basics to get your feet wet and some resources to get your hands dirty.

Join us for the October meeting of PdxDevOps.

Agenda:

1) Celebrate Ansible's successful acquisition

2) Daniel Drier will talk about a puppet autosigning gem he created.

3) Ken Eshelby will talk about a metrics API inside OpenNMS (backed by Cassandra)

pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. The group welcomes participants interested in any related products, technologies and methodologies. The group has been meeting regularly since August 2010 for presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. Every month 15-35 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for devops – join us!

Join us for the November meeting of PdxDevOps.

Agenda:

1) Overview of jive's Collins+xCAT automated provisioning w/ Devon Peters

2) Kubernetes for Sysadmins: Why is Kubernetes awesome for System Administrators? Because you get to sleep all night and go home on time w/ Elson Rodriguez, @elsonrodriguez

pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. The group welcomes participants interested in any related products, technologies and methodologies. The group has been meeting regularly since August 2010 for presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. Every month 15-35 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for devops – join us!

Join us for the November meeting of PdxDevOps.

Agenda:

1) Overview of Nix and NixOS by Corbin Simpson (Acquia)

Nix is a package manager designed to perfectly isolate dependencies and yield reproducible builds. The NixOS Linux distro is built on top of Nix. We'll look at how Nix relates to the modern devops environment and how it can simplify continuous integration and configuration management.

2) A short talk on building services with gRPC and Kubernetes by Kelsey Hightower (Google)

Kubernetes is a scheduler framework for deploying docker containers at scale. It is based on production-proven code that has lived inside Google for years.

pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. The group welcomes participants interested in any related products, technologies and methodologies. The group has been meeting regularly since August 2010 for presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. Every month 15-35 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for devops – join us!

Come and talk to other Cassandra users about Cassandra and uses and abuses of the technology. It will be hosted at New Relic with free pizza and beer.

Doors open at 6 and talks begin at 6:30.

Topic: Using Cassandra with Apache Spark

Join us for the Feburary meeting of PdxDevOps.

Agenda:

1) Overview of Nix and NixOS by Corbin Simpson (Acquia) (second try)

Nix is a package manager designed to perfectly isolate dependencies and yield reproducible builds. The NixOS Linux distro is built on top of Nix. We'll look at how Nix relates to the modern devops environment and how it can simplify continuous integration and configuration management.

2) "Creating Efficient Docker Images" by Isaac Stefanek

Docker can do many great things for the continuous integration and delivery process. One of the benefits that can be achieved using Docker is speeding up build and deploy times. Creating Docker files that maximize this benefit can take some work, especially if you are dealing with a bloated technology stack. We'll take a look at some common best practices that will have your Docker builds running at warp speed. The examples will be focused on building NodeJS applications, but many of the concepts will be universal for any Dockerized app.

pdxdevops is a Portland, Oregon user group that explores the glorious intersection of software development and systems operations, and shares practical advice on working effectively in an era of agile infrastructure, server automation and cloud computing. The group welcomes participants interested in any related products, technologies and methodologies. The group has been meeting regularly since August 2010 for presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. Every month 15-35 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for devops – join us!