Backstage Blog

• Engineering
• Go
• Python
• Scala
• Ruby
• Monitoring
• Open Source

We made some updates to Periskop, our internal pull-based exception monitoring service. To learn about what is new in 2022, read on.

• Engineering
• Finagle
• Twirp
• Scala
• Open Source
• Announcements

This article announces the release of Twinagle, an open source implementation of the Twirp protocol for Scala/Finagle.

• Engineering
• Go
• Monitoring
• Open Source
• Typescript
• React
• Announcements

A new approach to exception monitoring, designed for high scalability...

• Announcements
• Open Source
• Monitoring
• Go

On Monday this week, the Prometheus authors have released version 1.0.0 of the central component of the Prometheus monitoring and alerting system, the Prometheus server. (Other components will follow suit over the next months.) This is a major milestone for the project. Read more about it on the Prometheus blog, and check out the announcement of the CNCF, which has recently accepted Prometheus as a hosted project.

• Open Source
• Hadoop
• Big Data
• Crunch

With Java 8 now in the mainstream, Scala and Clojure are no longer the only choices to develop readable, functional code for big data technology on the JVM. In this post we see how SoundCloud is leveraging Apache Crunch and the new Crunch Lambda module to do the high-volume data processing tasks which are essential at early stages in our batch data pipeline efficiently, robustly and simply in Java 8.

• Announcements
• Open Source
• Monitoring
• Go

In previous blog posts, we discussed how SoundCloud has been moving towards a microservice architecture. Soon we had hundreds of services, with many thousand instances running and changing at the same time. With our existing monitoring set-up, mostly based on StatsD and Graphite, we ran into a number of serious limitations. What we really needed was a system with the following features:

• A multi-dimensional data model, so that data can be sliced and diced at will, along dimensions like instance, service, endpoint, and method.
• Operational simplicity, so that you can spin up a monitoring server where and when you want, even on your local workstation, without setting up a distributed storage backend or reconfiguring the world.
• Scalable data collection and decentralized architecture, so that you can reliably monitor the many instances of your services, and independent teams can set up independent monitoring servers.
• Finally, a powerful query language that leverages the data model for meaningful alerting (including easy silencing) and graphing (for dashboards and for ad-hoc exploration).

All of these features existed in various systems. However, we could not identify a system that combined them all until a colleague started an ambitious pet project in 2012 that aimed to do so. Shortly thereafter, we decided to develop it into SoundCloud’s monitoring system: Prometheus was born.

• Announcements
• Go
• Open Source

Let’s talk about the stream.

The SoundCloud stream represents stuff that’s relevant to you primarily via your social graph, arranged in time order, newest-first. The atom of that data model, an event, is a simple enough thing.

• Timestamp
• User who did the thing
• Identifier of the thing that was done

For example,

• At 2014-04-01T13:14:15.034Z,
• a-trak
• Reposted track skrillex/duck-sauce-nrg-skrillex-kill

If you followed A-Trak, you’d want to see that repost event in your stream. Easy. The difficult…

• iOS
• Mobile
• Open Source
• Ruby

I’m excited to announce that SoundCloud is sponsoring the development of CocoaPods through a Travis Foundation grant. CocoaPods is an open-source dependency manager for Objective-C projects. Travis Foundation is a non-profit that pairs corporate sponsors with open-source projects to make open source even better.

At SoundCloud, our iOS team uses CocoaPods every day to manage the dependencies of our mobile apps. We hope that this sponsorship will lead to improvements that benefit the entire Mac…

• Open Source

Sketchy is a spam-fighting, open-source software framework developed by SoundCloud engineers Matt Weiden, Rany Keddo, and Michael Brückner. Sketchy reduces malicious user activity on web applications. You can use it to address several common issues:

• Detect when a user submits text that contains spam content.
• Detect when a user submits multiple texts that are nearly identical.
• Rate-limit malicious actions that users perform repeatedly.
• Check user signatures such as IP addresses against external blacklist APIs.
• Collect and consolidate reports of spam from users.
…

• Contests
• Open Source
• Ruby
• Events

The lineup for BaRuCo 2013 looks amazing, with speakers such as Aaron Patterson, Katrina Owen, Sandi Metz, and Ruby’s inventor Yukihiro Matsumoto. The conference is currently SOLD OUT, but we have one extra ticket… and it could be yours!

If you win the ticket, SoundCloud will fly you from anywhere in the world to Barcelona, Spain and put you up in a nice Catalonian hotel.

How do you enter to win?

It’s simple. Just create a command-line interface in Ruby that uses the SoundCloud API. You can use the SoundCloud Ruby SDK, but this is not a requirement. The only…