Brendan Gregg

Wrangling Elephants in the Cloud

You know the elephant in the room, the one no one wants to talk about. Well it turns out there was a whole herd of them hiding in my cloud. There's a herd of them hiding in your cloud too. I'm sure of it. Here is my story and how I learned to wrangle the elephants in the cloud.

Like many of you, my boss walked into my office about three years ago and said "We need to move everything to the cloud." At the time, I wasn't convinced that moving to the cloud had technical merit. The business, on the other hand, had decided that, for whatever reason, it was absolutely necessary.

As I began planning the move, selecting a cloud provider, picking tools with which to manage the deployment, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to provide the same quality of service in a cloud as I had in our server farm. There were too many unknowns.

Top on Solaris

Recently, I was asked to give some advice on an integration project involving some Solaris web servers . One of the sides requested to install the top command. Now I know and love top for Linux but using top on Solaris is a waste in my opinion. Solaris comes with the prstat command built in- why use something else? Of course he answered that top was standard for him and he was used to it but I felt obliged to convince him otherwise so I dug around and found some proof 🙂