Steve Newman, Author at Scalyr

Steve Newman / April 29

Implementing PowerQueries

When we first built Scalyr, we focused on making it fast and easy to extract answers from logs. Over the years, as we add capabilities, we’ve maintained that focus on simplicity and speed. We based…
Read More

Photo of Christine Heckart, Scalyr's new CEO

Steve Newman / January 17

Introducing Christine Heckart, Scalyr’s new CEO

It seems like just yesterday that I announced that Scalyr had raised Series A. It was a big step for the company. We’ve been pretty capital efficient, so we weren’t short on cash, but the…
Read More

Steve Newman / July 16

Work in Progress

At Scalyr, we’re building a large-scale storage system for timeseries and log data (see Introducing Scalyr Logs). To make good design decisions, we need hard data about EC2 I/O performance. Plenty of data has been published on this…
Read More

Steve Newman / November 20

Building a Sustainable Startup

Although Scalyr has been around since 2011, it feels like we are really just getting started. So many tech startups come roaring out of the gate, pursuing growth at all costs. Sometimes this leads to…
Read More

Steve Newman / July 27

Support Driven Development: Listen now so you don’t hear it later

Here at Scalyr, we’re big fans of Complaint-Driven Development, which I’ll summarize as “focus engineering effort on fixing the things users actually complain about.” We especially focus on issues that generate support requests, with such…
Read More

Steve Newman / September 27

Irreversible Failures: Lessons from the DynamoDB Outage

Summary: Most server problems, once identified, can be quickly solved with a simple compensating action—for instance, rolling back the bad code you just pushed. The worst outages are those where reversing the cause doesn’t undo…
Read More

Steve Newman / April 22

Scalyr Announces $2.1M Seed Round To Reinvent System Visibility

A few years ago, we set out to rebuild server and log monitoring from the ground up. Today marks a new and exciting chapter in the story. To tell it properly, let me take you…
Read More

Steve Newman / April 3

Scalyr is Hiring!

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to writing. We’re entering a new stage at Scalyr, and we’re looking for a few strong engineers — frontend, backend, and devops — to join us as…
Read More

Steve Newman / August 11

99.99% uptime on a 9-to-5 schedule

Being “on call” is often the most dreaded part of server operations. In the immortal words of Devops Borat, “Devops is intersection of lover of cloud and hater of wake up at 3 in morning.”…
Read More

Steve Newman / July 25

Impossible Engineering Problems Often Aren’t

When your problem is impossible, redefine the problem. In an earlier article, I described how Scalyr searches logs at tens of gigabytes per second using brute force. This works great for its intended purpose: enabling…
Read More

Blog