Month: June 2017

The Curious Case of the Slow Jenkins Job

By Marc Esher

When I started work this morning, I expected a normal manager day: emails, meetings, shepherding some proposed infrastructure changes through our change management process. That was not to be. What followed instead was most of the day on the edge of my limited Linux troubleshooting abilities, trying to diagnose performance degradation on our production Jenkins server. Around 10:30 AM, Andy messaged me: “Anecdotal Jenkins slowness. Something that regularly takes 3 minutes on my machine takes 18 minutes on Jenkins” This is a story about troubleshooting. Prologue: The environment This story’s main characters are RHEL, Jenkins, New Relic, job-dsl-plugin, and the … Continue reading The Curious Case of the Slow Jenkins Job

Going Serverless: using Twilio and AWS Lambda to make phone calls with an AWS IoT button

By Marc Esher

  Credit Full credit for this idea and post goes to my colleague Andy, who presented this approach at a recent lunch-and-learn at work. A few months after his presentation, I decided to try replicating what he did. This blog post represents what I learned from that effort. Thanks Andy! The Goal For the 3 phones in our house, when one is misplaced, press an Amazon IoT button and have it dial the phone. A single click should call one phone number, double click another, and long click the third number. Then, the phone would ring, and I would listen … Continue reading Going Serverless: using Twilio and AWS Lambda to make phone calls with an AWS IoT button