Developer Blog

the story of HOD : ahead of its time, obsolete at launch

10 October 2011

Last week we shut down an early part of the bizo infrastructure : HOD (Hadoop on Demand). I thought it might be fun to look back on this project a bit.

Writing better 3rd party Javascript with Coffeescript, Jasmine, PhantomJS and Dependence.js

5 October 2011

Here at Bizo we recently underwent a major change to our Javascript tags that’s used in our free analytics product (http://www.bizo.com/marketer/audience_analytics). Our code gets loaded by millions of visitors each month across thousands of web sites; so our Javascript has to run reliably in just about any browser on any page.

Cloudwatch metrics revisited

24 August 2011

In a previous post, I discussed our initial usage of cloudwatch custom metrics. Since then, we've added more metrics and changed how we're recording them, so I thought it might be helpful to revisit the topic.

Report delivery from Hive via Google Spreadsheets

19 August 2011

At Bizo, we run a number of periodically scheduled Hive jobs produce a high level summary as just a few (often, just one) row of data. In the past, we’ve simply used the same delivery mechanism as with larger reports; the output is emailed as a CSV file to the appropriate distribution list. This was less than ideal for a number of reasons:

Bizo dev team @ TechShopSF

12 August 2011

MongoSF follow-up and contest winners

1 June 2011

Thanks for stopping by and meeting the Bizo engineering team at MongoSF. We had a great time meeting everyone at the conference and the after-party. Stay in touch! As part of our conference sponsorship, we were able to include a small card in the conference bags.

Bizo @ MongoSF

22 May 2011

Cloudwatch custom metrics @ Bizo

19 May 2011

Now that Cloudwatch Custom Metrics are live, I wanted to talk a bit about how we're using them here at Bizo. We've been heavy users of the existing metrics to track requests/machine counts/latency, etc. as seen here. We wanted to start tracking more detailed application-specific metrics and were excited to learn about the beta custom metric support.

Synchronizing Stashboard with Pingdom alerts

16 May 2011

First, what's Stashboard? It's is an open-source status page for cloud services and APIs. Here's a basic example:

How Bizo survived the Great AWS Outage of 2011 relatively unscathed...

21 April 2011

The twittersphere, techblogs and even some business sites are a buzz with the news that the US East Region of AWS has been experiencing a major outage. This outage has taken down some of the most well known names on the web. Bizo's infrastructure is 100% AWS and we support 1000s of publisher sites (including some very well know business sites) doing billions of impressions a month. Sure, we had a few bruises early yesterday morning when the outage first began, but soon after then we've been operating our core, high volume services on top of AWS but without the East region.