Ryan is a Principal Engineer at Runscope. Recently, Ryan was included in the AWS Community Hero Program. The program was created by Amazon Web Services to recognize AWS experts who go above and beyond to share their expertise and knowledge with the greater cloud community. Prior to Runscope, Ryan led technical operations at Pinterest, and before that, at PBworks. I sat down with Ryan and asked him to share a few things about himself and a few Runscope behind-the-scenes facts.
Q: What is your role at Runscope? What are the main types of problems that you focus on?
I'm a member of the software engineering team at Runscope, where I focus on technical operations. "Technical operations" encompasses the work that keeps Runscope up and running: setting up new infrastructure, identifying performance bottlenecks, and building tools to make this work easy and automatic.
Q: How does Runscope use Amazon Web Services?
Runscope runs most of its server infrastructure on Amazon EC2 (although some service regions are powered by other providers). Amazon EC2 is the most comprehensive cloud platform on the market right now, with features like private networking, a strong API, and 9 locations around the world.
We also use Amazon DynamoDB to store data for many of our microservices, and we use Amazon Route 53 to manage our DNS. Route 53's latency-based routing lets us route customer traffic to the nearest service region, which helps us provide a fast experience for all our customers around the world.
As a small (but growing) engineering team, it's been incredibly helpful to be able to rely on a service provider like Amazon to run our low-level infrastructure. As an example, earlier this month we added a service region in Japan. Thanks to Amazon's global presence, it only took us a couple hours of engineering to expand our service to Japan.
Q: Does Runscope use a lot of other cloud services? Which components are managed in-house, and which components are trusted to Runscope's partners?
Yes, we've relied heavily on cloud services for many parts of our infrastructure. For example, we've used Keen IO to power some of the performance and usage analytics in Runscope Metrics. We also use lower-level services like Mandrill to deliver email notifications to our customers.
We believe it's important to focus on our core competency -- API debugging and testing -- and to control our own infrastructure when it's directly relevant to those core competencies. We're happy to rely on our partners to keep everything else up and running.
Have a penchant for DevOps? We're hiring!
Runscope is looking for a DevOps Engineer to plan, build and automate a modern distributed and service-powered infrastructure. To find out more about what it's like to work at Runscope and see other open positions, visit this page.