From Concept to Implementation: Building Fast Stack

Just six months ago, a vision was formed after years of frustration with the current solutions available on the market. A vision was born, a blueprint defined, and work began on transferring that vision into a reality. Endless nights, weekends, and just about any time in between resulted in what might be called an what might be considered an 24 hours a day effort, with a few small brakes between development cycles.

It turns out, digesting metrics is relatively easy, scaling that effort is hard, and providing effective visualizations into those metrics is even harder. An initial server side architecture was developed in under a week. Rough, functional, an effective draft. This provided a great foundation for establishing API contracts. It was well understood that the effort would be an 'disposable' one. What was not expected was that two additional separate efforts were made, battle tested, and ultimately dismantled. Load testing quickly exposed design flaws. This has been an interesting exercise in that we are not ingesting metrics for a single application, however creating a solution for ingesting metrics for hundreds if not thousands of applications.

Beyond scalability concerns, uptime is another important topic. Configuration changes, deployments, etc need to be performed in real-time. Interrupting service to customers for these types of changes is not acceptable. It becomes necessary to establish a solution where changes may be introduced in an asynchronous (hot reload) manner, where inbound requests support backpressure. Essentially we need a system that scales infinitely, and aims to provide a no downtime experience. It's harder than it might initially appear.

The Product vision

The product vision

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We arrived at a definition of a series of complementary product offerings, that in concert would provide our customers with total end to end observability. Imagine your marketiung team engaging in user behavior patterns and overall experience. Campaign performance, page load times, conversion funnels at their fingertips. Dev ops teams monitoring the health of their infrastructure. Application developers monitoring the performance of their code. A unified platform to bring it all together.

Fast Stack Pulse

End user focused application availability and performance monitoring.

APM Core

Otel based metrics ingestion for application infrastructure. AI assisted alerting and performance analysis.

Fast Stack Beam

Client side metrics agent for application infrastructure. Browser based, native integrations for most frameworks, with SDKs for various languages.

Fast Stack Flow

Application usage analytics. Where users are coming from, what they are doing, and where they are going.

Alice

A specially trained AI model specializing in analyzing metrics and logs, providing insights and recommendations to help optimize application performance and availability.