All posts tagged with 'platform'
How we structure our data teams at FreeAgent
Since joining FreeAgent back in April I’ve been both impressed and interested with how the Data organisation is structured. I’ve come from an enterprise world where you have lots of Data Engineers, a team of dedicated Data Architects and a separate Business Intelligence org. A few things that immediately struck me at FreeAgent were: No one has the title ‘Data Engineer’Data Analytics are part of the Engineering orgNo one has… Continue reading
Going Underground
Back in the hazy days of last summer we kicked off a project to improve the infrastructure behind FreeAgent, to prepare ourselves for an order of magnitude (or two) of very high growth in the coming years, as well as greatly bolstering our DR capablility. Deciding on a hosting strategy is not simple. Unlike when we first started FreeAgent, today there are a multitude of options: full cloud hosting, fully-managed… Continue reading
Revving the engine
At FreeAgent we deal with a lot of accounting data - every invoice, bank transaction, expense and VAT return in the system must be processed, and its tax and accounting effects calculated and recorded. In the early days of FreeAgent this was something that was baked directly into the business objects – reporting data was pulled directly from the day-to-day business records. As the number of users grew and the… Continue reading
Puppet and MCollective Talk
Thomas Haggett, one of our senior platform engineers, recently gave a talk at a Scottish Ruby User Group meetup about Puppet and MCollective, two technologies we've been embracing in anger at FreeAgent in 2011. We'll be blogging about what we're doing with these technologies in detail in the coming months but in the meantime, here's a little taster video: Thomas Haggett - Puppet from Cultivate on Vimeo. Continue reading
Speeding up SSL
SSL is great; widely supported, easy to set-up, relatively cheap these days and (relatively) secure. We've required it from our early days and it hasn't caused us too many issues other than needing us to renew our SSL certificates from time to time and requiring a few more IP addresses than we otherwise would have needed1. That said, I recently visited Portland to attend PuppetConf (all about Puppet, a configuration… Continue reading