Wiredgorilla

Editor’s note : For retailers, predicting consumers’ desires and demand is the holy grail. For retail IT, the goal is understanding the performance of your ecommerce applications. Here, Japanese online retailer Mercari shows how they used Cloud Profiler and Trace to understand a complex microservices-based application running on Google Cloud, to meet rigorous SLOs as demand shifts for their products.  The events of 2020 have accelerated ecommerce, increasing demand for and traffic on online marketplaces. Analyst eMarketer predicts that ecommerce sales in the United States will grow 18% in 2020, against an overall fall in total retail sales of 10.5% for the year. Likewise, our business—Japan-headquartered consumer-to-consumer marketplace Mercari Inc—is growing rapidly. In the United States alone, we have seen 74% year-on-year growth in monthly average users to 3.4 million. A big part of our success are our robust payment and deposit systems and AI-based fraud monitoring, which enab...

Docker Hub is a popular registry for hosting public container images. Earlier this summer, Docker announced it will begin rate-limiting the number of pull requests to the service by “Free Plan” users. For pull requests by anonymous users this limit is now 100 pull requests per 6 hours; authenticated users have a limit of 200 pull requests per 6 hours. When the new rate limits take effect on November 1st, they might disrupt your automated build and deployment processes on Cloud Build or how you deploy artifacts to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run or App Engine Flex from Docker Hub.  This situation is made more challenging because, in many cases, you may not be aware that a Google Cloud service you are using is pulling images from Docker Hub. For example, if your Dockerfile has a statement like “ FROM debian:latest ”or your Kubernetes Deployment manifest has a statement like “ image: postgres:latest ” it is pulling the image directly from Docker Hub. To help you identify th...