Jacob Tomlinson

The Informatics Lab is a technology, science and design research group at the Met Office.

It has been nearly two years since I published a new blog post on this website.

In Theo’s previous posts on storing high momentum data and its accompanying metadata we get some interesting insights into the future of cloud based data storage.

Straight from our own Informatics Lab, Jacob will share how to perform large scale distributed data analysis on any cloud platform with Pangeo.

This article was originally written for the the Met Office workshop run at the Intro to Earth Information event on the 12th of March 2019.

Mozfest workshop facilitators meeting Figuring out the right format for a workshop can be tricky.

Enable your development teams to be able to deploy software quickly and efficiently, as well as at great scale, with containerisation.

If you read reports from organizations like the CNCF they will tell you that 90% of people are developing in containers, 69% are running them in production and 77% of those are using Kubernetes to manage them.

Sometimes I find that something goes wrong in a container and some data stored in a persistent volume gets corrupted.

Server administration is an activity that often happens in an isolated context in a terminal.

Introduction For a while I’ve been searching for a decent light switch solution for my home automation setup.

I spent some time this week exploring whether it would be possible to run Dask and Distributed on a function as a service platform like AWS Lambda.

In late 2017 the Met Office ran a joint Tianchi data science challenge with Alibaba.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on February 7th, 2018.

My data lives in an object store, but my tools expect a POSIX file path, what do I do?

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on December 19th, 2017.

This session gives an in-depth look at the current state of big data at AWS.

In order to analyse the petabytes of data we have at the Met Office we need very large clusters of servers.

ZEIT is a great platform for deploying your opsdroid instance.

This week Computer Weekly have published an article interviewing me about how the Met Office is tackling the vast amount of data we are producing.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on July 21st, 2017.

It is common practice for release notes to consist of a list of the Pull Requests which have been merged since the last release.

Introduction When using Hashicorp’s Vault you may want to have an authentication token which only has permissions to seal the vault.

My team won a Real IT Award for Innovation!

Abstract The Met Office is a world leading weather and climate centre with the largest operational supercomputer in Europe.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on May 8th, 2017.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on May 8th, 2017.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on April 20th, 2017.

Introduction I recently acquired an Apple Airport Express wireless hotspot which wouldn’t power on.

Introduction Currently InfluxData do not provide a 32bit FreeBSD build of Telegraf as part of their standard packages.

We should split the session into roughly three activities, with the final one being totally open ended.

Introduction Building games for iOS is straight forward with Game Maker.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on June 24th, 2016.

Telegraf is an application for collecting server and application telemetry and metrics and sending them to a time series datastore like InfluxDB.

In 2013 VMware dropped their Python library for accessing the API for ESXi/vSphere on GitHub.

Originally published on the Met Office Informatics Lab blog on June 2nd, 2016.

Here is an interesting note on testing the disk performance of your AWS instances.

Interactive shell In this post we are going to create a container we can interact with.

Installing Docker Installing Docker on your machine is required but beyond the scope of this series.