Summary #

Recently I have been looking into ways to test my Apache Beam pipelines at work. Most common use cases of Beam generally involve either batch reading data from GCS and writing to analytical platforms such as Big Query or stream reading data from Pubsub and writing to perhaps Bigtable.

A pipeline consists of transforms and its generally easy to test them in isolation as an independent unit test per stage, however I am personally a big fan of “end-to-end” testing or “Integration testing” and this is where things can sometimes get tricky.

Most folks have been using Grafana or something similar to monitor Kubernetes cluster.

If you are using Google cloud container engine, then the standard unified place to monitor all your application and services is Stackdriver.

According to Google’s documentation, when you create a new container cluster using GUI or gcloud, Stackdriver is automatically configured with a sink, however It did not work out of the box for me hence this post :)

Well, the easiest way to check if Stackdriver is configured is to issue a command

Introduction #

Isochrones are curves of equal travel time from a certain point of origin, another way of saying this would be that an Isochrone is an isoline for travel time, if the weighting factor is changed from time to distance, then the resulting curve is called an Isodistance.

In this post I will present a rough way to create an Isochrone and an Isodistance using google’s directions API.