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Rob Gibbon

Rob Gibbon

27 posts

Rob has 20+ years' industry experience building, scaling, managing and serving the teams, technology and environments behind around 50+ commercial web properties and data hubs across all major industries in varied roles. Rob brings both deep commercial and technical expertise to the product leadership team at Canonical. When he's not busy making great product, Rob is out running, reading and thinking, or just being.


Rob Gibbon
3 May 2023

Big data security foundations in five steps

Data Platform Article

We’ve all read the headlines about spectacular data breaches and other security incidents, and the impact that they have had on the victim organisations. And in some ways there’s no place more vulnerable to attack than a big data environment like a data lake. ...


Rob Gibbon
16 November 2022

Apache Kafka service design for low latency and no data loss

Apps Article

Designing a production service environment around Apache Kafka that delivers low latency and zero-data loss at scale is non-trivial. Indeed, it’s the holy grail of messaging systems. In this blog post, I’ll outline some of the fundamental service design considerations that you’ll need to take into account in order to get your service arch ...


Rob Gibbon
31 August 2022

Kubernetes operators – the top 5 things to watch for

Charms Article

Software operators are steadily revolutionising how we deploy and run complex distributed systems. They offer the promise of low-intervention, self-driving software – ideally leading to service reliability gains and better uptime. For an introduction to Kubernetes operators, check out our introductory webinar or download our guide to Kube ...


Rob Gibbon
6 December 2021

Canonical Data Platform 2021 winter roundup

AI Article

Canonical Data Platform: that was 2021 It’s that time of the year again: many folks are panic buying cans of windscreen de-icer spray and thermal underwear, bringing pine trees into the front room and preparing to enjoy an extended break with the family. So we thought to ourselves, what better time than now to take ...


Rob Gibbon
10 November 2021

SQL Server on Ubuntu Pro: bringing it all back home

Cloud and server Article

Not going to lie, the Microsoft SQL Server is my all-time favourite Microsoft product. For a long time, SQL Server was only available for Windows, but not much is really sacred. So now Microsoft, in collaboration with Canonical, are distributing and supporting several flavours of SQL Server on Ubuntu Pro for Azure. I’m going to ...


Rob Gibbon
26 October 2021

In defence of pet servers

Apps Article

We all know the drill by now: modern compute infrastructure needs to be deterministic, disposable, commoditised and repeatable. We’re all farmers now, and our server estates must be treated like cattle – ready for slaughter at a moment’s notice. However, we must remember that the driver behind the new design rationale is primarily the unr ...


Rob Gibbon
30 August 2021

Cloud PaaS through the lens of open source – opinion

Data Systems Article

Opinion piece by Rob Gibbon – Product Manager at Canonical. All views expressed are the author’s own. The open source perspective viz. PaaS Open source software, as the name suggests, is developed in the open. The software can be freely inspected by anyone, and can be freely patched as required to suit the security requirements ...


Rob Gibbon
27 August 2021

DataOps: keeping the data flowing with Model-driven Operations

Data Systems Article

DataOps: Prologue – why is it so hard? If you’ve ever lived DataOps, you’ll know that it’s a challenge at the best of times. A day in the life of a typical data engineering team involves securing, releasing, debugging and stabilising complex and oftentimes fragile data pipelines. These pipelines can involve many source applications and ...


Rob Gibbon
25 August 2021

Happy birthday – 30 Years of Linux

Desktop Article

Won’t be big Thirty years ago today, Linus Torvalds announced his free operating system to the world. As with many of the world’s greatest, Linux had humble beginnings as a very small pet project. The GNU was working on an ambitious free, public domain operating system but the project had been delayed, and enthusiasts were ...


Rob Gibbon
18 August 2021

How to run Apache Spark on MicroK8s and Ubuntu Core, in the cloud: Part 4

Cloud and server Article

In this series, we’ve been building up an Apache Spark cluster on Kubernetes using MicroK8s, Ubuntu Core OS, LXD and GCP. We’ve learned about and set up nested virtualisation on the cloud, and had some fun. But right, it’s retrospective time: in Part 1, we saw how to get MicroK8s up on LXD, on Ubuntu ...


Rob Gibbon
18 August 2021

How to run Apache Spark on MicroK8s and Ubuntu Core, in the cloud: Part 3

Cloud and server Kubernetes

If you’ve followed the steps in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, you’ll have a working MicroK8s on the next-gen Ubuntu Core OS deployed, up, and running on the cloud with nested virtualisation using LXD. If so, you can exit any SSH session to your Ubuntu Core in the sky and return to ...