I recently talked with Frederic Branczyk. Fredric is the founder of Polar Signals, a new always-on, zero-instrumentation profiler. Before Polar Signals, Fredric spent time at Red Hat and CoreOS, where he worked on Kubernetes and Prometheus. In this interview, Frederic and I break down Polar Signals’s architecture and its main components: Parca and FrostDB. Parca is of particular interest; it is able to achieve its minimally invasive profiling claims by using an eBPF filter that samples the entire OS’s stack at 19hz. Data is then passed to a server and stored into FrostDB, an embedded storage engine built on Datafusion and Parquet. During the discussion, Frederic mentions several influential papers: * Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers * BOLT: A Practical Binary Optimizer for Data Centers and Beyond * Propeller: A Profile Guided, Relinking Optimizer for Warehouse-Scale Applications * Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications You can support me by purchasing The Missing README: A Guide for the New Software Engineer for yourself or gifting it to new software engineers that you know. I occasionally invest in infrastructure startups. Companies that I’ve invested in are marked with a [$] in this newsletter. See my LinkedIn profile for a complete list. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit materializedview.io