Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Somehow this seems quite appropriate. (via John Bredehoft)

• 75 acres: Pizza eaten in US daily; 270TB: Backblaze storage pod; 14nm: Intel extends Moore's Law
• Quotable Quotes
  • discreteevent: The dream of reuse has made a mess of many systems.
  • David Crawley: Don't think of Moore's Law in terms of technology; think of it in terms of economics and you get much greater understanding. The limits of Moore's Law is not driven by current technology. The limits of Moore's Law are really a matter of cost.
  • Simon Brown: If you can't build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer?
  • smileysteve: The net result is that you should be able to transmit QPSK at 32GBd in 2 polarizations in maybe 80 waves in each direction. 2bits x 2 polarizations x 32G ~128Gb/s per wave or nearly 11Tb/s for 1 fiber. If this cable has 6 strands, then it could easily meet the target transmission capacity [60TB].
  • Eric Brumer: Highly efficient code is actually memory efficient code.

• How to be a cloud optimist. Tell yourself: an instance is half full, it's not half empty; Downtime is temporary; Failures aren't your fault.


• Mother Earth, Motherboard by Neal Stephenson. Goes without saying it's gorgeously written. The topic: The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth. < Related to Google Invests In $300M Submarine Cable To Improve Connection Between Japan And The US.


• IBM compares virtual machines and against Linux containers: Our results show that containers result in equal or better performance than VM in almost all cases. Both VMs and containers require tuning to support I/O-intensive applications.


• Does Psychohistory begin with BigData? Of a crude kind, perhaps. Google uses BigQuery to uncover patterns of world history: What’s even more amazing is that this analysis is not the result of a massive custom-built parallel application built by a team of specialized HPC programmers and requiring a dedicated cluster to run on: in stark contrast, it is the result of a single line of SQL code (plus a second line to create the initial “view”). All of the complex parallelism, data management, and IO optimization is handled transparently by Google BigQuery. Imagine that – a single line of SQL performing 2.5 million correlations in just 2.5 minutes to uncover the underlying patterns of global society.


• Fabian Giesen with an deep perspective on how communication has evolved to use a similar pattern. Networks all the way down (part2): anything we would call a computer these days is in fact, for all practical purposes, a heterogeneous cluster made up of various specialized smaller computers, all connected using various networks that go by different names and are specified in different standards, yet are all suspiciously similar at the architecture level; a fractal of switched, packet-based networks of heterogeneous nodes that make up what we call a single “computer”. It means that all the network security problems that plague inter-computer networking also exist within computers themselves. Implementations may change substantially over time, the interfaces – protocols, to stay within our networking terminology – stay mostly constant over large time scales, warts and all.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...