Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Finally, a clear diagram of Amazon's industry impact. (MARK A. GARLICK)

• 150: # of globular clusters in the Milky Way; 800 million: Facebook Messenger users; 180,000: high-res images of the past; 1 exaflops: 1 million trillion floating-point operations per second; 10%: of Google's traffic is now IPv6; 100 milliseconds: time it takes to remember; 35: percent of all US Internet traffic used by Netflix; 125 million: hours of content delivered each day by Netflix's CDN;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Erik DeBenedictis: We could build an exascale computer today, but we might need a nuclear reactor to power it
  • wstrange: What I really wish the cloud providers would do is reduce network egress costs. They seem insanely expensive when compared to dedicated servers.
  • rachellaw: What's fascinating is the bot-bandwagon is mirroring the early app market.
    With apps, you downloaded things to do things. With bots, you integrate them into things, so they'll do it for you. 
  • erichocean: The situation we're in today with RAM is pretty much the identical situation with the disks of yore.
  • @bernardgolden: @Netflix will spend 2X what HBO does on programming in 2016? That's an amazing stat. 
  • @saschasegan: Huawei's new LTE modem has 18 LTE bands. Qualcomm's dominance of LTE is really ending this year.
  • Unruly Places: The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us.
  • @mjpt777: Queues are everywhere. Recognise them, make them first class, model and monitor them for telemetry.
  • Guido de Croon:  the robot exploits the impending instability of its control system to perceive distances. This could be used to determine when to switch off its propellers during landing, for instance.
  • @gaberivera: In the future, all major policy questions will be settled by Twitter debates between venture capitalists
  • Craig McLuckie: It’s not obvious until you start to actually try to run massive numbers of services that you experience an incredible productivity that containers bring
  • Brian Kirsch: One of the biggest things when you look at the benefits of container-based virtualization is its ability to squeeze more and more things onto a single piece of hardware for cost savings. While that is good for budgets, it is excessively horrible when things go bad.
  • @RichardWarburto: It still surprises me that configuration is most popular user of strong consistency models atm. Is config more important than data
  • @jamesurquhart: Five years ago I predicted CFO would stop complaining about up front cost, and start asking to reduce monthly bill. Seeing that happen now.
  • @martinkl: Communities in a nutshell… • Databases research: “In fsync we trust” • Distributed systems research: “In majority vote we trust”
  • @BoingBoing: Tax havens hold $7.6 trillion; 8% of world's total wealth
  • @DrQz: Amazon's actual profits are still tiny, relying heavily on its AWS cloud business.
  • hadagribble: we need to view fast storage as something other than disk behind a block interface and slow memory, especially with all the different flavours of fast persistent storage that seem to be on the horizon. For the one's that attach to the memory bus, the PMFS-style [1] approach of treating them like a file-system for discoverability and then mmaping to allow them to be accessed as memory is pretty attractive.


• EC2 with a 5% price reduction on certain things in certain places. Not exactly the race to the bottom one would hope for in a commodity market, which means the cloud is not a commodity. Happy New Year – EC2 Price Reduction (C4, M4, and R3 Instances).


• Since the locus of the Internet is centering on a command line interface in the form of messaging, chatbot integrations may be giving APIs a second life, assuming they are let inside the walled garden. The next big thing in computing is called 'ChatOps,' and it's already happening inside Slack. The advantage chatops has over the old Web + API mashup dream is that messaging platforms come built-in with a business model/app store, large amd growing user base, and network effects. Facebook’s Secret Chat SDK Lets Developers Build Messenger Bots. Slack apps. WeChat API. Telegram API. Alexa API. Google's Voice Actions. How about Siri or iMessage? Nope. njovin likes it: I've worked with the new Chat SDK and our customers' use cases aren't geared toward forcing (or even encouraging) users into using Facebook Messenger. Most of them are just trying to meet demand from their customers. In our particular case, we have customers with a lot of international travelers who have access to data while abroad but not necessarily SMS. IMO it's a lot better than having a dedicated app you have to download to interact with a specific brand.


• The world watched a lot of porn this year. If you like analytics you'll love Pornhub’s 2015 Year in Review: In 2015 alone, we streamed 75GB of data a second; bandwidth used is 1,892 petabytes; 4,392,486,580 hours of video were watched; 21.2 billion visits.


• A very interesting way to frame the issue. On the dangers of a blockchain monoculture: The Bitcoin blockchain: the world’s worst database. Would you use a database with these features? Uses approximately the same amount of electricity as could power an average American household for a day per transaction. Supports 3 transactions / second across a global network with millions of CPUs/purpose-built ASICs. Takes over 10 minutes to “commit” a transaction. Doesn’t acknowledge accepted writes: requires you read your writes, but at any given time you may be on a blockchain fork, meaning your write might not actually make it into the “winning” fork of the blockchain (and no, just making it into the mempool doesn’t count). In other words: “blockchain technology” cannot by definition tell you if a given write is ever accepted/committed except by reading it out of the blockchain itself (and even then). Can only be used as a transaction ledger denominated in a single currency, or to store/timestamp a maximum of 80 bytes per transaction. But it’s decentralized!

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