Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

An alternate universe where Zeppelins rule the sky. 1929. (@AeroDork)

• 15%: Facebook's reduction in latency using HTTP2's server push; 1.9x: nanotube transistors outperform silicon; 200: projectors used to film a "hologram"; 50%: of people fall for phishing attacks (it's OK to click); 5x: increased engagement using Google's Progressive Web Apps; 115,000+: Cassandra nodes at Apple; $500 million: Pokémon Go; $150M: Delta's cost for datacenter outage; 


• Quotable Quotes: 
  • Dan Lyons: I wanted to write a book about what it’s like to be 50 and trying to reinvent yourself – that struggle. There are all these books and inspirational speakers talking about being a lifelong learner and it’s so great to reinvent yourself, the brand of you. And I wanted to say, you know, it’s not like that. It’s actually really painful.
  • Engineers & Coffee~ In modern application development everything is a stream now versus historically everything was a transaction. Make a request and the you're done. It's easier to write analytics on top of streams versus using Hive. It's cool that Kinesis is all real-time and has the power of SQL.
  • David Smith: The [iOS] market has been pulling me along towards advertising based apps, and I’ve found that the less I fight back with anachronistic ideas about how software “should” be sold, the more sustainable a business I have.
  • @tef_ebooks: (how do you keep a lisp user in suspense
  • @bodil: Use tests to verify your assumptions. Use a type checker to verify your implementations. Always.
  • tostitos1979: Here is a factoid for the youngins ... the Internet/Arpanet was created BEFORE the first microprocessor! In fact, Intel was originally founded to make RAM ICs. They only later created the first microprocessor (the 4004)!
  • gsubes:  Our tests showed than even with larger messages (100k price ticks per request) pipes were still a magnitude slower [than Memory Mapping].
  • Quincy Larson: Did you know the average developer only get two hours of uninterrupted work done a day? They spend the other 6 hours in varying states of distraction.
  • StorageMojo: Achieving lower-than-DRAM pricing requires volume, and that’s where NRAM has a competitive advantage over, say, 3D XPoint. Processing can be done on today’s flash, DRAM or logic lines. NRAM processing only needs spin coating and patterning – as well as carbon nanotubes – which modern fabs all support.
  • Xiao Mina: We’ve seen this story before: as cost of production and distribution go down, the range of creativity goes up.
  • @clarkkaren: Give humans a system and they'll game it. The End.
  • Jim Starkey: AmorphousDB is my modest effort to question everything database.
    The best way to think about Amorphous is to envision a relational database and mentally erase the boxes around the tables so all records free float in the same space – including data and metadata.
  • @jdub: On Reddit: “What is the use of Elastic IPs, if I can use ELB or an Auto Scaling Group instead?” STUDENT, YOU HAVE ACHIEVED ZEN OF CLOUD.
  • @BenedictEvans: A key premise for the next decade: it's easier for software to enter other industries than for other industries to hire software people
  • @jasongorman: To clarify, "dependency injection" literally just means passing an object's collaborators as constructor/method params. That's all it is.
  • jackpeterfletch: Grand solution to world hunger, available on Kindle!
  • @swardley: Optimise flow.  Often when you examine flows then you’ll find bottlenecks, inefficiencies and profitless flows.  There will be things that you’re doing that you just don’t need to. Be very careful here to consider not only efficiency but effectiveness. 
  • @PatrickMcFadin: #uber is fully replicated and active-active to make sure you never get stranded. #cassandrasummit
  • @FSVO: A monk named Chaitin found an algorithm for expressing the complexity of sutras. His master commented, “This monk could be shorter.”
  • Dotzler: We [Firefox] can learn from the competition [Chrome]. The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM. 
  • @hichaelmart: Although CPU bound calculations [on OpenWhisk] seem about 4x slower than Lambda, so not too bad. Lambda still the winner so far though.
  • Shel Kaphan: Okay, I’m going to be building this website to run a bookstore [Amazon] and I haven’t done that before but it doesn’t sound so hard. When I’m done with that I’m not sure what I’ll do.
  • sixhobbits: "Our logger failed silently" "Shouldn't that have been recorded somewhere?" "I guess it's turtles all the way down"
  • @xmal: Trying to explain that CRDT causal contexts are a natural evolution of TCP sequence numbering and vector clocks in reliable causal broadcast
  • Joi Ito: Just like it is impossible to make another Silicon Valley somewhere else, although everyone tries—after spending four days in Shenzhen, I’m convinced that it’s impossible to reproduce this ecosystem anywhere else.
  • @adriancolyer: "My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones..." Knuth 1974
  • @Excellion: According to legend, if you say Blockchain three times fast, your databases will magically become immutable & your company a fintech leader.
  • bec0: The world has changed. Dennard scaling has mostly been replaced. The economic Moore's Law has morphed. It had too...we have all gotten used to its benefits.
  • @cloud_opinion: 5 stages of Cloud Grief: It's not secure / It's someone's computer / We do private cloud / Hybrid cloud  / Lambda is full of servers anyway
  • @DDD_Borat: "Why you not like framework annotations in your code?" - "Would you put bumper sticker on a Ferrari?" Rofl
  • @robert_winslow: Slow software is your fault. These are the real speed limits: billions of CPU instructions, GBs of RAM access, 100k+ SSD I/Os... per second.
  • Walter Bentley: I am proud to say, OpenStack held up to the torment. Did not experience not one single API request failure throughout my numerous load tests — yet another proof point that OpenStack is ready for enterprise/production use.
  • @xaprb: Let's fork it, say the people who have never put their heart and 5 years of their life into a product only to watch someone else fork it.
  • @adrianco: People asking Docker to slow down is like OpenStack folks asking AWS to standardize and slow down.
  • @amcafee: "In 1974, it was illegal for an airline to charge < $1,442 for a flight between New York City and Los Angeles."
  • Fairly Nerdy: For most real world scenarios, where you are betting against the house which has a house edge, f* becomes negative, which means that you shouldn’t be playing that game.  Truthfully it means that you should take the other side of the wager, become the house, and make them bet against you!
  • Judd Kaiser: Experience shows that good scalability can be achieved on 10 GigE networking provided that you stay above about 50,000 cells per core. That means, for example, that a 20 M cell problem shows good scaling up to about 400 cores; beyond that, interprocess communication latency begins to dominate and scaling degrades.


• Maybe the real reason Uber wants driverless cars is hiring, er...onboarding drivers from across the globe is a really tough problem to solve. Each location has their own processes and that kills scalability. Screening processes and regulations vary, some countries have a very long list of required documents, and onboarding flows vary. Here's the story: How Uber Engineering Massively Scaled Global Driver Onboarding. So you can't use the same app everywhere. The solution was, as it often is, is to go meta and dynamic: the onboarding state machine (OSM)  easily configure a set of steps for each onboarding process in each country, state, city, or any level of granularity we need, coupled with an event system that allows us to easily switch users from one step to another depending on their actions or input. The onboarding API can then easily query the OSM to know at which step in the process a user is.  Clients are now stateless,  responsible only for their UI, 100% of the business logic in the shared back end. They went from Flask to Tornado and a lighter version of their initial JSON schema architecture, where only data is passed to the client, not UI definitions.

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