Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 2.5 billion+: smartphones on earth; $36,000: loss making a VR game; $1 million: spent playing Game of War; 2000 terabytes: saved downloading Font Awesome's fonts per day; 14TB: new hard drives; 19: Systems We Love talks; 4,600Mbps: new 802.11ad Wi-Fi standard; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Thomas Friedman: [John] Doerr immediately volunteered to start a fund that would support creation of applications for this device by third-party developers, but Jobs wasn’t interested at the time. He didn’t want outsiders messing with his elegant phone.
  • Fastly: For every problem in computer networking there is a closed-box solution that offers the correct abstraction at the wrong cost. 
  • ben stopford: The Data Dichotomy. Data systems are about exposing data. Services are about hiding it.
  • Ernie: just as Amazon invaded the CDN ecosystem with CloudFront and S3, CDNs are going to invade the cloud compute space of AWS.
  • The Attention Merchants: When not chronicling death in its many forms, Bennett loved to gain attention for his paper by hurling insults and starting fights. Once he managed in a single issue to insult seven rival papers and their editors. He was perhaps the media’s first bona fide “troll.” As with contemporary trolls, Bennett’s insults were not clever.
  • @swardley: "Serving 2.1 million API requests for $11" not bad at all. My company site used to cost £19 pcm
  • hibikir: I don't know about Uber, but I've worked at a lot of places that had sensitive data. A common patterns is to fail to treat employees like attackers, and protect data in ways that are very beatable by a motivated employee. 
  • @davecheney: OH: lambdas are stored procedures for millenials.
  • @jamesurquhart: This. Containers will play a huge role in low-level service deployments, but not user facing (e.g. “consumer”) app deployments (5-7 years).
  • theptip: Geo-redundancy seems like a luxury, until your entire site comes down due to a datacenter-level outage. (E.g. the power goes down, or someone cuts the internet lines when doing construction work on the street outside).
  • Resilience Thinking: The ruling paradigm-that we can optimize components of a system in isolation of the rest of the system-is proving inadequate to deal with the dynamic complexity of the real world.
  • Eliezer Steinbock: Disconnect users when they’ve just left their tab open. It’s so simple to do and saves precious resources
  • @ieatkillerbees: In 20 years of engineering I've never said, "thank goodness we hired someone who can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard while strangers watch"
  • Rushkoff: I think as people realize they can’t get jobs in this highly centralized digital economy, as companies realize that it might be better to beat them than join them, I think we will see the retrieval of some of these earlier networking values.
  • Darren Cibis: I think BigQuery is the better product at this stage, however, it’s had a big head start over Athena which has a lot of catching up to do.
  • Fastly: Over the span of a day, IoT devices were probed for vulnerabilities 800 times per hour by attackers from across the globe.
  • Quantum Gravity Research Could Unearth the True Nature of Time: somehow, you can emerge time from timeless degrees of freedom using entanglement.
  • @SystemsWeLove: "You can think of the OS as the bouncer at Club CPU: if a VIP comes in and buys up the place, you're out." -- @arunthomas #systemswelove
  • Erik Darling: When starting to index temp tables, I usually start with a clustered index, and potentially add nonclustered indexes later if performance isn’t where I want it to be.
  • Customers Don’t Give a Shit About Your Data Centers: My youngest daughter co-developed an Alexa skill called PotterHead. By taking advantage of the templates and how-to instructions, the skill was designed, developed, tested, and deployed within 24 hours — without a data center or any knowledge of ansible, git, jenkins, chef, or kubernetes.


• In summary: mobile is [still] eating the world, everything is changing, nobody knows where it will all end up. And people are scared. Interesting observation on the new scale: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google are 10x bigger than Microsoft & Intel when they were changing the world. 


• Bigger is not always better when it comes to datacenters. AWS re:Invent 2016: Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton. Amazon could easily build 200 megawatt (MW) facilities, yet they choose to build mostly 32MW facilities. Why? The data tells them to. What does the data say? The law of diminishing returns. The cost savings don't justify having a larger failure domain. When you start small and scale up a datacenter you get really big gains in cost advantage. As you get bigger and bigger it's a logarithm. The gains of going bigger are relatively small. The negative gain of a big datacenter is linear. If you have a 32MW datacenter tha's about 80k servers it's bad if it goes down, but it can be handled so that it's unnoticeable. If a datacenter with 500K server goes down the amount of network traffic needed to heal all the problems is difficult to handle.

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)...