Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 22nd, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

Van Gogh? Nope. A satellite image of phytoplankton populations or algae blooms in the Baltic Sea. (NASA)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 41 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you even more.

• .5 billion: weekly visits to Apple App store; $500m: new US exascale computer; $1.7 billion: EU's newest fine on Google; flat: 2018 global box office; up: digital rentals, sales, and subscriptions to streaming services; 43%: Dutch say let AI run the country; 2 min: time from committing an AWS key to Github to first attack; 40: bugs in blockchain platforms found in 30 days; 100%: Norwegian government 2025 EV target; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @raganwald: You know what would really help restore confidence? Have members of the executive leadership team, and Boeing’s board of directors, fly on 737 Max’s, every day, for a month. Let them dogfood the software patch. I am 💯 serious.
  • skamille: I worry that the cloud is just moving us back to a world of proprietary software. Hell, many of these providers are just providing open source API compatibility with custom-built backends! What happens when no new open source comes out of the smaller companies, and the big-3 decide they don't really need or want to play nice anymore?
  • @adriancolyer: "eRPC (efficient RPC) is a new general-purpose remote procedure call (RPC) library that offers performance comparable to specialized systems, while running on commodity CPUs in traditional datacenter networks based on either lossy Ethernet or lossless fabrics… We port a production grade implementation of Raft state machine replication to eRPC without modifying the core Raft source code. We achieve 5.5 µs of replication latency on lossy Ethernet, which is faster than or comparable to specialized replication systems that use programmable switches, FPGAs, or RDMA."
  • @matthewstoller: I just looked at Netflix’s 10K. The company is burning through cash. $3B this year, $4B next year. Debt skyrocketing. It all looks good when capital is cheap I guess.
  • @BrentToderian: What city went from 14% of all trips by bike in 2001, to 22% by 2012, then leaped to 30% in 3 years by 2015, & 35% by 2018? Thanks to #Ghent, Belgium’s Deputy Mayor @filipwatteeuw for sharing the secrets of their urban biking transformation (with jumps in walking & transit too). 
  • @slobodan_: "It is serverless the same way WiFi is wireless. At some point, the e-mail I send over WiFi will hit a wire, of course"
  • Yep, there are more quotes...

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)...

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Sponsored Post: Software Buyers Council, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr

Who's Hiring? 

• Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• Join Etleap, an Amazon Redshift ETL tool to learn the latest trends in designing a modern analytics infrastructure. Learn what has changed in the analytics landscape and how to avoid the major pitfalls which can hinder your organization from growth. Watch a demo and learn how Etleap can save you on engineering hours and decrease your time to value for your Amazon Redshift analytics projects. Register for the webinar today.


• Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services

• Shape the future of software in your industry. The Software Buyers Council is a panel of engineers and managers who want to share expert knowledge, contribute to improvement of software, and help startups in their industry. Receive occasional invitations to chat with for 30 minutes about your area of expertise and software usage. No obligations, no marketing emails or sales calls. Upcoming topics include infrastructure and application monitoring, AI/ML platforms, and more. Learn more and join today.


• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net

• Build, scale and personalize your news feeds and activity streams with getstream.io. Try the API now in this 5 minute interactive tutorial. Stream is free up to 3 million feed updates so it's easy to get started. Client libraries are available for Node, Ruby, Python, PHP, Go, Java and .NET. Stream is currently also hiring Devops and Python/Go developers in Amsterdam. More than 400 companies rely on Stream for their production feed infrastructure, this includes apps with 30 million users. With your help we'd like to ad a few zeros to that number. Check out the job opening on AngelList.

• Scalyr is a lightning-fast log management and operational data platform.  It's a tool (actually, multiple tools) that your entire team will love.  Get visibility into your production issues without juggling multiple tabs and different services -- all of your logs, server metrics and alerts are in your browser and at your fingertips. .  Loved and used by teams at Codecademy, ReturnPath, Grab, and InsideSales. Learn more today or see why Scalyr is a great alternative to Splunk.


• Advertise your product or service here!

If you are interested in a sponsored post for an event, job, or product, please contact us for more information.

---

Why engineers are joining the Software Buyers Council:

1) Make a big impact. All studies are requested by startup founders who are committed to making big changes based on the feedback they receive.

2) Be heard. Have one-on-one conversations with me, not some market research corporation. Informal conversation about topics that interest you. No judgement, no sales pitch, no cross-examination.

3) Minimal effort and no commitment. Accept, reject, or ignore invitations as you wish. When you accept an invitation, you can choose the date and time, and the chats are only 30 minutes. Nothing to prepare before or after.

4) Help the startup community and your peers. Your input will help software startups (not mega corporations) and your peers who use or might use that software in the future.

Learn more and join today. Upcoming topics include infrastructure and application monitoring, AI/ML platforms, and more.

---

Make Your Job Search O(1) — not O(n)

Triplebyte is unique because they're a team of engineers running their own centralized technical assessment. Companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart now let Triplebyte-recommended engineers skip their own screening steps.

We found that High Scalability readers are about 80% more likely to be in the top bracket of engineering skill.

Take Triplebyte's multiple-choice quiz (system design and coding questions) to see if they can help you scale your career faster.

---

The Solution to Your Operational Diagnostics Woes

Scalyr gives you instant visibility of your production systems, helping you turn chaotic logs and system metrics into actionable data at interactive speeds. Don't be limited by the slow and narrow capabilities of traditional log monitoring tools. View and analyze all your logs and system metrics from multiple sources in one place. Get enterprise-grade functionality with sane pricing and insane performance. Learn more today. 

---

If you are interested in a sponsored post for an event, job, or product, please contact us for more information.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 15th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

The web is 30! Some say it's not the web we wanted. But if we got that web, would it have ever grown so big? Worse usually is better.

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 40 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you even more.

• 300%: AWS IoT growth per year; 74%: mobile games user spending in the App store; 31.4 trillion: new record for calculating digits of pi (121 days); 112Gbps: Intel's SerDes; 100M: image and video dataset; 1.5 trillion suns: weight of the Milky Way; 300+: backdoored apps on GitHub; 10%: hacked self-driving cars needed to bring traffic to a halt; $3 million: Marriott data breach cost after insurance; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • @kelseyhightower: Platform in a box solutions that are attempting to turn Kubernetes into a PaaS are missing the "as a service" part. It's more like PaaR: Platform as a Responsibility. Your responsibility to purchase, staff, patch, scale, and upgrade.
  • DHH: We’re stopping all major product development at Basecamp for the moment, and dedicating all our attention to fixing these single points of failure that the recent cloud outages have revealed. We’re also going to pull back from our big migration to the cloud for a while, until we’re able to comfortably commit to a multi-region, multi-provider setup that’s more resilient against these outages...We were using Google Cloud Storage, but given too many issues big and small over the year, we’ll be migrating to AWS S3 for storage going forward.
  • Daniel Ek: after careful consideration, Spotify has filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission (EC), the regulatory body responsible for keeping competition fair and nondiscriminatory. In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience—essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers. After trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple, we’re now requesting that the EC take action to ensure fair competition.
  • Many more quotes await your reading pleasure...

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)...

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 8th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

A highly simplified diagram of serverless. (@jbesw)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 40 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you even more.

• 5%: France's new digital tax revolution; $15 trillion: AI contribution to global GDP by 2030; 70%: better response time using HTTP keep-alive in lambda; 115 million: Akamai found bots (per day) compromising user accounts by credential stuffing; 83%: of all internet traffic is API calls, not HTML; $1 million: first millionaire bug-bounty hacker is 19 years old; 15%: mooch their Netflix account; 5%: Microsoft's app store take; $15: Tensorflow at the edge; 30%: first quarter drop in DRAM prices; $2 billion: IBM's microkernel folly; ~1TWh: lithium-ion batteries production per year by 2030; 25%: Tesla supercharger time improvement by a software update; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • Jeff Bezos: I've witnessed this incredible thing happen on the internet over the last two decades. I started Amazon in my garage 24 years ago — drove packages to the post office myself. Today we have 600,000-plus people, millions and millions of customers, a very large company. How did that happen in such a short period of time? It happened because we didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting. All of the heavy-lifting infrastructure was already in place for it. There was already a telecommunication network, which became the backbone of the internet. There was already a payment system — it was called the credit card. There was already a transportation network called the US Postal Service, and Royal Mail, and Deutsche Post, all over the world, that could deliver our packages. We didn't have to build any of that heavy infrastructure. An even more stark example is Facebook. Here's a guy who literally, in his dorm room, started a company — Mark Zuckerberg started a company in his dorm room, which is now worth half a trillion dollars — less than two decades ago.
  • @paul_snively: You say "convention over configuration;" I hear "ambient information stuck in someone's head." You say "configuration over hardcoding;" I hear "information in a different language that must be parsed, can be malformed, or not exist."
  • So many more quotes...

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)...

Click to read more ...

Sponsored Post: Software Buyers Council, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr

Who's Hiring? 

• Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• Join Etleap, an Amazon Redshift ETL tool to learn the latest trends in designing a modern analytics infrastructure. Learn what has changed in the analytics landscape and how to avoid the major pitfalls which can hinder your organization from growth. Watch a demo and learn how Etleap can save you on engineering hours and decrease your time to value for your Amazon Redshift analytics projects. Register for the webinar today.


• Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services

• Shape the future of software in your industry. The Software Buyers Council is a panel of engineers and managers who want to share expert knowledge, contribute to improvement of software, and help startups in their industry. Receive occasional invitations to chat with for 30 minutes about your area of expertise and software usage. No obligations, no marketing emails or sales calls. Upcoming topics include infrastructure and application monitoring, AI/ML platforms, and more. Learn more and join today.


• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net

• Build, scale and personalize your news feeds and activity streams with getstream.io. Try the API now in this 5 minute interactive tutorial. Stream is free up to 3 million feed updates so it's easy to get started. Client libraries are available for Node, Ruby, Python, PHP, Go, Java and .NET. Stream is currently also hiring Devops and Python/Go developers in Amsterdam. More than 400 companies rely on Stream for their production feed infrastructure, this includes apps with 30 million users. With your help we'd like to ad a few zeros to that number. Check out the job opening on AngelList.

• Scalyr is a lightning-fast log management and operational data platform.  It's a tool (actually, multiple tools) that your entire team will love.  Get visibility into your production issues without juggling multiple tabs and different services -- all of your logs, server metrics and alerts are in your browser and at your fingertips. .  Loved and used by teams at Codecademy, ReturnPath, Grab, and InsideSales. Learn more today or see why Scalyr is a great alternative to Splunk.


• Advertise your product or service here!

If you are interested in a sponsored post for an event, job, or product, please contact us for more information.

---

Why engineers are joining the Software Buyers Council:

1) Make a big impact. All studies are requested by startup founders who are committed to making big changes based on the feedback they receive.

2) Be heard. Have one-on-one conversations with me, not some market research corporation. Informal conversation about topics that interest you. No judgement, no sales pitch, no cross-examination.

3) Minimal effort and no commitment. Accept, reject, or ignore invitations as you wish. When you accept an invitation, you can choose the date and time, and the chats are only 30 minutes. Nothing to prepare before or after.

4) Help the startup community and your peers. Your input will help software startups (not mega corporations) and your peers who use or might use that software in the future.

Learn more and join today. Upcoming topics include infrastructure and application monitoring, AI/ML platforms, and more.

---

Make Your Job Search O(1) — not O(n)

Triplebyte is unique because they're a team of engineers running their own centralized technical assessment. Companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart now let Triplebyte-recommended engineers skip their own screening steps.

We found that High Scalability readers are about 80% more likely to be in the top bracket of engineering skill.

Take Triplebyte's multiple-choice quiz (system design and coding questions) to see if they can help you scale your career faster.

---

The Solution to Your Operational Diagnostics Woes

Scalyr gives you instant visibility of your production systems, helping you turn chaotic logs and system metrics into actionable data at interactive speeds. Don't be limited by the slow and narrow capabilities of traditional log monitoring tools. View and analyze all your logs and system metrics from multiple sources in one place. Get enterprise-grade functionality with sane pricing and insane performance. Learn more today. 

---

If you are interested in a sponsored post for an event, job, or product, please contact us for more information.

How is software developed at Amazon?

How is software developed at Amazon? Get a couple of prime pizzas delivered and watch this excellent interview with Ken Exner, GM of AWS Developer Tools. It's notable Ken is from the tools group because progress in an industry is almost always made possible by the development of better tools.

The key themes from the talk: decomposition, automation, and organize around the customer.

The key idea:

Scaling is by mitosis. Teams split apart into smaller teams that completely own a service. EC2 started as one two pizza team. 

This quote nicely embodies all three of the themes and is the key reason AWS keeps on winning the public cloud. Bottom up, Amazon adaptively grows their entire organization in response to customer inputs. 

If you want an example of how a complex AWS feature was developed from customer input then take a listen to Heavy Networking 433: An Insider’s Guide To AWS Transit Gateways. The AWS Transit Gateway was developed because customers asked for it...and AWS listened.

AWS is eating the world because customers keep on asking for a bigger menu.

And here's a short gloss of the talk...

Click to read more ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 1st, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

10 years of AWS architecture increasing simplicity or increasing complexity? (Michael Wittig)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 39 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you forever.

• 1.3 billion: npm package downloads per day; 20: honeybee communication signals used to coordinate thousands of workers; 71: average global life expectancy; 120K: max inflight SQS messages; 80%: shared code between iOS, Android, the web; 1 TB: microSD card; 20%: increase in value wind energy using ML; 64%: respondents cite optimizing cloud spend as the topvinitiative; 250: drones augmenting small military units; 35,880: record robots shipped to North American companies; 50K: aerial photos of the UK; 119%: increase in demand for AI talent; 18TB: MAMR hard drive; $20 million: Pinterest paid more than expected for AWS; 100,000: MySQL connections; 19%: all requests come from Bots, APIs, and search engine crawlers; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @evazhengll: A surgeon in #China performed world’s 1st remote operation using '#5G Surgery' on animal, removing its liver, through controlling robotic arms in a location 30 miles away. It was made possible by using a low latency of 0.1 seconds, the lower the latency, the more responsive the robot
  • @AWSonAir: .@McDonalds uses Amazon ECS to scale to support 20,000 orders per second. #AWSSummit
  • @antoniogm: Know why the European startup scene sucks? Because American startups have a huge, high-GDP, early-adopter market from day one, and they internationalize AFTER scaling. Euros have to internationalize IN ORDER TO scale, and most die in the process. GDPR makes this *worse*.
  • Ivan Ivanitskiy: Even though blockchain does not allow for modification of data, it cannot ensure such data is correct.
  • @kelseyhightower: Kubernetes is for people building platforms. If you are a developer building your own platform (AppEngine, Cloud Foundry, or Heroku clone), then Kubernetes is for you.
  • @adrianco: I think the main thing cloud native apps do that datacenter apps don’t do is scale elastically (even down to zero in some cases) and maintain high utilization, so you stop paying when you stop using the resource.
  • @kellabyte: Also almost every mention of SEDA  is incorrect IMO. If you read the paper the goal of the paper was to dynamically adjust CPU resources by *CHAINED* queues where thread pools can move threads between stages so that stages who needed more compute time got more threads.
  • So much more...

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)...

Click to read more ...

Give Meaning to 100 Billion Events a Day — The Shift to Redshift

This is a guest post by Alban Perillat-Merceroz, from the Analytics team at Teads.

In part one, we described our Analytics data ingestion pipeline, with BigQuery sitting as our data warehouse. However, having our analytics events in BigQuery is not enough. Most importantly, data needs to be served to our end-users.

TL;DR — Teads Analytics big picture

In this article, we will detail:

• Why we chose Redshift to store our data marts,
• How it fits into our serving layer,
• Key learnings and optimization tips to make the most out of it,
• Orchestration workflows,
• How our data visualization apps (Chartio, web apps) benefit from this data.

Data is in BigQuery, now what?

Click to read more ...

Design Of A Modern Cache—Part Deux

This is a guest post by Benjamin Manes, who did engineery things for Google and is now doing engineery things as CTO of Vector.

The previous article described the caching algorithms used by Caffeine, in particular the eviction and concurrency models. Since then we’ve made improvements to the eviction algorithm and explored a new approach towards expiration.

Eviction Policy

Window TinyLFU (W-TinyLFU) splits the policy into three parts: an admission window, a frequency filter, and the main region. By using a compact popularity sketch, the historic frequencies are cheap to retain and lookup. This allows for quickly discarding new arrivals that are unlikely to be used again, guarding the main region from cache pollution. The admission window provides a small region for recency bursts to avoid consecutive misses when an item is building up its popularity.

This structure works surprisingly well for many important workloads like database, search, and analytics. These cases are frequency-biased where a small admission window is desirable to filter aggressively...

Click to read more ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 22nd, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

Isn't inetd a better comp? (link)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 39 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you forever.

• 2%: of sales spent by consumer packaged goods companies on R&D (14% for tech); 272 million: metric tons of plastic are produced each year around the globe; 100+ fps: Google's Edge TPU; 6,000: bugs per million lines of code; 2.2 GB/sec: SIMD JSON parser; 20-30%: fall in DRAM prices; 8x: Russian hackers faster than North Korean hackers; 50%: EV car sales in China by 2025;


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • @davygreenberg: If I do a job in 30 minutes it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.
  • @PaulDJohnston: Lambda done badly is still better than Kubernetes done well
  • Ross Mcilroy: we now believe that speculative vulnerabilities on today's hardware defeat all language-enforced confidentiality with no known comprehensive software mitigations, as we have discovered that untrusted code can construct a universal read gadget to read all memory in the same address space through side-channels. In the face of this reality, we have shifted the security model of the Chrome web browser and V8 to process isolation.
  • @ben11kehoe: Statelessness is not the critical property of #serverless compute, it's ephemerality. Being positively limited in duration means the provider can *transparently* manage the platform, no scheduled (or unscheduled, in Fargate's case) downtime needed.
  • The over under on the remaining number of quotes is 15.
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)...

Click to read more ...