Sponsored Post: Zohocorp, Exoscale, Host Color, Cassandra Summit, Scalyr, Gusto, LaunchDarkly, Aerospike, VividCortex, MemSQL, AiScaler, InMemory.Net

Who's Hiring?

• IT Security Engineering. At Gusto we are on a mission to create a world where work empowers a better life. As Gusto's IT Security Engineer you'll shape the future of IT security and compliance. We're looking for a strong IT technical lead to manage security audits and write and implement controls. You'll also focus on our employee, network, and endpoint posture. As Gusto's first IT Security Engineer, you will be able to build the security organization with direct impact to protecting PII and ePHI. Read more and apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• High-Scalability Database Beer Bash. Come join Aerospike and like-minded peers on Wednesday, September 7 from 6:30-8:30 PM in San Jose, CA for an informal meet-up of great food and libations. You'll have the chance to learn about Aerospike's high-performance NoSQL database for mission-critical applications, and about the use cases of the companies switching to Aerospike from first-generation NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and Redis. Feel free to invite colleagues and peers! RSVP: bit.ly/DBbeer


• Join database experts from companies like Apple, ING, Instagram, Netflix, and many more to hear about how Apache Cassandra changes how they build, deploy, and scale at Cassandra Summit 2016. This September in San Jose, California is your chance to network, get certified, and trained on the leading NoSQL, distributed database with an exclusive 20% off with  promo code - Academy20. Learn more at CassandraSummit.org

Cool Products and Services

• Do you want a simpler public cloud provider but you still want to put real workloads into production? Exoscale gives you VMs with proper firewalling, DNS, S3-compatible storage, plus a simple UI and straightforward API. With datacenters in Switzerland, you also benefit from strict Swiss privacy laws. From just €5/$6 per month, try us free now.


• High Availability Cloud Servers in Europe: High Availability (HA) is very important on the Cloud. It ensures business continuity and reduces application downtime. High Availability is a standard service on the European Cloud infrastructure of Host Color, active by default for all cloud servers, at no additional cost. It provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against any outage caused by a hardware or an Operating System (OS) failure. The company uses VMware Cloud computing technology to create Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud servers. See Cloud service at Host Color Europe.


• Dev teams are using LaunchDarkly’s Feature Flags as a Service to get unprecedented control over feature launches. LaunchDarkly allows you to cleanly separate code deployment from rollout. We make it super easy to enable functionality for whoever you want, whenever you want. See how it works.


• 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.


• 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


• VividCortex measures your database servers’ work (queries), not just global counters. If you’re not monitoring query performance at a deep level, you’re missing opportunities to boost availability, turbocharge performance, ship better code faster, and ultimately delight more customers. VividCortex is a next-generation SaaS platform that helps you find and eliminate database performance problems at scale.


• MemSQL provides a distributed in-memory database for high value data. It's designed to handle extreme data ingest and store the data for real-time, streaming and historical analysis using SQL. MemSQL also cost effectively supports both application and ad-hoc queries concurrently across all data. Start a free 30 day trial here: http://www.memsql.com/


• aiScaler, aiProtect, aiMobile Application Delivery Controller with integrated Dynamic Site Acceleration, Denial of Service Protection and Mobile Content Management. Also available on Amazon Web Services. Free instant trial, 2 hours of FREE deployment support, no sign-up required. http://aiscaler.com


• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.


• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

If any of these items interest you there's a full description of each sponsor below...

Click to read more ...

How PayPal Scaled to Billions of Transactions Daily Using Just 8VMs

How did Paypal take a billion hits a day system that might traditionally run on a 100s of VMs and shrink it down to run on 8 VMs, stay responsive even at 90% CPU, at transaction densities Paypal has never seen before, with jobs that take 1/10th the time, while reducing costs and allowing for much better organizational growth without growing the compute infrastructure accordingly? 

PayPal moved to an Actor model based on Akka. PayPal told their story here: squbs: A New, Reactive Way for PayPal to Build Applications. They open source squbs and you can find it here: squbs on GitHub.

The stateful service model still doesn't get enough consideration when projects are choosing a way of doing things. To learn more about stateful services there's an article, Making The Case For Building Scalable Stateful Services In The Modern Era, based on an great talk given by Caitie McCaffrey. And if that doesn't convince you here's WhatsApp, who used Erlang, an Akka competitor, to achieve incredible throughput: The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought For $19 Billion.

I refer to the above articles because the PayPal article is short on architectural details. It's more about the factors the led the selection of Akka and the benefits they've achieved by moving to Akka. But it's a very valuable motivating example for doing something different than the status quo. 

What's wrong with services on lots of VMs approach?

Click to read more ...

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 12th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

The big middle finger to the Olympic Committee. They pulled this video of the incredibly beautiful Olympic cauldron at Rio.

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

• 25 years ago: the first website went online; $236M: Pokemon Go revenue in 5 weeks in 3 countriesSeveral thousand: work on Apple maps; 2500 Nimitz Carriers: weight of iPhone if implemented using tube transistors; $50 trillion: cost of iPhone in 1950, economic output of the world in your hand; 1000x: faster phase-change RAM; 15lbs: Americans heavier than 20 years ago; 2 years: for hacking the IRS; 3.6PB: hypothetical storage pod based on 60 TB SSD; 330,000: cash registers hacked; 162%: increased love for electric cars in China; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @carllerche: it is hard to imagine how a node app could get closer to the metal with only 20MM LOC between the app and the hardware.
  • David Heinemeier Hansson (RoR)~ Lots and lots of huge systems that are running the gosh darn Internet are built by remote people operating asynchronously. You don't think that's good enough for your little shop?
  • Cesarini: Some frameworks that try to automate activities end up failing to hide complexity. They limit the trade-offs you can make, so they cater only to a subset of systems, often with very detailed requirements. 
  • "Uncle" Bob Martin: I have lived through 22 orders of magnitude growth of growth in hardware.
  • Jovanovic: To use Bitcoin for real-time trades, we need to eliminate its lazy fork-resolution mechanism and adopt strong consistency, a more proactive approach that guarantees transaction persistence.
  • Pedro Ramalhete: one latency distribution plot is worth a thousand throughput measurements
  • @n1ko_w1ll: Impressive numbers:  - 80% cut code with #scala - responsive at 90% load with #akka Impressive numbers: - 80% cut code with #scala- responsive at 90% load with #akka
  • @samkroon: So Aussie government is asking 20 million ppl to login to one web site on the same night... Fail. Should have gone #serverless. #census2016
  • @caitie: "My contribution to RPC is not to make another system based on RPC" @cmeik #NikeTechTalks
  • @krisajenkins: This is your return type: Int / This is your return type on microservices: IO / (Logger (Either HttpError Int)) Microservices: Know the risks.
  • @nosqlonsql: Latency drives throughput if you cannot achieve enough concurrency. Kafka vs Chronicle. Must read by @PeterLawrey
  • reddit: Today's date is 100/1000/10000 in binary
  • @caitie: "The languages we associate with distributed programming are really concurrent languages" @cmeik #NikeTechTalks
  • @goserverless: Lambda down :( #aws #serverless
  • @pkanavos: @goserverless I think I'll PaaS
  • Jan Wedel: So if you plan to build an application from scratch and it is only meant to be used in on-premise scenarios as described, you probably shouldn't go for a microservice architecture.
  • @bmoesta: Any industry that solely focuses on efficiency innovation is on the verge of death. Disruptive innovations that drive progress drive growth
  • flak: It’s quite likely that your crypto will explode sooner or later, and it’s possible that random numbers will be implicated, but it’s very unlikely that some USB gizmo promising “true random” at kilobits per second will save you. Save your money instead.


• Imagine how much the world has changed in those 25 years. The world's first website went online 25 years ago today. Without the Web the Internet would probably still be a backwater for researchers. The Web was the Internet's killer app. It's hard to imagine Pokemon is Augmented Realities' killer app. AR needs its let the people make it bigger and better technology. Given the balkanization of AR into proprietary silos AR may never have its Web moment. Will there be an HTTP for AR?


• The phrase "small, reprogrammable quantum computer" doesn't sound remotely present-tense, but it is: Shantanu Debnath and colleagues at the University of Maryland reveal their new device can solve three algorithms using quantum effects to perform calculations in a single step, where a normal computer would require several operations. Although the new device consists of just five bits of quantum information (qubits), the team said it had the potential to be scaled up to a larger computer...the key to the new device was a system of laser pulses that drove the quantum logic gates, which operate like the switches and transistors that power ordinary computers.


• Turning programmers into a proper profession, like doctors, is not the way to go. How much do doctors innovate? Very little. Doctors as a profession have been pounded into their current shape by two oppressors: fear of lawsuits and educational debt. Doctors are bound by best practices and oaths to do nothing interesting. What must programmers do constantly? Innovate and do the interesting. By not being a profession we are free to do harm, yes, but we are also able to create. Creation is a better failure mode than ossification. "Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming". Nice gloss by Eric Fleming: Long story short this was really two talks in one. The first speech was about progress in hardware and software from 1945 to 2015. The second talk is about how there is so much growth in the programming field that there are too many young inexperienced people to do it right which necessitates some self regulatory body to bring young professionals into the flock. Ironically the talk his didn't intend to give, the first one is far more interesting than the talk he did give about how to fix the growing inexperience in industry.


• Don't let what happened in Turkey happen to your coup attempt. Learn from experience. Here's your step-by-step guide on How to Overthrow a Government. Presented at, you may be surprised to hear, DefCon. First select from a menu of three overthrow methods: regime change: elections, coups and revolution. Next select a crack insurgency team from a handy wizard interface. Then there's a drop down list of intelligence gathering resources and funding options. After a few more clicks just press Go and you have your revolution (you'll certainly choose revolution, you get so many more points that way).

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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10 Gameday Failure Testing Scenarios from Obama for America

I have dozens if not hundreds of half finished articles and snippets of ideas in the haunted house that is my Google Docs. Walking the house around midnight, with the lights turned off course, I stumbled upon one ghost that has been haunting me since 2012. It is time to perform the ritual of exorcism by just publishing something.

You may or may not remember Obama for America, which in 2012 had a staff of 120 people that built and maintained the infrastructure that helped get out the vote for Obama. 

Harper Reed and Dylan Richard headed up the effort. Around that time they were getting a lot of press. One of the things that interested me was how they held Gameday test events, where they would simulate failure modes in their testing environments. Google calls these DiRT (Disaster Recovery Testing event) exercises. 

So I asked Harper and Dylan what these exercises actually were and they were kind enough to reply. And I apparently forgot all about it. My apologies. Better late than never? Yah, let's go with that.

Here are some of the failure testing scenarios carried out by the Obama for America team:

1. Flush memcache
2. Kill memcache (null route on instances)
3. Kill replicants (we used security groups to deny access)
4. Kill master
5. Kill the backing API (we had a heavy SOA)
6. Put API in read-only (killing master should accomplish this - but this tests client apps explicitly)
7. Kill SQS (we used it heavily, particularly for decoupled systems and fall backs)
8. Emulate an EBS failure (kill all DBs [we used RDS], kill all EBS backed instances)
9. Emulate full east coast failure (we had a 2 stage failover plan to the west coast - fail to a read only mode which we could do easily, and fail over permanently which would only happen in the case of extended east coast AWS unavailability)
10. Emulate human error (claim to have done something [scale up, restart a DB, flush the cache, bounce the wsgi proc, etc] but don't actually do it) 

Now there's one less ghost haunting the halls.

Related Articles

• Learning from First Responders: When Your Systems Have to Work
• AWS Case Study: Obama for America Campaign 2012
• When the Nerds Go Marching In
• “FAILURE WAS NOT AN OPTION.” HARPER REED TALKS ABOUT THE OBAMA 2012 RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN
• Home»October»Harper Reed: Q&A with Obama's Game-Changing Tech Guru 

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 5th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

What does a 107 football field long battery building Gigafactory look like? A lot like a giant Costco. (tour)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

• 60 billion: Facebook messages per day; 3x: Facebook messages compared to global SMS traffic; $15: min wage increases job growth; 85,000: real world QPS for Twitter's search; 2017: when MRAM finally arrives; $60M: Bitcoin heist, bigger than any bank robbery; 710m: Internet users in China; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @cmeik: When @eric_brewer told me that Go was good for building distributed systems, I couldn't help but think about this.
  • David Rosenthal: We can see the end of the era of data and computation abundance. Dealing with an era of constrained resources will be very different.In particular, enthusiasm for blockchain technology as A Solution To Everything will need to be tempered by its voracious demand for energy.
  • Dr Werner Vogels: What we’ve seen is a revolution where complete applications are being stripped of all their servers, and only code is being run. Quite a few companies are ripping out big pieces of their applications and replacing their servers, their VMs and their containers with just code. Perhaps we no longer have to think about servers.
  • @dsb: agree w serverless future - seeing more startups using that model & entirely eliminates most of my infra diligence questions
  • Emin Gün Sirer: It's too early for a coherent story to emerge from the smoldering ashes of the Bitfinex disaster. 
  • @jeremiahdillon: The coming decades will bring population shrinkage not seen since the Black Death. Good for wages, bad for GDP.
  • Nicole Hemsoth: The chatter is going around, once again, that AWS is looking to deliver a private version of its public cloud infrastructure, something that is not as easy to do as it sounds. 
  • Michael Rabin: I must admit that after many years of work in this area, the efficacy of randomness for so many algorithmic problems is absolutely mysterious to me. It is efficient, it works; but why and how is absolutely mysterious. 
  • Algorithms to Live By: that “bubble sort has no apparent redeeming features,” the research of Ackley and his collaborators suggests that there may be a place for algorithms like Bubble Sort after all. Its very inefficiency—moving items only one position at a time—makes it fairly robust against noise, far more robust than faster algorithms like Mergesort, in which each comparison potentially moves an item a long way. Mergesort’s very efficiency makes it brittle
  • JoshGlazebrook: Looks like Hitachi (HGST) is still leading in terms of reliability. 
  • @SeanMcElwee: don't argue with capitalists. seize the means of production.
  • jondubois: What the author describes, I would not call 'protocols' - The Bitcoin network is a hosted implementation of the Bitcoin protocol - It is not the protocol itself. Tokens in the context of the Bitcoin protocol itself have no value - The value is derived from the popularity of the infrastructure, not from the popularity of the protocol.


• Where there is Pokemon there is a way. If you don't make an API someone will. Ingenious third party tracking services are one reason Pokemon Go is slow: The company says these services were making the servers unreliable. Pokémon Go doesn’t have an API, so it seems like Pokévision and others created countless of accounts on many servers around the world using Android emulators. With these emulators, they could fake movements around cities and reverse-engineer the game to create a sort of lightweight API and gather Pokémon data.


• Two years later is appears Facebook creating a separate Messenger app was a good idea. Go figure. This Is The Smartest Thing Facebook Ever Did: In phase one, Facebook grows the user base. “We’re really at the beginning of phase two,” he said, in which the company focuses on growing organic interactions between people and businesses. Once businesses see this is working, the company launches stage three, in which it asks companies to pay up. This strategy has worked well for the company’s other products: Facebook reported $6.44 billion in sales this year, up 59 percent from a year ago. The company’s profits almost tripled to $2.06 billion.


• So you want a system where the guberment has the master key to all encrypted systems? What a great idea! Anyone can now print out all TSA master keys.


• This is from WWI! French gov: "WWI sites will be fully cleared of unexploded ordnance in... 300-900 years." Can you imagine what the the aftermath of the cryptowars will be like? Sorry, don't touch that toaster...it will hack your neural lace and make you do crazy shite. Voting booths are all compromised, back to paper. Don't even think of using your all electric AI controlled car. It's now an IDAID (Improvised Destructive AI Device). Remember all those families that drove themselves over the cliff? So sad. After the fifth iteration of this pattern we'll have to melt it all down and start over again, only this time through only steampunk tech will be allowed.

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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Is build back? The Fall of the General Purpose CPU

There's a meme out there that hardware is dead. Maybe not. Hardware is becoming more specialized as the general purpose CPU can't keep up. The tick-tock cycle created by Moore's law meant designers had a choice: build or buy. Make your own hardware to deep inspect 1gps of network traffic (for example) and release later or use an off-the-shelf CPU and release sooner.

Now in the anarchy of a Moore's lawless it looks like build is back. Jeff Dean is giving a talk at #scaledmlconf where he talks about this trend at Google.

CPU@jackclarkSF: Jeff Dean says Google can run its full Inception' v3 image model on a phone at about 6fps. And specialized ASICs are coming. 

And Mo Patel captured this slide from the talk:

Sponsored Post: Exoscale, Host Color, Cassandra Summit, Scalyr, Gusto, LaunchDarkly, Aerospike, VividCortex, MemSQL, AiScaler, InMemory.Net

Who's Hiring?

• IT Security Engineering. At Gusto we are on a mission to create a world where work empowers a better life. As Gusto's IT Security Engineer you'll shape the future of IT security and compliance. We're looking for a strong IT technical lead to manage security audits and write and implement controls. You'll also focus on our employee, network, and endpoint posture. As Gusto's first IT Security Engineer, you will be able to build the security organization with direct impact to protecting PII and ePHI. Read more and apply here.

Fun and Informative Events

• Join database experts from companies like Apple, ING, Instagram, Netflix, and many more to hear about how Apache Cassandra changes how they build, deploy, and scale at Cassandra Summit 2016. This September in San Jose, California is your chance to network, get certified, and trained on the leading NoSQL, distributed database with an exclusive 20% off with  promo code - Academy20. Learn more at CassandraSummit.org


• NoSQL Databases & Docker Containers: From Development to Deployment. What is Docker and why is it important to Developers, Admins and DevOps when they are using a NoSQL database? Find out in this on-demand webinar by Alvin Richards, VP of Product at Aerospike, the enterprise-grade NoSQL database. The video includes a demo showcasing the core Docker components (Machine, Engine, Swarm and Compose) and integration with Aerospike. See how much simpler Docker can make building and deploying multi-node, Aerospike-based applications!  

Cool Products and Services

• Do you want a simpler public cloud provider but you still want to put real workloads into production? Exoscale gives you VMs with proper firewalling, DNS, S3-compatible storage, plus a simple UI and straightforward API. With datacenters in Switzerland, you also benefit from strict Swiss privacy laws. From just €5/$6 per month, try us free now.


• High Availability Cloud Servers in Europe: High Availability (HA) is very important on the Cloud. It ensures business continuity and reduces application downtime. High Availability is a standard service on the European Cloud infrastructure of Host Color, active by default for all cloud servers, at no additional cost. It provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against any outage caused by a hardware or an Operating System (OS) failure. The company uses VMware Cloud computing technology to create Public, Private & Hybrid Cloud servers. See Cloud service at Host Color Europe.


• Dev teams are using LaunchDarkly’s Feature Flags as a Service to get unprecedented control over feature launches. LaunchDarkly allows you to cleanly separate code deployment from rollout. We make it super easy to enable functionality for whoever you want, whenever you want. See how it works.


• 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.


• 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


• VividCortex measures your database servers’ work (queries), not just global counters. If you’re not monitoring query performance at a deep level, you’re missing opportunities to boost availability, turbocharge performance, ship better code faster, and ultimately delight more customers. VividCortex is a next-generation SaaS platform that helps you find and eliminate database performance problems at scale.


• MemSQL provides a distributed in-memory database for high value data. It's designed to handle extreme data ingest and store the data for real-time, streaming and historical analysis using SQL. MemSQL also cost effectively supports both application and ad-hoc queries concurrently across all data. Start a free 30 day trial here: http://www.memsql.com/


• aiScaler, aiProtect, aiMobile Application Delivery Controller with integrated Dynamic Site Acceleration, Denial of Service Protection and Mobile Content Management. Also available on Amazon Web Services. Free instant trial, 2 hours of FREE deployment support, no sign-up required. http://aiscaler.com


• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.


• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

If any of these items interest you there's a full description of each sponsor below...

Click to read more ...

How to Setup a Highly Available Multi-AZ Cassandra Cluster on AWS EC2

This is a guest post by Alessandro Pieri, Software Architect at Stream. Try out this 5 minute interactive tutorial to learn more about Stream’s API.

Originally built by Facebook in 2009, Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database designed to handle large amounts of data across a large number of servers. At Stream, we use Cassandra as the primary data store for our feeds. Cassandra stands out because it’s able to:

• Shard data automatically

• Handle partial outages without data loss or downtime

• Scales close to linearly

If you’re already using Cassandra, your cluster is likely configured to handle the loss of 1 or 2 nodes. However, what happens when a full availability zone goes down?

In this article you will learn how to setup Cassandra to survive a full availability zone outage. Afterwards, we will analyze how moving from a single to a multi availability zone cluster impacts availability, cost, and performance.

Recap 1: What Are Availability Zones?

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 29th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Facial tats to disrupt big brother surveillance systems may actually work. Our future?

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

• 40.4 million: iPhones sold this quarter;  7: number of times Facebook has avoided the IRS; 104: new exoplanets; 100: new brain regions found; 2x: HTTPS adoption; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @mat: Apple is doomed: "the nearly $8 billion in profits this quarter is more than twice what Facebook made in 2015"
  • Bruce Schneier: The truth is that technology magnifies power in general, but the rates of adoption are different. The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: they can make use of new technologies faster. And when those groups discovered the Internet, suddenly they had power. But when the already powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the Internet for their needs, they had more power to magnify. That’s the difference: the distributed were more nimble and were quicker to make use of their new power, while the institutional were slower but were able to use their power more effectively.
  • @mjasay: What AWS does for AMZN: $2.89B in revenue (up from $1.8B last year), earning 56% of Amazon profits (EPS was $1.78, up from $0.19 last year)
  • @kurtseifried: I wonder how discrete cloud billing can get? Per cpu cycle? bit moved in and out? I suspect yes.
  • Algorithms to Live By: More generally, our intuitions about rationality are too often informed by exploitation rather than exploration. When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision—and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense.
  • Pinterest: As it turns out, it’s damn hard to design consistent and beautiful things at scale. 
  • @obfuscurity: OH: “god i hate having to lie about loving containers all the time”
  • @beaucronin: Leah McGuire: "Metrics are the unit tests of data science"; without them you won't know when things break and you'll be exposed #wrangleconf
  • @tsantero: OH: "Blockchain: a system that allows a bunch of non-CS people to suddenly be distributed computing experts."
  • zeveb: People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.
  • Richard Watson: My take-home [re Pokemon Go]: even the very best can be surprised when the scale hits the fan.
  • @xaibeha: HTTP/2: Because a hundred requests per page load is just a fact of nature.
  • mdatwood: many people have this irrational hate for Java, or they hate the Java from 10 years ago. Todays Java is fast, has tons of mature frameworks, and is probably one of the best tools to use from building a web service back end.
  • @BenedictEvans: Obvious: an iPhone has hundreds of times more compute power than the original Pentium. More important: $50 Androids in rural Africa do too
  • Dark Silicon: infeasible to operate all on-chip components at full performance at the same time due to the thermal constraints (peak temperature, spatial and temporal thermal gradients etc.
  • @Sneakyness: Why do people always assume that companies have scaling issues, and not that they've determined that 85% uptime is enough to make money
  • @cdixon: Alternative headline: "Alphabet invests $859M in long-term projects."
  • @xaprb: We were promised a Utopian vision with the “semantic web,” but it turns out it’s actually Feedly, IFTT, Slack, and Pocket that fulfill it.
  • Amit: Let's drop 10¢ coins and $10 bills and treat them like 50¢ coins, $2 bills, $50 bills — they exist but we don't use them widely.
  • Graham Templeton: One major advantage of life over modern engineering is power efficiency.
  • @neil_conway: @t_crayford @kellabyte >10k threads running native code + user-defined stored procedures in a single address space sounds pretty scary.


• Niantic is looking for a Software Engineer - Server Infrastructure to help make Pokemon go. You think it's easy? Think again: Create the server infrastructure to support our hosted AR/Geo platform underpinning projects such as Pokémon GO using Java and Google Cloud. You will work on real-time indexing, querying and aggregation problems at massive scales of hundreds of millions of events per day, all on a single, coherent world-wide instance shared by millions of users.


• DDos attacks as a reason to bypass the kernel. Why we use the Linux kernel's TCP stack:  During some attacks we are flooded with up to 3M packets per second (pps) per server...With this scale of attack the Linux kernel is not enough for us. We must work around it. We don't use the previously mentioned "full kernel bypass", but instead we run what we call a "partial kernel bypass". With this the kernel retains the ownership of the network card, and allows us to perform a bypass only on a single "RX queue". 


• BTW, I bought nothing on Prime Day. How AWS Powered Amazon’s Biggest Day Ever: This wave of traffic then circled the globe, arriving in Europe and the US over the course of 40 hours and generating 85 billion clickstream log entries. Orders surpassed Prime Day 2015 by more than 60% worldwide and more than 50% in the US alone. On the mobile side, more than one million customers downloaded and used the Amazon Mobile App for the first time.

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 ...

Economics May Drive Serverless

We've been following an increasing ephemerality curve to get more and more utilization out of our big brawny boxes. VMs, VMs in the cloud, containers, containers in the cloud, and now serverless, which looks to be our first native cloud infrastructure.

Serverless is said to be about functions, but you really need a zip file of code to do much of anything useful, which is basically a container.

So serverless isn't so much about packaging as it is about not standing up your own chunky persistent services. Those services, like storage, like the database, etc, have moved to the environment.

Your code orchestrates the dance and implements specific behaviours. Serverless is nothing if not a framework writ large.

Serverless also intensifies the developer friendly disintermediation of infrastructure that the cloud started.

Upload your code and charge it on your credit card. All the developer has to worry about their function. Oh, and linking everything together (events, DNS, credentials, backups, etc) through a Byzantine patch panel of a UI; uploading each of your zillions of "functions" on every change; managing versions so you can separate out test, development, and production. But hey, nothing is perfect.

What may drive serverless more than anything else is economics. From markonen: 

In my book, the innovation in Lambda is, above everything else, about the billing model. My company moved the work of 40 dedicated servers onto Lambda and in doing so decimated our costs. Paying for 1500 cores (our current AWS limit) in 100ms increments has been a game changer.

I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not be there.

There are many more quotes likes this, but that's the jist of it. And as pointed out by others, the pay off depends on some utilization threshold. If you can drive the utilization of your instances to some high level then running your own instances makes economic sense.

For the rest of us taking advantage of the aggregation of a big cloud provider is a winner. Setting up a highly available service on the cloud, dealing with instances and all the other overhead is still a huge PITA. Why deal with all that if you don't have to?

Developers pick winners. Developers follow ease of use. Developers follow the money. So serverless is a winner. You'll just have to get over the name.