Issue #101
Peter Alvaro discusses research, Habits of high functioning teams, Beyond remote, Avoiding micro-services mega-disasters, Evolution of Kubernetes.
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
— Bruce Lee
Posts
How Does the Raft Consensus-Based Replication Protocol Work in YugabyteDB?
This architecture is similar to how sharding and replication work in Google Spanner, Google’s proprietary distributed SQL database. This post gives a deep dive into how YugabyteDB’s Raft usage works in practice and the resulting benefits. - #blog #yugabyte
Uniting SQL and NoSQL for Monitoring: Why PostgreSQL is the ultimate data store for Prometheus
To their credit, the developers of Prometheus foresaw that their product is opinionated, and built in extensibility to allow other systems to improve on it. In turn, Prometheus users often look to other systems as a way to augment their monitoring setup. This is where PostgreSQL comes in. - #medium #timescale
How we reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline by 67%
At Taloflow, we are determined not to be the cobbler whose children went barefoot. We approach our own AWS costs as if we are helping one of our customers. The results are striking and worth sharing. And, with zero upfront or reserved commitments required! - #taloflow #blog
Despite being extremely optimistic about the future of remote work, I find the current narrative around it fairly narrow, overrated and repetitive. There's a lot of focus on where people will live and how wages will change, but not enough on what work will actually look like and how culture needs to adapt to it. - #vimota
Habits of High-Functioning Teams
I’ve been very lucky to have worked directly with dozens, if not hundreds, of developers by this point in my career. I’ve been on some unhealthy teams: teams where people were fearful, and held their cards very close to their chest out of a perceived or real worry around their job security. I’ve also been on dysfunctional teams, where many days or weeks of development time was wasted while the team whiplashed between unclear priorities, or where the cost of coordination had grown so high that no one simply wanted to do it, leaving team as a collective of individuals rather than a unit. But I’ve luckily spent time on some very high-performing teams. When I’ve been on those teams, I was excited to come to work everyday, I wasn’t afraid of disagreeing publicly with those more senior than me, and I felt like my voice and my work had impact.
In this post, I’ll try to document the characteristics and habits of the highest-performing teams I’ve been on. - #deniseyu
Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems. - #untools
Paper
Dapper a large scale distributed tracing infrastructure
The main goal of this paper is to report on our experience building, deploying and using the system for over two years, since Dapper’s foremost measure of success has been its usefulness to developer and operations teams. Dapper began as a self-contained tracing tool but evolved into a monitoring platform which has enabled the creation of many different tools, some of which were not anticipated by its designers. We describe a few of the analysis tools that have been built using Dapper, share statistics about its usage within Google, present some example use cases, and discuss lessons learned so far. - #github
Podcasts
The challenges with distributed systems, how modern messaging technologies can help augment the user experience, the difference between modern messaging technologies and blockchain technology, what developers should be considering while building real-time and streaming apps, etc. - #swimstreams #apple
Distributed Systems Research with Peter Alvaro
Peter Alvaro is a distributed systems researcher who has published papers on a range of subjects, including debugging, failure testing, databases, and programming languages. He works with both academia and industry. Peter joins the show to discuss his research topics and goals. - #softwareengineeringdaily
Videos
Avoiding Microservice Megadisasters - Jimmy Bogard
"Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation" by Will Wilson
The Evolution of Distributed Systems on Kubernetes
Bilgin Ibryam takes us on a journey exploring Kubernetes primitives, design patterns and new workload types. - #infoq