Issue #128
Elon musk talks about twitter, When dropbox unplugged a datacenter, What is entropy?, Practising programming, what does designing for google means.
Getting cheated occasionally is the small price for trusting the best of everyone, because when you trust the best in others, they generally treat you best.
— Kevin Kelly
I got delayed to publish this issue today, the reason is, I was migrating my domains to Route53 last night and guess what? I goofed up something which stopped emails on one of the domains. I was fixing it. 🥺
Post
That time we unplugged a data center to test our disaster readiness
Finally, at 5:00 pm PT, the time came to pull the plug at each facility, one by one, until all three were offline. Much like our second DFW test, we saw no impact to global availability—and ultimately reached our goal of a 30 minute SJC blackhole!
Yeah, we know, this probably sounds a bit anti-climactic. But that’s exactly the point! Our detail-oriented approach to preparing for this event is why the big day went so smoothly. - #KrishelleHardson-Hurley #RossDelinger #TongPham
We Need Someone Who Has Done "It" Before
Either the new hire tries to apply a playbook that is not a good fit for the current context. No one really gave them the lay of the land, and they were rushed into executing.
They inevitably fail.
Or, the new hire identifies the complexity in the situation, maps it to their speciality, but proposes a way forward that doesn’t match expectations. Leader: “Wait, I didn’t know things were that broken” or “this isn’t actually what we hired you to fix!” - #JohnCutler
It Took Me 10 Years to Understand Entropy, Here is What I Learned
You are probably already somewhat familliar with the notions of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. These are key concepts in thermodynamics classes, but entropy is a notion that we all struggled with at some points in our studies. Like my statistical physics teacher used to say:
There are only 4 or 5 persons in this world that truly understand entropy, and I don’t belong to them.
— Nicolas Sator
- #AurelienPelissier
103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
Today is my birthday. I turn 70. I’ve learned a few things so far that might be helpful to others. For the past few years, I’ve jotted down bits of unsolicited advice each year and much to my surprise I have more to add this year. So here is my birthday gift to you all: 103 bits of wisdom I wish I had known when I was young. - #KevinKelly
How I put my whole life into a single database
Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 2.5 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather. - #FelixKrause
Design For Scale and High Availability – What Does 100 Million Users On A Google Service Mean?
Imagine a simple service with an API server and a database.
Now when this service is owned by Google, the traffic is expected to be in the scale of 100 million users. That means:
10 billion requests/day
100k requests/second (average)
200k requests/second (peak)
2 million disk seeks per second (IOPS)
How are these served? - #ShivangSarawagi
Dynamic Data Race Detection in Go Code
A data race occurs in Go when two or more goroutines access the same memory location, at least one of them is a write, and there is no ordering between them, as defined by the Go memory model. Outages caused by data races in Go programs are a recurring and painful problem in our microservices. - #MuraliKrishnaRamanathan #MilindChabbi
This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber - #WillLarson
What was not obvious early on was why we were seeing so much database load on this keyspace and how we might get to a normal serving state. Our response to this incident involved a number of responders who were subject-matter experts in various aspects of Slack’s infrastructure. Some responders began to work on investigating the reasons for the unusual load pattern that we were seeing, while others began to work on mitigations. - #LauraNolan
When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment's thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What's less obvious is that they have to continue spending considerable amounts of time simply to maintain that technique, let alone expand it. - #LaurenceTratt
Video
Talk of the internet town - Elon Musk