Issue #85
Curated list of blogs, videos, papers, podcasts on programming and distributed systems.
"It Doesn’t Matter Where You Came From. All That Matters Is Where You Are Going."
— Brian Tracy
Posts
Internals of Google Cloud Spanner
Due to some maintenance they reshard the MySQL Clusters. This process took 2 years to complete. Google understood that they are growing very fast and these kinds of databases will be a pain in future. That is how the Spanner was born. - #thedataguy
Scaling to 100k Users
This is an attempt to distill the basics around that formula into writing. We’re going to take our new photo sharing website, Graminsta, from 1 to 100k users. - #alexpareto
Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
Visual Studio can be one of the programmer's best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio's insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our programming intelligence rather than augmenting it? - #charlespetzold
Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust
Most recently, we drastically improved the performance of a service by switching its implementation from Go to Rust. This post explains why it made sense for us to reimplement the service, how it was done, and the resulting performance improvements. - #blog #discordapp
Apache Kafka with Kubernetes — Provision and Performance
Kafka is a stateful service, and this makes managing Kafka on Kubernetes more complex than it is for stateless microservices. The biggest challenge comes when configuring persistent volumes, which needs to deliver high throughput at consistent low latency. - #medium #swlh
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
Students spend hundreds of hours using these tools over the course of their education (and thousands over their career), so it makes sense to make the experience as fluid and frictionless as possible. Mastering these tools not only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem impossibly complex. - #csail #mit
The Definitive Guide to Docker Swarm
Everything you need to know about Docker Swarm and how to use it to scale and securely maintain your Docker projects - #medium
How Twitter Improves Resource Usage with a Deterministic Load Balancing Algorithm
Finagle embeds a client-side load balancer in every client. Instead of making calls to a central server-side load balancer, all requests go straight to a destination server, without an intermediary. - #infoq
Under the Hood of Uber’s Experimentation Platform
There are over 1,000 experiments running on our platform at any given time. For example, before Uber launched our new driver app, completely redesigned with our driver-partners in mind, it went through extensive hypothesis testings through a series of experiments conducted with our XP. - #eng #uber
Paper
Gandalf: An Intelligent, End-To-End Analytics Service for Safe Deployment in Cloud-Scale Infrastructure
By using a lambda architecture, Gandalf provides both realtime and long-term deployment monitoring with automated decisions and notifications. Gandalf has been running in production in Microsoft Azure for more than 18 months, serving both data-plane and control-plane components. It achieves 92.4% precision and 100% recall (no high-impact service outages in Azure Compute were caused by bad rollouts) for dataplane rollouts. For control-plane rollouts, Gandalf achieves 94.9% precision and 99.8% recall. - #usenix
Podcast
Presto with Justin Borgman
Justin Borgman joins the show to discuss the motivation for Presto, the problems it solves, and the architecture of Presto. He also talks about the company he started, Starburst Data, which sells and supports technologies built around Presto. - #softwareengineeringdaily