Getting Started with Lyft Envoy for Microservices Resilience

This is a guest repost by Flynn at datawireio on Envoy, a Layer 7 communications bus, used throughout Lyft's service-oriented architecture.

Using microservices to solve real-world problems always involves more than simply writing the code. You need to test your services. You need to figure out how to do continuous deployment. You need to work out clean, elegant, resilient ways for them to talk to each other.

A really interesting tool that can help with the “talk to each other” bit is Lyft’s Envoy: “an open source edge and service proxy, from the developers at Lyft.” (If you’re interested in more details about Envoy, Matt Klein gave a great talk at the 2017 Microservices Practitioner Summit.)

Envoy Overview

It might feel odd to see us call out something that identifies itself as a proxy – after all, there are a ton of proxies out there, and the 800-pound gorillas are NGINX and HAProxy, right? Here’s some of what’s interesting about Envoy:

• It can proxy any TCP protocol.
• It can do SSL. Either direction.
• It makes HTTP/2 a first class citizen, and can translate between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 (either direction).
• It has good flexibility around discovery and Continue reading

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Business Case for Serverless

You can’t pick a technical direction without considering the business implications. Mat Ellis, Founder/CEO of Cloudability, in a recent CloudCast episode, makes the business case for Serverless. The argument goes something like:

• Enterprises know they can’t run services cheaper than Amazon. Even if the cost is 2x the extra agility of the cloud is often worth the multiple.

• So enterprises are moving to the cloud.

• Moving to the cloud is a move to services. How do you build services now? Using Serverless.

• With services businesses use a familiar cost per unit billing model, they can think of paying for services as a cost per database query, cost per terabyte of data, and so on.

• Since employees are no longer managing boxes and infrastructure they can now focus entirely on business goals.

• There’s now an opportunity to change business models. Serverless will make new businesses economically viable because they can do things they could never do before based on price and capabilities.

• Serverless makes it faster to iterate and deploy new code which makes it faster to find a proper product/market fit.

• Smaller teams with smaller budgets with smaller revenues can do things now that only big companies could do Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 24th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 40 TFLOPS: on Lambda; 7: new habitable planets with good beer; dozens: balloons needed in Loon network; 500 TB/sec: rate at which DNA is copied in human body; 1/2: web is encrypted; 34: regions in Azure; $8k: cost of Tesla self-driving hardware; 99.95%: DMCA takedowns are bot BS; 300 nanometers: new microscope; 7%: AMP traffic to publishers; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @jasonlk: Elon Musk: Self-Driving Car Revolution Will Leave 15% of World Population Without Jobs
  • Near death Archimedes: Stand away, fellow, from my diagram!
  • rumpelstilskin21: Angular and React make for popular headlines on reddit but unless you are working for a major, large web site where such things might be deemed useful by management (and no one else) then quit trying to get educated by the amateurs on reddit.
  • StorageMojo: There is a new paradigm about to hit the industry, which will eviscerate large portions of Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 17th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 1 cubic millimeter: computer with deep-Learning; 1,600: data on nearby stars; 40M: users for largest Parse app; 58x: Tensorflow 1.0 speedup on 64 gpus; 46%: ecommerce controlled by Amazon; 60%: IT growth in public cloud; 200 TB: one tv episode; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @krishnan: Serverless will not be around in 5 years. It will be AI coding AI coding Ai....... Serverless or not doesn't matter #RunForrestRun
  • user5994461: Amazon: Create usual services and sell them. Google: Make unique products that push the boundaries of what was previously thought possible. Amazon: Don't care about inefficiencies and usage. Inefficiencies can be handled by charging more to the clients, usage doesn't matter because the users are mostly the clients and they don't feel their pain. Google: Had to make all their core technologies efficient, performant, scalable and maintainable or they couldn't sustain their business.
  • Hans Rosling: To me, the impressive thing is that people succeed at all.
  • @littleidea: Google Spanner didn't beat CAP, just mitigated the hell Continue reading

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Part 3 of Thinking Serverless —  Dealing with Data and Workflow Issues

This is a guest repost by Ken Fromm, a 3x tech co-founder — Vivid Studios, Loomia, and Iron.io. Here's Part 1 and 2. 

This post is the third of a four-part series of that will dive into developing applications in a serverless way. These insights are derived from several years working with hundreds of developers while they built and operated serverless applications and functions.

The platform was the serverless platform from Iron.io but these lessons can also apply to AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and IBM’s OpenWhisk project.

Serverless Processing — Data Diagram

Thinking Serverless! The Data

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 10th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• Half a trillion: Apple’s cash machine; 4,000-5,000: collected data points per adult in US; 10 million: gallons of gas UPS saves turning right; 2.27: Tesla 0-60 time; 40: complex steps to phone security; $2.3 billion: VR/AR investment in 2016; 18%: small players make up public cloud services market; 500°C: first chip to survive on Venus; 5 billion: ever notes; 375,000: images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in public domain; 18 million: queries per minute against Facebook's Beringei database; 159: jobs per immigrant founder; 2.5 miles: whales breach for stronger signal; 10,000x: computers faster in 2035; 


• Quotable Quotes: 
  • @martin_casado: Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%
  • Jure Leskovec: It’s [trolling] a spiral of negativity. Just one person waking up cranky can create a spark and, because of discussion context and voting, these sparks can spiral out into cascades of bad behavior. Bad conversations lead to bad conversations. People who get Continue reading

In-memory noSQL DBMS Client in Big Data Cluster

This is guest post by Sergei Sheinin, creator of the 2DX Web UI Database Cluster Framework, a low latency big data cluster with in-memory noSQL DBMS Web Browser client.

When I began working in the field of data management the disconnect between rigid structure of relational database tables and free form of documents managed by end users and their businesses stood out as a technical and managerial hurdle. On the one hand there were strict definitions of normalized relational database models and unstructured document formats on the other. Often the users in charge of changing document structures held organizational responsibilities far removed from database modeling or programming. On one occasion I was involved in a project where call center operators made on the fly decisions to update a document structure based on phone conversations with customers. Such updates had to be streamed into a relational back-end creating havoc in database structure and build of table columns.

In seeking a permanent solution I researched merits of Entity-Attribute-Value database schema and its applications. This technique proved successful in enabling front end users to modify relational-bound documents through performing updates to structure described in their metadata. However application of EAV raised Continue reading

Part 2 of Thinking Serverless —  Platform Level Issues 

This is a guest repost by Ken Fromm, a 3x tech co-founder — Vivid Studios, Loomia, and Iron.io. Here's Part 1.

Job processing at scale at high concurrency across a distributed infrastructure is a complicated feat. There are many components involvement — servers and controllers to process and monitor jobs, controllers to autoscale and manage servers, controllers to distribute jobs across the set of servers, queues to buffer jobs, and whole host of other components to ensure jobs complete and/or are retried, and other critical tasks that help maintain high service levels. This section peels back the layers a bit to provide insight into important aspects within the workings of a serverless platform.

Throughput

Throughput has always been the coin of the realm in computer processing — how quickly can events, requests, and workloads be processed. In the context of a serverless architecture, I’ll break throughput down further when discussing both latency and concurrency. At the base level, however, a serverless architecture does provide a more beneficial architecture than legacy applications and large web apps when it comes to throughput because it provide for far better resource utilization.

In a post by Travis Reeder on What is Serverless Computing and Why is Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 3rd, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 100 billion: words needed to train large networks; 73,653: hard drives at Backblaze; 300 GB hour: raw 4k footage; 1993: server running without rebooting; 64%: of money bet is on the Patriots; 950,000: insect species; 374,000: people employed by solar energy; 10: SpaceX launched Iridium Next satellites; $1 billion: Pokémon Go revenue; 1.2 Billion: daily active Facebook users; $7.17 billion: Apple service revenue; 45%: invest in private cloud this year; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • @kevinmarks: #msvsummit @varungyan: Google's scale is about 10^10 RPCs per second in our microservices
  • language: "Order and chaos are not a properties of things, but relations of an observer to something observed - the ability for an observer to distinguish or specify pattern."
  • general_ai: Doing anything large on a machine without CUDA is a fool's errand these days. Get a GTX1080 or if you're not budget constrained, get a Pascal-based Titan. I work in this field, and I would not be able to do Continue reading

Performance, Scalability, and High Availability: 3 Key Infrastructure Adaptability Requirements

This is a guest post by Tony Branson. 

Performance, scalability, and HA are often used interchangeably, and any confusion about them can result in unrealistic metrics and deployment delays. It is important to invest your time and understand the differences among these three approaches before you invest your money in resilient systems.

Performance

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Part 1 of Thinking Serverless — How New Approaches Address Modern Data Processing Needs 

This is a guest repost by Ken Fromm, a 3x tech co-founder — Vivid Studios, Loomia, and Iron.io.

First I should mention that of course there are servers involved. I’m just using the term that popularly describes an approach and a set of technologies that abstracts job processing and scheduling from having to manage servers. In a post written for ReadWrite back in 2012 on the future of software and applications, I described “serverless” as the following.

The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It simply means that developers no longer have to think that much about them. Computing resources get used as services without having to manage around physical capacities or limits. Service providers increasingly take on the responsibility of managing servers, data stores and other infrastructure resources…Going serverless lets developers shift their focus from the server level to the task level. Serverless solutions let developers focus on what their application or system needs to do by taking away the complexity of the backend infrastructure.

At the time of that post, the term “serverless” was not all that well received, as evidenced by the comments on Hacker News. With the introduction of a number Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 27th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 1+ trillion: messages Twitter handles per day; 695 million: Internet users in China; >350k: Twitter Star Wars bots; $90 million: value of LasVegas.com domain name; 45%: WiFi connection failure rate; 80: threads in Slack Mac OS app; 364: slides in Adrian Cockcroft's microservices deck; 5180%: increases at Etsy in daily visits to pages related to Donald Trump; 465,000: cars sold by Costco last year; 14 Million: one day of DuckDuckGo searches; 58 million: science papers online; ~3x: use of Kubernetes in production settings; 54: r3.2xlarge instances used for Reddit caching; $14 billion: Microsoft’s Azure's annual run rate; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Carlo Rovelli: the basic ingredient is down there in the physical world: physical correlation between distinct variables. The physical world is not a set of self-absorbed entities that do their selfish things. It is a tightly knitted net of relative information, where everybody’s state reflects somebody else’s state. 
  • Charles Stross: Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 20th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 900 GB: data stolen in Cellebrite hack; 99.24%: users identified by cross-browser fingerprinting; 72%: intend to migrate to a hybrid cloud; 90%: Google & Facebook ad traffic is useless; 5.2 terabytes per second: data from Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder; 10 billion: searches on DuckDuckGo in 2016; $330m: Amazon's loss on Alexa; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @brucel: Breaking: Programmer accused of writing unreadable code refuses to comment.
  • @asymco: Remember Android first? App Annie believes the Apple’s App Store produced about twice as much revenue as Google Play
  • @bridgetkromhout: Describing your old-timer ranting as "greybeard" just makes me want to fight you with sed & awk at twenty paces. Be there tomorrow at dawn.
  • @StevenShorrock: Root Cause Analysis is: * Acceptable for simple systems * Inappropriate for complicated systems * Ludicrous for complex systems
  • @swardley: Five years ago Amazon was worth about half of Walmart, today Walmart is worth about half of Amazon.
  • Eric Raymond: In practice, I found Rust painful to Continue reading

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Fun and Informative Events

• Your event here!

Cool Products and Services

• Build, scale and personalize your news feeds and Continue reading

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone knew a little queuing theory?

After many days of rain one lane of this two lane road collapsed into the canyon. It's been out for a month and it will be many more months before it will be fixed. Thanks to Google maps way too many drivers take this once sleepy local road. 

How do you think drivers go through this chokepoint? 

One hundred experience points to you if you answered one at a time.

One at a time! Through a half-duplex pipe following a first in first out discipline takes forever!

Yes, there is a stop sign. And people default to this mode because it appeals to our innate sense of fairness. What could be fairer than alternating one at a time?

The problem is it's stupid.

While waiting, stewing, growing angrier, I often think if people just knew a little queueing theory we could all be on our way a lot faster.

We can't make the pipe full duplex, so that's out. Let's assume there's no priority involved, vehicles are roughly the same size and take roughly the same time to transit the network. Then what do you do?

Why can't people figure out its faster to drive through Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 13th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 99.9: Percent PCs cheaper than in 1980; 300x20 miles: California megaflood; 7.5 million: articles published on Medium; 1 million: Amazon paid eBook downloads per day; 121: pages on P vs. NP; 79%: Americans use Facebook; 1,600: SpaceX satellites to fund a city on Mars; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @GossiTheDog: How corporate security works: A) buy a firewall B) add a rule allowing all traffic C) the end How corporate security works:A) buy a firewall B) add a rule allowing all traffic C) the end
  • @caitie: Distributed Systems PSA: your regular reminder that the operational cost of a system should be included & considered when designing a system
  • @jimpjorps: 1998: the internet means you can "telecommute" to a tech job from anywhere on Earth 2017: everyone works in the same one square mile of SF
  • Jessi Hempel: [re: BitTorrent] Perhaps the lesson here is that sometimes technologies are not products. And they’re not companies. They’re just damn good technologies.
  • Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 6th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 3 of top 5: Stackoverflow questions are about Git; 3,000: four-passenger cars could serve 98 percent of NYC taxi demand; 44%: US population lives within 20 miles of Amazon fulfillment center; 72%: Amazon customers shopped using mobile device; 110%: increase in industrial control system attacks; 455: Number of scripted television series aired this year; $28.5 billion/yr: App downloads on iOS;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @ValaAfshar: Number of robots working in Amazon warehouses: 2016: 45,000 / 2015: 30,000 2014: 15,000 / 2013: 1,000 — @JonErlichman
  • @jason_kint: updated duopoly #s. new IAB data came out yesterday. easy to run vs earnings for goog and fb, it's evident everyone else is zero sum game. 
  • rb2k_: I also haven't seen one [company in Germany] that isn't riddled with MBA grads that mainly push Jira tickets around.
  • Joe McCann: The best software developers I know are always hacking over the holidays. True story.
  • @kaffeecoder: Sigh. Async vs blocking protocol is irrelevant. What matters is communicating Continue reading