Russ

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Worth Reading: The TCP Tortoise

As LinkedIn migrated to serving its pages on HTTP/2 earlier this year, it became imperative that we identify and use the most optimal transport layer strategy for our users’ network. Being a Transmission Control Protocol-centric (TCP) infrastructure, we initiated an effort to study the effects of different TCP congestion control strategies in different geographies. We found that with the right strategy, we could significantly improve our site speed, resulting in up to 7% faster content downloads. —Prasanna Vijayanathan @ Linkedin

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Worth Reading: NVMe for Data Centers

The Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) specification defines a new method to access solid-state drives (SSDs) over a PCIe bus, and it’s forecasted to grow exponentially over the next few years thanks to its performance advantages and lower latencies compared with legacy protocols (such as SATA). NVMe-enabled storage infrastructures are not only seeing wide deployment, but they’re now entering other data center areas that were once typically reserved for legacy HDDs and SSDs. NVMe has become an agent for next-generation data centers. To understand this evolution, it’s important to review the history and examine some of the new application workloads that are being transformed by this protocol. —Anand Jayapalan @ The Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: The Coco Block Chain

Today I am proud to introduce the Coco Framework, an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. Coco achieves this by designing specifically for confidential consortiums, where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled. Based on these requirements, Coco presents an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect. —Mark Russinovich @ Azure

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Worth Reading: Automated Safe Cracking

In the process of building his safecracking robot, which he will demonstrate live at the Defcon cybersecurity conference next week, Seidle discovered a series of real vulnerabilities in the relatively cheap, but popular, SentrySafe he tested. But the larger lesson of his work goes beyond his particular safe’s security flaws. It points instead to a new reality for vendors of physical security equipment: If automated tools can crack your locks or safes, the increasing affordability of those tools makes you more vulnerable than ever. —Andy Greenberg @ Wired

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Worth Reading: Deep dive into Sky Lake

The architecture of Skylake is very different from that of the prior “Haswell” and “Broadwell” Xeon chips, and will be carried forward with the next-generation “Cascade Lake” processors that will very likely be implemented in a highly tuned 14 nanometer process – what Intel calls 14++ nanometer in its chip manufacturing presentations. (We had not heard of Cascade Lake before, and assumed future Xeons would be based on the “Kaby Lake” design already implemented in the Xeon E3 chips for single-socket servers.) The point is, the Socket P form factor for Xeon SP processors will be used for at least two generations of server chips, and possibly more. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Ops is everyone’s job now

Distributed systems are never “up”; they exist in a constant state of partially degraded service. Accept failure, design for resiliency, protect and shrink the critical path. You can’t hold the entire system in your head or reason about it; you will live or die by the thoroughness of your instrumentation and observability tooling. You need robust service registration and discovery, load balancing, and backpressure between every combination of components. You need to learn to integrate third-party services; many core functions will be outsourced to teams or companies that you have no direct visibility into or influence upon You have to test in production, and you have to do so safely; you cannot spin up a staging copy of a large distributed system. —Charity Majors @ opensource

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Worth Reading: Web archiving and the importance of context

One of the most basic tenants of all data science is that data doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is the result of a massive pipeline of explicit and implicit decisions, yet so much of the output of the data science world proceeds as if data can be cleanly separated from the contexts in which it is created. Nowhere is this more apparent than the world of web archiving. —Kalev Leetaru @ Forbes

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Worth Reading: Making mainstream switches malleable

While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: What we learn in transitioning from card catalogs

When we transition to a new technology, do we lose valuable metadata? Could errors be introduced in the process of transfer of data from one medium to another? It’s an issue society has already had to confront — when the world’s libraries transitioned to digital and online catalogs from their older systems based on paper cards. —David Cassel @ The New Stack

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On the ‘web: Hyperconvergence in the Network

First there is white box; the networking world is already moving in this direction. While network devices, such as firewalls, routers, and switches were once purchased in an “appliance” model, many parts of the networking world are quickly moving towards a disaggregated model, where the hardware and software are purchased as separate “things.” This enables the concept of white box—although the box might not actually be white. The terms “bright box” and “grey box” attempt to capture the reality that you might still buy boxes from brand named vendors, but rather than buying them for their software capabilities, you can now buy them for their hardware capabilities.

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Worth Reading: Speeding up doesn’t help

The evolution then began, first at 1.5x speed, and eventually working up to twice the speed. At first, it made me laugh. Those distinct voices I had grown so accustomed to had turned into high-speed ramblings. Listening to Ira Glass and Terry Gross at 2x speed is like expecting a massage at a spa and getting a defibrillator instead. But you get used to it, and plus: 50-minute podcasts were taking me 25 minutes to get through. Those that were an hour or longer were flying by. I was no longer just getting through my queue; I now had time to discover even more podcasts. —Paolo Uggetti @ The Ringer

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Worth Reading: A code camps getting the boot?

Within the past week, two major learn-to-code boot camp programs have announced that they are going out of business. Iron Yard, a boot camp-style tech and coding school, was founded in 2012 and grew to twenty campuses nationwide (including Las Vegas, baby). Trouble was apparent three months ago when Iron Yard shuttered five of its locations, and the company has now announced that the rest will close by October. —Michelle Gienow @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Erasing Tech Debt

I worked on projects based on the following premise: “We’re going to switch to a different technology and everything will get discarded. For now, as long as it works, don’t worry too much about coding standards.” If it doesn’t sound too bad for you, let’s look at it from a different angle: “We’re all going to die at some point, so while you’re alive, do whatever you want and don’t worry about the consequences.” —Gabriel Colombo @ Free Code Camp

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The OSPF Two Part Metric

Looking at the capabilities of any given protocol running in our networks today, it certainly seems there are few use cases left the protocol cannot support. In fact, modern interior gateway protocols have become so capable that it almost seems like we only need one to support everything. This is not reality, of course—there are many places where a specialized protocol would do better than a general purpose one, and there are still many use cases current protocols cannot support. One such use case, for OSPF, illustrated below, uses a two part metric to solve a very specific problem, as illustrated below.

On the left side of this diagram you can see the “typical” broadcast network. Originally common in what used to be called local area networks, these sorts of broadcast segments are actually more common on metro edges and wireless networks today than in a campus or data center. Anyone familiar with OSPF should already know what the problem is with this sort of configuration—if you build an adjacency between every pair of routers illustrated here, you end up with just too much state. For instance—

  • Each pair of routers in the network will form an adjacency, and hence Continue reading

Worth Reading: AMD Thread Ripper

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor offers higher core and thread counts, which equates to more capability and performance than any other consumer-level processor for high-end computing functionality. By doubling the core count found in the Ryzen chip that launched late in the first quarter, AMD can address different markets that requires higher levels of performance, including video editing, rendering, software development and others. AMD even paints this chip as being able to handle “mega-tasking,” the ability to run two complex workloads (video transcoding and gaming, for example) without the same kind of performance drop you would find on other processors. —Ryan Shrout @ Market Watch

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