Todd Hoff

Author Archives: Todd Hoff

Public Cloud Postcentralization is the Thin Edge of the Wedge into the Enterprise

 

Like an amoeba the public cloud is extending fingerlike projections to the edge in a new kind of architecture that creates a world spanning distributed infrastructure under one centralized management, billing, and security domain.

This issue—the deep nature of centralization—came up as a comment on my article What Do You Believe Now That You Didn't Five Years Ago? Centralized Wins. Decentralized Loses.

Centralization can refer to the locus of computation, but it also refers to a boundary, to a domain of control.

Facebook, Netflix, and Google are all distributed across much of the world, but they are still centralized services because control is centralized. You know this because in a browser, no matter where you are in the world, you navigate to facebook.com, netflix.com, or google.com, you never enter the URL for independent shards, yet all your data and services magically follow you around like a hyperactive puppy. 

That's the world we've come to expect. That's how services built on a cloud work.

In an unexpected development, the public cloud is expanding control out to the edge. As I wrote in Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 27th, 2018:

The Anna Key-Value Store Now Has 355x the Performance of DynamoDB for the Dollar

 

New databases used to be announced seemingly every week. While database neogenesis has slowed down considerably, it has not gone necrotic.

RISELabs, those wonderfully innovative folks over at Berkeley, have uplifted their Anna datatabase—a shared-nothing, thread-per-core architecture to achieve lightning-fast speeds by avoiding all coordination mechanisms—to become cloud-aware.

What's changed?

Anna is not only incredibly fast, it’s incredibly efficient and elastic too: an autoscaling, multi-tier, selectively-replicating cloud service. All that adaptivity means that Anna ramps down resource consumption for cold things, and ramps up consumption for hot things. You get all the multicore Anna performance you want, but you don’t pay for what you don’t need.
Just to throw out some numbers, we measured Anna providing 355x the performance of DynamoDB for the dollar. No, I don’t think that is because AWS is earning a 355x margin on DynamoDB! The issue is that Anna is now orders of magnitude more efficient than competing systems, in addition to being orders of magnitude faster.
They've posted about Anna's new superpowers in Going Fast and Cheap: How We Made Anna Autoscale:
Using Anna v0 as an in-memory storage engine, we set out to address the cloud storage problems described Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 7th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Get antsy waiting 60 seconds for a shot? Imagine taking over 300,000 photos over 14 years, waiting for Mount Colima to erupt. Sergio Tapiro studied, waited, and snapped.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • 3.5 Pflop/s: fully synchronous tensorflow data-parallel training; 3.3 million: new image/caption training set; 32,408,715: queries sent to Pwned Passwords; 53%: Memory ICs Total 2018 Semi Capex; 11: story Facebook datacenter prison in Singapore; $740,357: ave cost of network downtime; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @BenedictEvans: Recorded music: $18 billion. Cars: $1 trillion. Retail: $20 trillion.
    • @JoeEmison: Lies that developers tell (themselves): (1) This is the best stack/IaaS for us to use [reality: I know it and want to start now] (2) DevOps doesn’t matter until scaling [you’ll spend 30% of your time dealing with ops Continue reading

Sponsored Post: NationBuilder, Twitch, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

  • NationBuilder — if you’re a systems engineer, SRE or DevOps focused developer and have been looking for a place where you can help other people while still working in tech? We can give that opportunity. Please apply here. 

  • Twitch's commerce team in San Francisco is looking to hire senior developers to keep up with rapidly increasing demand for our Subscriptions and Payment platform. Engineers will be tasked with building new products and features to solve business and ecommerce challenges as we're dealing with engaging problems at a massive scale and will create solutions that impact millions of people around the world. Apply here. 

  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services


  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 31st, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

This mind blowing creation is from John Williamson. It's the first million integers, represented as binary vectors indicating their prime factors, laid out with UMAP. No, I really have no idea what that means either, but it did make me consider that our universe could be created by an algorithm. What are the wiggly cycles on the periphery? Groups of numbers that share a minimum amount of prime factors, further out groups are numbers that have increasing amounts of shared prime factors. So the primes are at the core, ungrouped as they have no prime factors to use to join groups. Primorials should be furthest out.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

Auth0 Architecture: Running In Multiple Cloud Providers And Regions

 

This is article was written by Dirceu Pereira Tiegs, Site Reliability Engineer at Auth0, and originally was originally published in Auth0.

Auth0 provides authentication, authorization, and single sign-on services for apps of any type (mobile, web, native) on any stack. Authentication is critical for the vast majority of apps. We designed Auth0 from the beginning so that it could run anywhere: on our cloud, on your cloud, or even on your own private infrastructure.

In this post, we'll talk more about our public SaaS deployments and provide a brief introduction to the infrastructure behind auth0.com and the strategies we use to keep it up and running with high availability. 

A lot has changed since then in Auth0. These are some of the highlights:

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 24th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Images from a far flung galaxy? Nope. It's the mind blowing swirling beauty of ink in motion. 

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • $10 billion: damages in worlds largest cyberattack; .5%: bitcoins use of all the electricity on earth; 1/200th: Verizon throttling California firefighters for leverage; 4.6%: YC companies reaching $100M+ valuation; 45: ave age of successful startup founder; $250,000: monthly take from browser-based Monero mining; 300+: 3D digitizatized Greek and Roman sculptures; 80: employees are chipped at a company; 100k: bike graveyard from failed startups; 70%: executives think they are block chain experts; $7 billion: Slack valuation; 120: AWS instance types; 27.6 petabytes: Microsoft’s undersea data center webcam of swimming fish; 42%: product is the reason startups fail; $334bn: Continue reading

What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago? Centralized wins. Decentralized loses.

 

 

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there's a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.

I say unfortunately because ten years ago, even five years ago, I still believed decentralization would win. Why? For all the idealistic technical reasons I laid out long ago in Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing In The Ambient Cloud.

While the internet and the web are inherently decentralized, mainstream applications built on top do not have to be. Typically, applications today—Facebook, Salesforce, Google, Spotify, etc.—are all centralized.

That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977),  TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999).

We do have new decentalized services: Bitcoin(2009), Minecraft(2009), Ethereum(2104), IPFS(2015), Mastadon(2016), and PeerTube(2018). We're still waiting on Pied Piper to deliver the decentralized internet. 

On an evolutionary timeline decentralized systems are neanderthals; centralized systems are the humans. Neanderthals came first. Humans may have interbred with neanderthals, humans may have even killed off the neanderthals, but Continue reading

Sponsored Post: NationBuilder, Twitch, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

  • NationBuilder — if you’re a systems engineer, SRE or DevOps focused developer and have been looking for a place where you can help other people while still working in tech? We can give that opportunity. Please apply here. 

  • Twitch's commerce team in San Francisco is looking to hire senior developers to keep up with rapidly increasing demand for our Subscriptions and Payment platform. Engineers will be tasked with building new products and features to solve business and ecommerce challenges as we're dealing with engaging problems at a massive scale and will create solutions that impact millions of people around the world. Apply here. 

  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services


  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 17th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

The amazing Zoomable Universe from 10^27 meters—about 93 billion light-years—down to the subatomic realm, at 10^-35 meters.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • 2.24x10^32T: joules needed by the Death Star to obliterate Alderaan, which would liquify everyone in the Death Star; 13 of 25: highest paying jobs are in tech; 70,000+: paid Slack workspaces; 13: hours ave american sits; $13.5 million: lost in ATM malware hack; $1.5 billion: cryptocurrency gambling ring busted in China; $8.5B: Auto, IoT, Security startups; 10x: infosec M&A; 1,000: horsepower needed to fly a jet suit; 30% Google's energy savings from AI control of datacenters;

  • Quotable Quotes:

What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago?

 

 

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there's a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.

I say unfortunately because ten years ago, even five years ago, I still believed decentralization would win. Why? For all the idealistic technical reasons I laid out long ago in Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing In The Ambient Cloud.

While the internet and the web are inherently decentralized, mainstream applications built on top do not have to be. Typically, applications today—Facebook, Salesforce, Google, Spotify, etc.—are all centralized.

That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977),  TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999).

We do have new decentalized services: Bitcoin(2009), Minecraft(2009), Ethereum(2104), IPFS(2015), Mastadon(2016), and PeerTube(2018). We're still waiting on Pied Piper to deliver the decentralized internet. 

On an evolutionary timeline decentralized systems are neanderthals; centralized systems are the humans. Neanderthals came first. Humans may have interbred with neanderthals, humans may have even killed off the neanderthals, but Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 10th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time (out Thur-Fri, so we're going early):

 

London Maker Faire 1851—The Great Exhibition—100,000 objects, displayed along more than 10 miles, by over 15,000 contributors.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • 90%: accuracy predicting gender from retinal image; $1 billion: Ebay sales per quarter from AI; $78 billion: global AI software market by 2025; $75m: penalty for botched SAP upgrade; 35 million: m^3 of mud dredged out of the Dutch waterways; 138 terabytes: memory per square inch; 500 million: Uber metrics per second; 22x: new faster JSON Sparser; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @IanColdwater: The JIRA tickets will continue until morale improves
    • @david_perell: Three crazy stats from @mikedariano’s newsletter. 1. People watch more Minecraft hours than the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB combined.  2. Only 26 countries have more people than Continue reading

Case Study: Pokémon GO on Google Cloud Load Balancing

 

There are a lot of cool nuggets in Google's New Book: The Site Reliability Workbook. If you haven't put it on your reading list, here's a tantalizing excerpt from CHAPTER 11 Managing Load by Cooper Bethea, Gráinne Sheerin, Jennifer Mace, and Ruth King with Gary Luo and Gary O’Connor.

 

Niantic launched Pokémon GO in the summer of 2016. It was the first new Pokémon game in years, the first official Pokémon smartphone game, and Niantic’s first project in concert with a major entertainment company. The game was a runaway hit and more popular than anyone expected—that summer you’d regularly see players gathering to duel around landmarks that were Pokémon Gyms in the virtual world.

Pokémon GO’s success greatly exceeded the expectations of the Niantic engineering team. Prior to launch, they load-tested their software stack to process up to 5x their most optimistic traffic estimates. The actual launch requests per second (RPS) rate was nearly 50x that estimate—enough to present a scaling challenge for nearly any software stack. To further complicate the matter, the world of Pokémon GO is highly interactive and globally shared among its users. All players in a given area see the same view of the game Continue reading

Sponsored Post: NationBuilder, Twitch, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Scalyr, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

  • NationBuilder — if you’re a systems engineer, SRE or DevOps focused developer and have been looking for a place where you can help other people while still working in tech? We can give that opportunity. Please apply here. 

  • Twitch's commerce team in San Francisco is looking to hire senior developers to keep up with rapidly increasing demand for our Subscriptions and Payment platform. Engineers will be tasked with building new products and features to solve business and ecommerce challenges as we're dealing with engaging problems at a massive scale and will create solutions that impact millions of people around the world. Apply here. 

  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services


  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 3rd, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Everything starts with Doug Engelbart — Jane Metcalfe.
It was the very first time (1968) the world had ever seen a mouse, seen outline processing, seen hypertext, seen mixed text and graphics, seen real-time video conferencing. — Doug Engelbart (Valley of Genius).
ARPA funded the demo at a cost of $1 million. Most importantly? It was the first use of a todo list as an example. A tradition unlike any other.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 27th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Startup opportunity? Space Garbage Collection service. 18,000+ known Near-Earth Objects. (NASA)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

Google’s New Book: The Site Reliability Workbook

 

Google has released a new book: The Site Reliability Workbook — Practical Ways to Implement SRE.

It's the second book in their SRE series. How is it different than the previous Site Reliability Engineering book?

David Rensin, a SRE at Google, says:

It's a whole new book.  It's designed to sit next to the original on the bookshelf and for folks to bounce between them -- moving between principle and practice.

And from the preface:

The purpose of this second SRE book is (a) to add more implementation detail to the principles outlined in the first volume, and (b) to dispel the idea that SRE is implementable only at “Google scale” or in “Google culture.”

The Site Reliability Workbook weighs in at a hefty 508 pages and roughly follows the structure of the first book. It's organized into three different parts: Foundations, Practices, and Processes. There are three appendices: Example SLO Document, Example Error Budget Policy, and Results of Postmortem Analysis.

The table of content is quite detailed, but here are the chapter titles:

  1. How SRE Relates to DevOps.  
  2. Implementing SLOs.
  3. SLO Engineering Case Studies.
  4. Monitoring.
  5. Alerting on SLOs.
  6. Eliminating Toil.
  7. Simplicity.
  8. On-Call.
  9. Incident Response.
  10. Postmortem Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 20th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

 

World History Timeline from 3000BC to 2000AD. Yet we still program with text—in files.

 

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • $150 billion: Bezos Prime; 49%: Amazon's share of US e-commerce; 1,000 terabytes: image size to represent one cubic millimeter of brain tissue;  7x: 4 year reduction in cost of computing power; 25x: faster code using SIMD; 4TB: RAM in GCE “ultramem” instance type; 4 months: half-life of an ICO; 80%: cost savings moving from AWS to DO; 130,000: square feet in biggest vertical farm; 14x: price increase for Google Maps;  

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Chappell: In [CPU] architectures, we believe that aggressive specialization is a part of the answer to what happens next. That’s mapping applications to the specific architectural choices. And you already see that Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 13th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Steve Blank tells the Secret History of Silicon Valley. What a long, strange trip it is.

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • $27 billion: CapEx invested by leading cloud vendors in first quarter of 2018; $40 billion: App store revenue in 10 years; $57.5 billion: venture investment first half of 2018; 1 billion: Utah voting system per day hack attempts; 67%: did not deploy a serverless app last year; $1.8 billion: made by Pokeman GO; $13 billion: Netflix's new content budget; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @davidbrunelle: The best developers and engineering leaders I've personally worked with do *not* have a notable presence on GitHub or public bodies of speaking or writing work. I worry that a lot of folks confuse celebrity and visibility with talent and ability.
    • Bernard Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Datadog, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Scalyr, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services

  • Datadog is a cloud-scale monitoring platform that combines infrastructure metrics, distributed traces, and logs all in one place. With out-of-the-box dashboards and seamless integrations with over 200 technologies, Datadog provides end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of modern applications at scale. Build your own rich dashboards, set alerts to identify anomalies, and collaborate with your team to troubleshoot and fix issues fast. Start a free trial and try it yourself.

  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net
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