Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 5th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 25ms: SpaceX satellite latency; 17 million: tax returns received by IRS during week ending April 21; 1.94 billion: Facebook users; 1.2 billion: Lambda requests by Expedia / month; ~$91.5K: Capital One's yearly Serverless TCO; 1.2 billion: Facebook Messenger users; 215 petabytes: storage per gram of DNA; 1/2: households in US are Amazon Prime members; 50.8%: households in US that are mobile phone only; 80 billion: street view images; 3 million: open sourced Instacart orders; $175: RaaS (ransomware-as-a-service); 350,000+: Amazon employees; 


• QuotableQuotes:
  • Paul Barnum: You can have a second computer when you've shown you know how to use the first one
  • @chrisalbon: 2007: “You are the product.”  2017: “You are the training data.”
  • shitloadofbooks: As an Ops guy, I preach Ansible + systemd all day everyday, but so many of our Devs (and Ops) have drunk the containerization Kool-aid.
  • roland-s: Like you, Continue reading

The AdStage Migration from Heroku to AWS

This is a guest repost by G Gordon Worley III, Head of Site Reliability Engineering at AdStage.

When I joined AdStage in the Fall of 2013 we were already running on Heroku. It was the obvious choice: super easy to get started with, less expensive than full-sized virtual servers, and flexible enough to grow with our business. And grow we did. Heroku let us focus exclusively on building a compelling product without the distraction of managing infrastructure, so by late 2015 we were running thousands of dynos (containers) simultaneously to keep up with our customers.

We needed all those dynos because, on the backend, we look a lot like Segment, and like them many of our costs scale linearly with the number of users. At $25/dyno/month, our growth projections put us breaking $1 million in annual infrastructure expenses by mid-2016 when factored in with other technical costs, and that made up such a large proportion of COGS that it would take years to reach profitability. The situation was, to be frank, unsustainable. The engineering team met to discuss our options, and some quick calculations showed us we were paying more than $10,000 a month for the convenience of Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 28th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 220,000-Core: largest Google Compute Engine job; 100 million: Netflix subscribers; 1.3M: Sling TV subscribers; 200: Downloadable Modern Art Books; 25%: Americans Won't Subscribe To Traditional Cable; 84%: image payload savings using smart CDN; 10^5: number of world-wide cloud data centers needed; 63%: more Facebook clicks using personality targeting; 2.5 million: red blood cells created per second; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Silicon Valley~ The only reason Gilfoyle and I stayed up 48 f*cking straight hours was to decrease server load, not keep it the same. 
  • Robert Graham: In other words, if the entire Mirai botnet of 2.5 million IoT devices was furiously mining bitcoin, it's total earnings would be $0.25 (25 cents) per day.
  • @BoingBoing: John Deere just told US Copyright office that only corporations can own Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Etleap, Pier 1, Aerospike, Loupe, Clubhouse, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, MemSQL, InMemory.Net, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

• Pier 1 Imports is looking for an amazing Sr. Website Engineer to join our growing team!  Our customer continues to evolve the way she prefers to shop, speak to, and engage with us at Pier 1 Imports.  Driving us to innovate more ways to surprise and delight her expectations as a Premier Home and Decor retailer.  We are looking for a candidate to be another key member of a driven agile team. This person will inform and apply modern technical expertise to website site performance, development and design techniques for Pier.com. To apply please email [email protected]. More details are available here.


• Etleap is looking for Senior Data Engineers to build the next-generation ETL solution. Data analytics teams need solid infrastructure and great ETL tools to be successful. It shouldn't take a CS degree to use big data effectively, and abstracting away the difficult parts is our mission. We use Java extensively, and distributed systems experience is a big plus! See full job description and apply here.


• Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• DBTA Roundtable OnDemand Webinar: Leveraging Big Data with Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS. Watch this recent roundtable discussion hosted by DBTA Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 21st, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• year 1899: “Nobody has to use the Internet”; 12MPH: Speed news of Lincoln's assassination traveled the US; $200 million: Lyft tips; 500: data structures and algorithms interview questions; %0.00244140625: Odds of 13 straight male Dr. Who regens; 100: gigafactories could power the world; 100K: bots on Messenger; 1 million: containers Netflix lanched in one week; 5.2 trillion: 2014 US revenue; 52,129: iterations to converge on NFL schedule; 36 Gbps: Facebook's network in the sky; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @mipsytipsy: "That doesn't sound hard. I could build that in a weekend."
  • @Noahpinion: The Elon Musk Future is the good future. The Peter Thiel Future is the bad future. But honestly you'll probably get the Jeff Bezos Future.
  • @BenedictEvans: In 2007 Google, Apple, Facebook & Amazon had maybe 50k staff between them. Today it's more like 400k.
  • @AWSonAir: @Expedia inserting 70,000 rows per second of hotel data with Amazon Aurora.
  • @swardley: STOP! If you're thinking of moving Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 14th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 10^15: synapses activated per second in human brain (2/3rds fail); $4.5B: Amazon spend on video (Netflix $6 billion); 22,000: AWS database migrations served; ~15%: Dropbox reduced CPU usage using Brotli; $3.5 trillion: IT spending in 2017; 10%: reduction in QoQ hard drive shipments; 33.3%: Nginx share of webserver market; 37.2 trillion: human cells in a Cell Atlas; 6.2 miles: journey to the center of the earth; 200: lines of code for blockchain; 95%: Wikipedia pages end up at philosophy; 1.2 billion: Messenger monthly users; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Jeff Bezos: Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.
  • Bob Schmidt: If debugging is the process of removing errors from a design, then designing must be the process of putting errors into a design!
  • @swardley Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Pier 1, Aerospike, Clubhouse, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, MemSQL, InMemory.Net, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

• Pier 1 Imports is looking for an amazing Sr. Website Engineer to join our growing team!  Our customer continues to evolve the way she prefers to shop, speak to, and engage with us at Pier 1 Imports.  Driving us to innovate more ways to surprise and delight her expectations as a Premier Home and Decor retailer.  We are looking for a candidate to be another key member of a driven agile team. This person will inform and apply modern technical expertise to website site performance, development and design techniques for Pier.com. To apply please email [email protected]. More details are available here.


• Etleap is looking for Senior Data Engineers to build the next-generation ETL solution. Data analytics teams need solid infrastructure and great ETL tools to be successful. It shouldn't take a CS degree to use big data effectively, and abstracting away the difficult parts is our mission. We use Java extensively, and distributed systems experience is a big plus! See full job description and apply here.


• Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• DBTA Roundtable Webinar: Leveraging Big Data with Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS. Thursday April 20, 2017 | 11:00 AM Pacific Time. Continue reading

Five things we’ve learned about monitoring containers and their orchestrators

This is a guest post by Apurva Davé, who is part of the product team at Sysdig.

Having worked with hundreds of customers on building a monitoring stack for their containerized environments, we’ve learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. The outcomes might surprise you - including the observation that instrumentation is just as important as the application when it comes to monitoring.

In this post, I wanted to cover some details around what it takes to build a scale-out, highly reliable monitoring system to work across tens of thousands of containers. I’ll share a bit about what our infrastructure looks like, the design choices we made, and tradeoffs. The five areas I’ll cover:

• Instrumenting the system

• Relating your data to your applications, hosts, and containers.

• Leveraging orchestrators

• Deciding what to data to store

• How to enable troubleshooting in containerized environments

For context, Sysdig is the container monitoring company. We’re based on the open source Linux troubleshooting project by the same name. The open source project allows you to see every single system call down to process, arguments, payload, and connection on a single host. The commercial offering turns all this data into thousands of Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 7th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 10-20: aminoacids can be made per second; 64800x: faster DDL Aurora vs MySQL; 25 TFLOPS: cap for F1 simulations; 15x to 30x: Tensor Processing Unit faster than GPUs and CPUs; 100 Million: Intel transistors per square millimeter; 25%: Internet traffic generated by Google; $1 million: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award; 43%: phones FBI couldn't open because of crypto;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @adulau: To summarize the discussions of yesterday. All tor exit nodes are evil except the ones I operate.
  • @sinavaziri: Let's say a data center costs $1-2B. Then the TPU saved Google $15-30B of capex?
  • Vinton G. Cerf: While it would be a vast overstatement to ascribe all this innovation to genetic disposition, it seems to me inarguable that much of our profession was born in the fecund minds of emigrants coming to America and to the West over the past century.
  • Alan Bundy: AI systems are not just narrowly focused by design, because we have yet to accomplish artificial Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 31st, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 5000: node (150,000 pod) clusters in Kubernetes 1.6; 15 years: time to @spacex launch with a recycled rocket booster; 174 mbps: Internet speed in Dublin; 10 nm: Intel’s new Moore approved process; 30 minutes: to create Samsung's S8; 50 billion: of your cells replaced each day; 2 million: new red blood cells per second; 3dbm: attenuation of human body, same as a wall; 12: hours of tardis sounds; 350: pages to stop a bullet; 2: meters of DNA pack in a space .000006m wide; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @swardley: Having met many "leaders" in technology & business, I wouldn't bet on the future survival of humanity. If anything AI might help the odds
  • Francis Pouliot: Any contentious hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain shall be considered an alternative cryptocurrency (altcoin), regardless of the relative hashing power on the forked chain.
  • @coda: WhatsApp: 900M users, built w/ < 35 devs, using #erlang Krispy Kreme: 1004 locations, 3700 employees, original glazed is 190 #calories
  • @BenedictEvans: Still think Continue reading

Sponsored Post: ButterCMS, Aerospike, Loupe, Clubhouse, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, MemSQL, InMemory.Net, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

• Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• Analyst Webinar: Forrester Study on Hybrid Memory NoSQL Architecture for Mission-Critical, Real-Time Systems of Engagement. Thursday, March 30, 2017 | 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET. In today’s digital economy, enterprises struggle to cost-effectively deploy customer-facing, edge-based applications with predictable performance, high uptime and reliability. A new, hybrid memory architecture (HMA) has emerged to address this challenge, providing real-time transactional analytics for applications that require speed, scale and a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Forrester recently surveyed IT decision makers to learn about the challenges they face in managing Systems of Engagement (SoE) with traditional database architectures and their adoption of an HMA. Join us as our guest speaker, Forrester Principal Analyst Noel Yuhanna, and Aerospike’s VP Marketing, Cuneyt Buyukbezci, discuss the survey results and implications for your business. Learn and register. 


• 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 language for importing data, and supports Continue reading

Faster Networks + Cheaper Messages => Microservices => Functions => Edge

When Adrian Cockroft—the guy who helped put the loud in Cloud through his energetic evangelism of Cloud Native and Microservice architectures—talks about what’s next, it pays to listen. And you can listen, here’s a fascinating forward looking talk he gave at microXchg 2017: Shrinking Microservices to Functions. It’s typically Cockroftian: understated, thoughtful, and full of insight drawn from experience.

Adrian makes a compelling case that the same technology drivers, faster networking and cheaper messaging, that drove the move to Microservices are now driving the move to Functions.

The payoffs are all those you’ve no doubt heard about Serverless for some time, but Adrian develops them in an interesting way. He traces how architectures have evolved over time. Take a look at my gloss of his talk for more details.

What’s next after Functions? Adrian talks about pushing Lambda functions to the edge. A topic I’m excited about and have been interested in for sometime, though I didn’t quite see it playing out like this.

Datacenters disappear. Functions are not running in an AWS region anymore, code is placed near the customer using a CDN at CDN endpoints. Now you have a fully distributed, at the edge, low Continue reading

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

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 40Gbit/s: indoor optical wireless networks; 15%: energy produced by wind in Europe; 5: new tasty particles; 2000: Qubits are easy; 30 minutes: flight time for electric helicopter; 42.9%: of heathen StackOverflowers prefer tabs;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @RichRogersIoT: "Did you know? The collective noun for a group of programmers is a merge-conflict." - @omervk
  • @tjholowaychuk: reviewed my dad's company AWS expenses, devs love over-provisioning, by like 90% too, guess that's where "serverless" cost savings come in
  • @karpathy: Nature is evolving ~7 billion ~10 PetaFLOP NI agents in parallel, and has been for ~10M+s of years, in a very realistic simulator. Not fair.
  • @rbranson: This is funny, but legit. Production software tends to be ugly because production is ugly. The ugliness outpaces our ability to abstract it.
  • @joeweinman: @harrietgreen1 : Watson IoT center opened in Munich... $200 million dollar investment; 1000 engineers #ibminterconnect
  • David Gerard: This [IBM Blockchain Service] is bollocks all the way down.
  • digi_owl Continue reading

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

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• billion billion: exascale operations per second; 250ms: connection time saved by zero round trip time resumption; 800 Million: tons of prey eaten by spiders; 90%: accuracy of quantum computer recognizing trees; 80 GB/s: S3 across 2800 simultaneous functions;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @GossiTheDog: Here's something to add to your security threat model: backups. Why steal live data and when you can drive away with exact replica?
  • @ThePublicSquare: "California produces 160% of its 1990 manufacturing, but with just 60% of the workers." -@uclaanderson economist Jerry Nickelsburg
  • @rbranson: makes total sense. I have a friend (who is VC-backed) that has stuff in Azure, GCloud, and AWS to maximize the free credits.
  • @AndrewYNg: If not for US govt funding (DARPA, NSF), US wouldn't be an AI leader today. Proposed cuts to science is big step in wrong direction.
  • @CodeWisdom: "To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program." - Alan Perlis 
  • @codemanship: What does it take Continue reading

Architecture of Probot – My Slack and Messenger Bot for Answering Questions

I programmed a thing. It’s called Probot. Probot is a quick and easy way to get high quality answers to your accounting and tax questions. Probot will find a real live expert to answer your question and handle all the details. You can get your questions answered over Facebook Messenger, Slack, or the web. Answers start at $10. That’s the pitch.

Seems like a natural in this new age of bots, doesn’t it? I thought so anyway. Not so much (so far), but more on that later.

I think Probot is interesting enough to cover because it’s a good example of how one programmer--me---can accomplish quite a lot using today’s infrastructure.

All this newfangled cloud/serverless/services stuff does in fact work. I was able to program a system spanning Messenger, Slack, and the web, in a way that is relatively scalabile, available, and affordable, while requiring minimal devops.

Gone are the days of worrying about VPS limits, driving down to a colo site to check on a sick server, or even worrying about auto-scaling clusters of containers/VMs. At least for many use cases.

Many years of programming experience and writing this blog is no protection against making mistakes. I made a Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Aerospike, Loupe, Clubhouse, GoCardless, Auth0, InnoGames, Contentful, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, MemSQL, InMemory.Net

Who's Hiring?

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

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• > 5 9s: Spanner availability; 200MB: random access from DNA storage; 215 Pbytes/gram: DNA storage; 287,024: Google commits to open source; 42: hours of audio gold; 33: minutes to get back into programming after interruption; 12K: Chinese startups started per day; 35 million: tons of good shipped under Golden Gate Bridge; 209: mph all-electric Corvette; 500: Disney projects in the cloud; 40%: rise in CO2; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • Marc Rogers: Anything man can make man can break
  • @manupaisable: 10% of machines @spotify rebooted every hour because of defunct #docker - war stories by @i_maravic @qconlondon
  • @robertcottrell: “the energy cost of each bitcoin transaction is enough to power 3.17 US households for a day”
  • Eric Schmidt: We put $30 billion into this platform. I know this because I approved it. Why replicate that?
  • dim: It uses p30 technology. Just basic things, gliders and lightweight spaceships. Basically, the design goes top-down: At the very top, there's the Continue reading

Part 4 of Thinking Serverless —  Addressing Security 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 and 3. 

This post is the last 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.

Arriving at a good definition of cloud IT security is difficult especially in the context of highly scalable distributed systems like those found in serverless platforms. The purpose of this post is to not to provide an exhaustive set of principles but instead highlight areas that developers, architects, and security officers might wish to consider when evaluating or setting up serverless platforms.

Serverless Processing — Similar But Different

High-scale task processing is certainly not a new concept in IT as it has parallels that date back to the days of job processing on mainframes. The abstraction layer provided by serverless process — in combination with Continue reading

Serverless computing: Freedom for devs at last

Serverless computing provides a great opportunity for developers seeking relief from the burden of infrastructure. By abstracting away everything but a block of code, the serverless model makes it faster for developers to iterate and deploy new code, enabling smaller teams with smaller budgets to do things that only big companies could do before. Or, as Mat Ellis, founder and CEO of Cloudability, recently said in a CloudCast episode, “Serverless attempts to industrialize developer impact.”On-premises serverlessTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• $5 billion: Netflix spend on new content; $1 billion: Netflix spend on tech; 10%: bounced BBC users for every additional second page load; $3.5 billion: Priceline Group ad spend; 12.6 million: hours streamed by Pornhub per day; 1 billion: hours streamed by YouTube per day; 38,000 BC: auroch carving; 5%: decrease in US TV sets;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Fahim ul Haq: Rule 1: Reading High Scalability a night before your interview does not make you an expert in Distributed Systems.
  • @Pinboard: Root cause of outage: S3 is actually hosted on Google Cloud Storage, and today Google Cloud Storage migrated to AWS
  • Matthew Green: ransomware currently is using only a tiny fraction of the capabilities available to it. Secure execution technologies in particular represent a giant footgun just waiting to go off if manufacturers get things only a little bit wrong.
  • dsr_: This [S3 outage] is analogous to "we needed to fsck, and nobody realized how long that would take".
  • tptacek: Uber isn't the driver's employer. Continue reading