Inside Huawei’s Open Source Buffet
Huawei is gaining share in the global technology market and beginning to use open source as a strategic weapon.
10 Stack Benchmarking DOs and DON’Ts
An interesting question came up on the mechanical-sympathy list about how to best benchmark a stack of different queue (aeron/argona, jctools, dpdk, pony) and transport (aeron, dpdk, seastar) options.
Who better to answer than Gil Tene, Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder, of Azul Systems? Here's his usual insightful and helpful response:
If you are looking at the set of "stacks" (all of which are queues/transports), I would strongly encourage you to avoid repeating the mistakes of testing methodologies that focus entirely on max achievable throughput and then report some (usually bogus) latency stats at those max throughout modes.
The tech empower numbers are a classic example of this in play, and while they do provide some basis for comparing a small aspect of behavior (what I call the "how fast can this thing drive off a cliff" comparison, or "peddle to the metal" testing), those results are not very useful for comparing load carrying capacities for anything that actually needs to maintain some form of responsiveness SLA or latency spectrum requirements.
Rules of thumb I'd start with (some simple DOs and DON'Ts):
VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Helps Meet Key Recovery Point Objectives at an Affordable Cost
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 10, 2015 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the City of Avondale, Ariz., has implemented VMware’s unified platform for the hybrid cloud. By virtualizing the network with VMware NSX™ and adopting VMware vCloud® Air™ Disaster Recovery, the City is better equipped to protect critical services. More than simple backups, Avondale is better prepared to achieve quick recovery from unforeseen incidents that could impact the delivery of municipal services to citizens and businesses such as traffic management, water and wastewater utilities, and emergency response by police officers and firefighters.
The city of Avondale, an innovative community in the Phoenix Metropolitan area, is committed to making sure that critical health, safety, utility, and financial services are always available for its residents. According to the City of Avondale, its municipal government maintains a budget of $180 million with over 500 employees. The 16-person Information Technology (IT) department supports the community by using technology to engage the community and innovate municipal services to keep the city responsive, efficient, and secure.
The City was looking to improve its ability to recover from unforeseen disasters through cloud-based disaster recovery. Given the Continue reading
Adapting Applications And Avoiding Acrobatic Adjustments
A couple of months ago, I was on a panel at TechUnplugged where we talked about scaling systems to large sizes. Here’s a link to the video of that panel:
One of the things that we discussed in that panel was applications. Toward the end of the discussion we got into a bit of a back-and-forth about applications and the systems they run on. I feel like it’s time to develop those ideas a bit more.
The Achilles’ Heel
My comments about legacy applications are pointed. If a company is spending thousands of dollars and multiples hours of time in the engineering team to reconfigure the network or the storage systems to support an old application, my response was simple: go out of business.
It does sound a bit flippant to think that a company making a profit should just close the shutters and walk away. But that’s just the problem that we’re facing in the market today. We’ve spent an inordinate amount of time creating bespoke, custom networks and systems to support applications that were written years, or even decades, ago in alien environments.
We do it every day without thinking. We have to install this specific Java version Continue reading
What happened next: the deprecation of ANY
Almost a year ago, we announced that we were going to stop answering DNS ANY queries. We were prompted by a number of factors:
The lack of legitimate ANY use.
The abundance of malicious ANY use.
The constant use of ANY queries in large DNS amplification DDoS attacks.
Additionally, we were about to launch Universal DNSSEC, and we could foresee the high cost of assembling ANY answers and providing DNSSEC-on-the-fly for those answers, especially when most of the time, those ANY answers were for malicious, illegitimate, clients.
Although we usually make a tremendous effort to maintain backwards compatibility across Internet protocols (recently, for example, continuing to support SHA-1-based SSL certificates), it was clear to us that the DNS ANY query was something that was better removed from the Internet than maintained for general use.
Our proposal at the time was to return an ERROR code to the querier telling them that ANY was not supported, and this sparked a robust discussion in the DNS protocol community. In this blog post, we’ll cover what has happened and what our final plan is.
Just before we published our blog a popular software started using ANY queries, to get all address Continue reading