Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 165 posts.

Systems & Performance
157

Nginx with dynamic upstreams

I recently made a setup at work where I had a Nginx server facing the user, which would forward requests to a service running behind an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (aka. ELB). That in itself doesn’t sound like a difficult task, you just find the hostname for the ELB and point Nginx at it with a proxy_pass statement like…

159

Service-Disoriented Architecture

“You can have a second computer once you’ve shown you know how to use the first one.” -Paul Barham The first rule of distributed systems is don’t distribute your system until you have an observable reason to. Teams break this rule on the regular. People have been talking about service-oriented architecture for a long…

163

To ECC or Not to ECC

On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a