I have developed some interest in the Rust programming language. Rust is a systems programming language which means it gets out of the way of developers interested in reaching low-level internals of a system. What sets it aside from other systems languages though is: Borrow checking to guarantee memory safety…
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Edit (2019-04-09): A quick qualifier for future readers. This post talks about correctness in the sense of correct code and not formal proofs or formal specifications. I refer to correctness in the sense of avoidable runtime errors.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
The Internet has gotten too big. Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist. I believed that better, faste...
Last December, I got an interesting bug report from the VWO support team. It seemed like the loading time of a particular analytics report was ridiculously slow for a big Enterprise customer. Since I am part of the Data platform, a flag was immediately raised and I got involved in debugging the issue.
Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes, Verbitski et al., SIGMOD’18 This is a follow-up to the paper we looked at earlier this week on the design…
We're thrilled to be so invested in QUIC, a new transport protocol that is more responsive, secure, and flexible than what the internet uses today. Learn why, straight from our very own Jana Iyengar, one of the editors of the core document.
This paper is by Abutalib Aghayev (Carnegie Mellon University), Sage Weil (Red Hat Inc.), Michael Kuchnik (Carnegie Mellon University), Mar...
Building a 4-node cluster for experimenting with the distributed operating system.
After diving into the C language through K&R, and then studying portability (see C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines ), my next challenge was to take a systematic look at the standard library. To do this I worked through P. J. Plauger’s book The Standard C Library (ISBN 978-0131315099) where he examines an…
If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there’s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of…
On 2019-07-10, the Stripe API was severely degraded. Two different database bugs and a configuration change caused a cascading failure over several critical services. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
Explore technical topics, solutions, and resources for building with Twilio – and beyond.
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Every time someone reports higher latency after migrating to Kubernetes, the root cause is an assumption that changed. This is one of those stories.
It's not beyond possibility to set up MySQL to achieve 100,000 concurrent connections if you balance network config and use thread pools. By Vadim Tkachenko
Performance metrics are surprisingly challenging to get right. Here we share how to create metrics that are accurate, precise, and useful!
Trail of Bits recently completed a security assessment of Kubernetes, including its interaction with Docker. Felix Wilhelm’s recent tweet of a Proof of Concept (PoC) “container escape” sparked our interest, since we performed similar research and were curious how this PoC could impact Kubernetes. Quick and dirty way…
One of my favorite blog posts about Rust is Things Rust Shipped Without by Graydon Hoare. To me, footguns that don't exist in a language are usually more important than expressiveness. In this slightly philosophical essay, I want to tell about a missing Rust feature I especially like: constructors.
I could not find much information on the interwebs how many containers you can run per host. So here are mine and the issues we ran into along the way.
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA’19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorith…
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves cheaper than divisions. For this reason, compilers frequently replace division instructions by multiplications. Roughly speaking, it works in this manner. Suppose that you want to…
