Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 19th, 2016

JPL is firing up their Exoplanet Travel Bureau . Reserve your space now.

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• 200K : msgs send per second through iMessage; 750 million : xactions per week in App and iTunes store; 11 million : Apple Music subscribers; .7c : speed of light in silicon; 1.125Tpbs : fastest ever data transmission; 360TB : Superman memory crystal stores data forever;  $1bn : Uber’s yearly cost for market share in China;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Joseph Bradley : “Here is the takeaway. Blockchains must be massively more scalable than the current tech that supports Bitcoin. We start scaling slowly or quickly. And if we choose the latter, it will “require fundamental protocol redesign.”
  • @sigfpe : Nobody knows how to “program” DNA. They just copy-and-paste bits from other organisms. A bit like how most code is built from stackoverflow.
  • @evankirstel : Slack now has 2.3 million daily active users, 675,000 paid seats, and 280 apps in its directory
  • Jonas Luster : Money spoiled blogging. Why? Because people moved from doing great things for money and then talking about them on their free blogs, to people doing nothing but talking on their monetized blogs. 
  • @mattocko : What’s vilely hypocritical re Koch’s latest dirty dealings (vs electric cars) is they enjoy 100x subsidies for oilco 
  • Greg Ferro : In my view, the most common architectural flaw made by network engineers is that the data centre has a single network. I believe that the correct perspective is that any “network” is a “network of networks”.
  • @antirez : @Nick_Craver I’ve always this nice feeling that you manage to run a top-traffic site with 1/100 of the hardware. It’s like a reality check…
  • @levie : With Apple, Amazon, and Netflix now producing their own shows, Box will be accepting script submissions for enterprise software dramas.
  • Fred George : We had 50 IT professionals, 25+ titles and zero people understanding the project they were working on…
  • @jasongorman : “They asked for a bridge, but I know what they really needed was (another) reusable civil engineering framework”
  • @aplokhotnyuk : @cbrisket @giltene @netty_project @eBay Neutrino is highly available… We have measured upwards of 300+ requests per second on a 2-core VM.
  • jsmthrowaway : You don’t even need unikernels, and as much as I loathe myself for saying it, I find myself agreeing with a few of Cantrill’s points regarding unikernels in prod. Not all of them, and I think it’s worth exploring, but there’s a spectrum here: on one end, unikernel app containers, and on the other full jails. The Google approach with minimal containers that still act Unixy and Posixy but carry very little distribution overhead is somewhere around 0.1 on the spectrum.
  • @Beaker : This is why I call these “Internet-scale monoculture vulnerabilities.” FFS. 


• We never considered the possibility Skynet may just be stupid. The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people : At root, this is a story about the problems that occur in the absence [of] adversarial peer review. NSA and GCHQ cut corners in their machine-learning approach, and no one called them on it, and they deployed it, and it kills people. But is also a microcosm of the spy services’ culture of secrecy and the way that the lack of peer review turns into missteps.


• A  buffer overflow exploit in glibc  remained undetected for 8 years. How Bazaar. Also,  Linux kernel bug delivers corrupt TCP/IP data to Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker containers .


• How Uber Engineering Evaluated JSON Encoding and Compression Algorithms to Put the Squeeze on Trip Data . They tested a whole bunch of different compression approaches. A whole bunch. Their goal was to find a solution that both yielded a small size and a short time to encode and decode. The conclusion: “MessagePack with zlib. We felt this was the best choice for our Python-based, sharded datastore with no strict schema enforcement (Schemaless). We only discovered this combination because we took a disciplined approach to test a wide range of protocols and algorithm combinations on real data and production hardware. First lesson learned: when in doubt, invest in benchmarking.” Result: A 1 TB disk will now last almost a year (347 days), compared to a month (30 days) without compression. We now have enough space to last over 30 years compared to just under 1 year, thanks to putting the squeeze on the data.


• That feeling when you try to show your Grandma how to use the TV remote.  When you’re house sitting for millennials and ask how the lights work . This is funny and a little sad, not much has changed in 30 years. 


• If you are IBM and your insatiable demon child needs feeding, what do you do? You buy companies for their data.  Why IBM Just Bought Billions of Medical Images for Watson to Look At : Merge’s data set contains some 30 billion images, which is crucial to IBM because its plans for Watson rely on a technology, called deep learning, that trains a computer by feeding it large amounts of data.

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 4th, 2016

Presented for your consideration: Drone Units of the U.S Armed Forces

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• 16 terabytes: new Samsung SSD; 1%: earned income from an on-demand platform; $35: PI 3 has 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM and WiFi; 1.5 million messages per second: Netflix cache replication;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @jzawodn: all right.. everything on one disk in one computer: 15TB SSD
  • @jaykreps: The disadvantage is that the needs of most companies are really different from Google's. Depth vs breadth thing.
  • Eliezer Sternberg: The brain tries to maximize the efficiency of our thinking by recognizing familiar patterns and anticipating them.
  • david-given: I would love to have a modernised Ada. With case sensitivity. And garbage collection (a lot of the language semantics are obviously intended to be based around having a garbage collector. 
  • @tyler_treat: You're not even building microservices if you have things operating in lockstep and tightly coupled interactions and data models.
  • cognitive electronic warfare: using artificial intelligence to learn in real-time what the adversaries’ radar is doing and then on-the-fly create a new jamming profile. That whole process of sensing, learning and adapting is going on continually
  • @WhatTheFFacts: Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid.
  • @mjpt777: "I think the net contribution of RPC to human welfare is negative. It was a disaster." - Butler Lampson
  • @just_security: Comey[FBI]: until these devices[smart phones], there was no closet, no room, no basement in America where we couldn't get in.
  • @traviskorte: The people who give algorithms credit for "creating" DeepDream art are the same ones who say predictive scoring is just a neutral tool. Hmm.
  • Emin Gün Sirer: Bitcoin provides an incredibly strong consistency guarantee, far stronger than eventual consistency. Specifically, it guarantees serializability, with a probability that is exponentially decreasing with latency.
  • The best thing about working at Facebook: But what makes Facebook a unique place to work isn't its vibrant campuses or cushy salaries. It's the sheer, insane scale of how many people use its product around the world. 
  • TradersBit: I have found that maybe 80% of everything I am developing/have developed for TradersBit could soon run on Lambda.
  • @asymco: There were over 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States from 1896 to 1930
  • Rob Harrop: it’s better to preserve good service for a smaller number of customers rather than give bad service to all customers, which is what will happen as latency starts to degenerate under heavy load if your queue isn’t bounded.
  • @jaykreps: Microservices are about scaling the number of engineers not the number of requests 
  • mbrock: The ideal is low coupling and high cohesion. That's supposed to mean your system is composed of parts that can be understood separately. Low coupling means that the innards of each module are isolated from the others. High cohesion means that each module presents a clear and distinct purpose.
  • js8: What seems to be the main contention here - should the interface just use the names (akin to philosophical nominalism) and leave them open to interpretation or should it somehow encode the properties of things it describes (akin to philosophical realism)?
  • Ross Williamson: if you’re working on a new product, try to do less. More and more features aren’t going to drive user adoption. It’s better to focus on a niche, and give those users exactly what they want.
  • overenginered: In a sense, working with AWS and Azure has given me a very clear view on how exactly design decisions cost real money. Once you get a lot of traffic, each instance needed to balance the load is costing a non trivial amount of money. For that I'm grateful, because I can now see the need and the benefits of optimizing code and taking basic hygienic measures.


• What has Google learned from creating three container management systems—Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes—in over a decade? The benefits of containerization go beyond merely enabling higher levels of utilization. Containerization transforms the data center from being machine oriented to being application oriented...The design of Kubernetes as a combination of microservices and small control loops is an example of control through choreography—achieving a desired emergent behavior by combining the effects of separate, autonomous entities that collaborate.


• I can just imagine the disappointment of AIs as they learn how real people don't live up to their fictional counterparts. Computers read 1.8 billion words of fiction to learn how to anticipate human behaviour. What, you mean great minds don't really go on strike and escape to Atlantis when they get a little butthurt? 


• This is why human drivers will eventually be made illegal. Google: Self-driving car followed 'the spirit of the road' before accident: The test driver, who had been watching the bus in the mirror, also expected the bus to slow or stop, Google said, "and we can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put.


• At a cost of $1.5 trillion it's nice to learn that the F-35 doesn't completely suck. Here's what I've learned so far dogfighting in the F-35. For a moving example of to counter this fiscal and strategic insanity, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War is a great read. It contains an illuminating discussion on the OODA loop as well. There seems a natural tendency for large projects to keep expanding in scope until they embrace all features and address no particular mission.

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Asyncio Tarantool Queue, get in the queue

In this article, I’m going to pay specific attention to information processing via Tarantool queues. My colleagues have recently published several articles in Russian on the benefits of queues (Queue processing infrastructure on My World social network and Push messages in REST API by the example of Target Mail.Ru system). Today I’d like to add some info on queues describing the way we solved our tasks and telling more about our work with Tarantool Queue in Python and asyncio.

The task of notifying the entire user base

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Malice or Stupidity or Inattention? Using Code Reviews to Find Backdoors

The temptation to put a backdoor into a product is almost overwhelming. It’s just so dang convenient. You can go into any office, any lab, any customer site and get your work done. No hassles with getting passwords or clearances. You can just solve problems. You can log into any machine and look at logs, probe the box, issue commands, and debug any problem. This is very attractive to programmers.

I’ve been involved in several command line interfaces to embedded products and though the temptation to put in a backdoor has been great, I never did it, but I understand those who have.

There’s another source of backdoors: infiltration by an attacker.

We’ve seen a number of backdoors hidden in code bases you would not expect. Juniper Networks found two backdoors in its firewalls. Here’s Some Analysis of the Backdoored Backdoor. Here’s more information to reaffirm your lack of faith in humanity: NSA Helped British Spies Find Security Holes In Juniper Firewalls. And here are a A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

Juniper is not alone. Here’s a backdoor in AMX AV equipment. A Secret SSH backdoor in Fortinet hardware found in more products. There were Backdoors Found in Barracuda Networks Gear. And The 12 biggest, baddest, boldest software backdoors of all time. Who knows how many backdoors are embedded in chips? Security backdoor found in China-made US military chip. And so on.

By now we can pretty much assume backdoors are the rule, not the exception.

Backdoors are a Cheap form of Attack

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Who's Hiring?

• The zanox Group are looking for a Senior Architect. We're looking for someone smart and pragmatic to help our engineering teams build fast, scalable and reliable solutions for our industry leading affiliate marketing platform. The role will involve a healthy mixture of strategic thinking and hands-on work - there are no ivory towers here! Our stack is diverse and interesting. You can apply for the role in either London or Berlin.


• Swrve -- In November we closed a $30m funding round, and we’re now expanding our engineering team based in Dublin (Ireland). Our mobile marketing platform is powered by 8bn+ events a day, processed in real time. We’re hiring intermediate and senior backend software developers to join the existing team of thirty engineers. Sound like fun? Come join us.


• Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement.  Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/434


• Manager - Performance Engineering: Lead the world-class performance team in charge of both optimizing the Netflix cloud stack and developing the performance observability capabilities which 3rd party vendors fail to provide.  Expert on both systems and web-scale application stack performance optimization. Find details on the position here https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/860482


• Software Engineer (DevOps). You are one of those rare engineers who loves to tinker with distributed systems at high scale. You know how to build these from scratch, and how to take a system that has reached a scalability limit and break through that barrier to new heights. You are a hands on doer, a code doctor, who loves to get something done the right way. You love designing clean APIs, data models, code structures and system architectures, but retain the humility to learn from others who see things differently. Apply to AppDynamics


• Software Engineer (C++). You will be responsible for building everything from proof-of-concepts and usability prototypes to deployment- quality code. You should have at least 1+ years of experience developing C++ libraries and APIs, and be comfortable with daily code submissions, delivering projects in short time frames, multi-tasking, handling interrupts, and collaborating with team members. Apply to AppDynamics

Fun and Informative Events

• Varnish Summits are a worldwide event series where Varnish customers, partners, open source users and other enthusiasts come together to network and learn.  At the summits Varnish Software's experts and core developers do a deep dive into technical best practices and offer workshops for both new and advanced Varnish users.

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• Containers & Databases: From Development to Deployment with Docker and Aerospike. What is Docker and why is it important to Developers, Admins and DevOps when they are using Aerospike, the high performance NoSQL Database? Find out in this on-demand webinar by Alvin Richards, VP of Product at Aerospike. The video includes an interactive demo showcasing the core Docker components (Machine, Engine, Swarm and Compose) and how Aerospike makes developing & deploying multi-container applications simpler. The slides are shared here.


• Dev teams are using LaunchDarkly’s Feature Flags as a Service to get unprecedented control over feature launches. LaunchDarkly allows you to cleanly separate code deployment from rollout. We make it super easy to enable functionality for whoever you want, whenever you want. See how it works.


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• 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


• VividCortex measures your database servers’ work (queries), not just global counters. If you’re not monitoring query performance at a deep level, you’re missing opportunities to boost availability, turbocharge performance, ship better code faster, and ultimately delight more customers. VividCortex is a next-generation SaaS platform that helps you find and eliminate database performance problems at scale.


• MemSQL provides a distributed in-memory database for high value data. It's designed to handle extreme data ingest and store the data for real-time, streaming and historical analysis using SQL. MemSQL also cost effectively supports both application and ad-hoc queries concurrently across all data. Start a free 30 day trial here: http://www.memsql.com/


• aiScaler, aiProtect, aiMobile Application Delivery Controller with integrated Dynamic Site Acceleration, Denial of Service Protection and Mobile Content Management. Also available on Amazon Web Services. Free instant trial, 2 hours of FREE deployment support, no sign-up required. http://aiscaler.com


• ManageEngine Applications Manager : Monitor physical, virtual and Cloud Applications.


• www.site24x7.com : Monitor End User Experience from a global monitoring network.

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A Journey Through How Zapier Automates Billions of Workflow Automation Tasks

This is a guest repost by Bryan Helmig, ‎Co-founder & CTO at Zapier, who makes it easy to automate tasks between web apps.

Zapier is a web service that automates data flow between over 500 web apps, including MailChimp, Salesforce, GitHub, Trello and many more.

Imagine building a workflow (or a "Zap" as we call it) that triggers when a user fills out your Typeform form, then automatically creates an event on your Google Calendar, sends a Slack notification and finishes up by adding a row to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. That's Zapier. Building Zaps like this is very easy, even for non-technical users, and is infinitely customizable.

As CTO and co-founder, I built much of the original core system, and today lead the engineering team. I'd like to take you on a journey through our stack, how we built it and how we're still improving it today!

The Teams Behind the Curtains

It takes a lot to make Zapier tick, so we have four distinct teams in engineering:

• The frontend team, which works on the very powerful workflow editor.
• The full stack team, which is cross-functional but focuses on the workflow engine.
• The devops team, which keeps the engine humming.
• The platform team, which helps with QA, and onboards partners to our developer platform.

All told, this involves about 15 engineers (and is growing!).

The Architecture

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 26th, 2016

Wonderful diagram of @adrianco Microservices talk at #OOP2016 by @remarker_eu  

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• 350,000: new Telegram users per day; 15 billion: messages delivered by Telegram per day; 50 billion suns: max size of a black hole; 10,000x: lower power for Wi-Fi; 400 hours: video uploaded to YouTube every minute;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • sharemywin: I don't think consensus scales. So, I think they'll be an ecosystem of block chains.
  • @aneel: "There is no failover process other than the continuous dynamic load balancing." 
  • Jono MacDougall: If you are happy hosting your own solution, use Cassandra. If you want the ease of scaling and operations, Use DynamoDB.
  • @plamere: Google’s BigQuery is *da bomb* - I can start with 2.2Billion ‘things’ and compute/summarize down to 20K in < 1 min.
  • Haifa Moses: We’re evaluating a totally new software model that allows us to automatically diagnose if a failure occurs during a mission and for messages to be displayed for flight controllers on the ground
  • @fmbutt: IBM abstracted analog calculation. MS abstracted HW. Goog abstracted SW. Powerful Mobile AI could abstract clouds. 
  • Jon Grall: Essentially, there’s a massive oversupply of apps, and the app markets are now saturated and suffering from neglect and short-term thinking by the companies who operate them. 
  • jhgg: At work we moved to GCE at the beginning of this year, from Linode after they were having stability issues over the christmas break. No complaints from us. So far have been very happy with it. We were considering moving to AWS, but to realize the same pricing as GCE we'd have to purchase reserved instances - the sustained usage discounts have been huge for us.
  • Brave New Geek: Python and App Engine were fast. Not like “this code is f*cking fast” fast—what we call performance—more like “we need to get this sh*t working so we have jobs tomorrow” fast—what we call delivery. 
  • There are more Quotable Quotes in the full article.


• You have to love the datacenter of the future. Data is stored in the DNA of seeds. Compute inhabits electronic plants using xylem, leaf, and vein in the creation of digital organic electronic circuits. Instead of walking into a cold dead datacenter we'll frolic in an uplifted Garden of Eden.


• Relying APIs is like building bridges and skyscrapers out of materials that constantly change their properties. Just Landed is Shutting Down: Since Just Landed launched in 2012, the cost of running the service has steadily increased over time. While flight data remains expensive, the real source of the cost increases has been adapting to the demise or restructuring of supporting services such as StackMob, UrbanAirship, and Bing Maps that Just Landed previously relied on. Traffic and mapping data in particular, much of which used to be free, has become quite expensive, and is now tightly controlled by big companies under oppressive Terms of Service.


• With Spotify moving to the Google Cloud Platform it looks like Google may have found a friendly marketing face to play the same role Netflix plays for AWS. Why make the move? nrh: Spotifier here. Frankly, price is not the biggest factor in a decision like this. If we were going for the lowest cost cloud option, it probably wouldn't be either AWS or Google - there are other providers who are hungrier for business that would be willing to do deep cuts at our scale. The way we think about this is that there are basically two classes of cloud services: commodities and differentiated services. Commodities are storage/network/compute, and the big players are going to compete on price and quality on these for the foreseeable future (as with most commodities). The differentiated services stuff is a bit more interesting. Different players have different strengths and weaknesses here - AWS has way, way better capabilities when it comes to administration and access control and identity management, for example (which is actually pretty important when trying to do this in a large org). The places were Google is strong (data platform) are the places that are most important for us as a business. Compelling: dataproc+gcs, bigquery, pubsub, dataflow Made it safe: high-enough quality, cheap enough.

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When Should Approximate Query Processing Be Used?

This is a guest repost by Barzan Mozafari, an assistant professor at University of Michigan and an advisor to a new startup, snappydata.io, that recently launched an open source OLTP + OLAP Database built on Spark.

The growing market for Big Data has created a lot of interest around approximate query processing (AQP) as a means of achieving interactive response times (e.g., sub-second latencies) when faced with terabytes and petabytes of data. At the same time, there is a lot of misinformation about this technology and what it can or cannot do.

Having been involved in building a few academic prototypes and industrial engines for approximate query processing, I have heard many interesting statements about AQP and/or sampling techniques (from both DB vendors and end-users):

Myth #1. Sampling is only useful when you know your queries in advance
Myth #2. Sampling misses out on rare events or outliers in the data
Myth #3. AQP systems cannot handle join queries
Myth #4. It is hard for end-users to use approximate answers
Myth #5. Sampling is just like indexing
Myth #6. Sampling will break the BI tools
Myth #7. There is no point approximating if your data fits in memory

Although there is a grain of truth behind some of these myths, none of them are actually accurate. There are many different forms of sampling, approximation, and error quantification, and their nuances are missed by these blanket statements. In other words, many of these impressions are simply based on wrong assumptions and/or misunderstanding of basic AQP terminology.

Anyhow, instead of going over each of these statements and explaining why they are categorically wrong, in this post I’d like to answer the positive question: When can (and should) one use approximate answers? Note that by asking this question, I am implicitly giving away that I don’t think approximate answers are always useful. A perfect example where you don’t want to use approximation is in billing departments. (Although every time I look at my own Internet bill, I start to think that even this example has its own exceptions. I’m too afraid to mention my Internet provider’s name here but I am sure you can guess).

Anyhow, let’s discuss the key reasons and use-cases for approximate answers.

1. Use AQP when you care about interactive response times

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Google's Transition from Single Datacenter, to Failover, to a Native Multihomed Architecture

Making a system work in one datacenter is hard. Now imagine you move to two datacenters. Now imagine you need to support multiple geographically distributed datacenters. That’s the journey described in another excellent and thought provoking paper from Google: High-Availability at Massive Scale: Building Google’s Data Infrastructure for Ads.

The main idea of the paper is that the typical failover architecture used when moving from a single datacenter to multiple datacenters doesn’t work well in practice. What does work, where work means using fewer resources while providing high availability and consistency, is a natively multihomed architecture:

Our current approach is to build natively multihomed systems. Such systems run hot in multiple datacenters all the time, and adaptively move load between datacenters, with the ability to handle outages of any scale completely transparently. Additionally, planned datacenter outages and maintenance events are completely transparent, causing minimal disruption to the operational systems. In the past, such events required labor-intensive efforts to move operational systems from one datacenter to another

The use of “multihoming” in this context may be confusing because multihoming usually refers to a computer connected to more than one network. At Google scale perhaps it’s just as natural to talk about connecting to multiple datacenters.

Google has built several multi-homed systems to guarantee high availability (4 to 5 nines) and consistency in the presence of datacenter level outages: F1 / Spanner: Relational Database; Photon: Joining Continuous Data Streams; Mesa: Data Warehousing. The approach taken by each of these systems is discussed in the paper, as are the many challenges is building a multi-homed system: Synchronous Global State; What to Checkpoint; Repeatable Input; Exactly Once Output.

The huge constraint here is having availability and consistency. This highlights the refreshing and continued emphasis Google puts on making even these complex systems easy for programmers to use:

The simplicity of a multi-homed system is particularly valuable for users. Without multi-homing, failover, recovery, and dealing with inconsistency are all application problems. With multi-homing, these hard problems are solved by the infrastructure, so the application developer gets high availability and consistency for free and can focus instead on building their application.

The biggest surprise in the paper was the idea that a multihomed system can actually take far fewer resources than a failover system:

In a multi-homed system deployed in three datacenters with 20% total catchup capacity, the total resource footprint is 170% of steady state. This is dramatically less than the 300% required in the failover design above

What’s Wrong With Failover?

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Building nginx and Tarantool based services

Are you familiar with this architecture? A bunch of daemons are dancing between a web-server, cache and storage.

What are the cons of such architecture? While working with it we come across a number of questions: which language (-s) should we use? Which I/O framework to choose? How to synchronize cache and storage? Lots of infrastructure issues. And why should we solve the infrastructure issues when we need to solve a task? Sure, we can say that we like some X and Y technologies and treat these cons as ideological. But we can’t ignore the fact that the data is located some distance away from the code (see the picture above), which adds latency that could decrease RPS.

The main idea of this article is to describe an alternative, built on nginx as a web-server, load balancer and Tarantool as app server, cache, storage.

Improving cache and storage

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