Strategy
I was emailing a service about their documentation and while their doc was good, about one particularly tricky concept they told me that once you use it for a while, that’s when you’ll understand it. In other words: you’ll only understand it after you understand it. I
Strategy
Like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects cascading failures. Here's how Google handles them. This excerpt is a particularly interesting and comprehensive chapter—Chapter 22 - Addressing Cascading Failures—from Google's awesome book on Site Reliability Engineering. Worth reading if it hasn't been on your
Strategy
One of the strategies Jacob Richter describes (How we built a big data platform on AWS for 100 users for under $2 a month) in his relentless drive to lower AWS costs is moving ML from the server to the client. Moving work to the client is a time honored
Strategy
This excerpt—Appendix B - A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services—is from Google's awesome book on Site Reliability Engineering. Worth reading if it hasn't been on your radar. And it's free! Fail Sanely Sanitize and validate configuration inputs, and respond to
Strategy
Netflix used their internal spot market to save 92% on video encoding costs. The story of how is told by Dave Hahn in his now annual A Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer. Netflix first talked about their spot market in a pair of articles published in 2015:
Strategy
We’ve seen computation using slime mold, soap film, water droplets, there’s even a 10,000 Domino Computer. Now DNA can do math In a test tube. Using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It’s not fast. Calculations can take hours. The upside: they are tiny and can work
Strategy
Failover does not cut it anymore. You need an ALWAYS ON architecture with multiple data centers.-- Martin Van Ryswyk, VP of Engineering at DataStax Failover, switching to a redundant or standby system when a component fails, has a long and checkered history as a way of dealing with failure.
Strategy
I have dozens if not hundreds of half finished articles and snippets of ideas in the haunted house that is my Google Docs. Walking the house around midnight, with the lights turned off course, I stumbled upon one ghost that has been haunting me since 2012. It is time to
Strategy
When Lee Atchison arrived at Amazon, Amazon was in the process of moving from a large monolithic application to a Service Oriented Architecture. Lee talks about this evolution in an interesting interview on Software Engineering Daily: Scalable Architecture with Lee Atchison, about Lee's new book: Architecting for Scale:
Strategy
If Google were created from scratch today, much of it would be learned, not coded. Around 10% of Google's 25,000 developers are proficient in ML; it should be 100% -- Jeff Dean Like the weather, everybody complains about programming, but nobody does anything about it. That’s
Strategy
Hotjar offers free website analytics so they have a challenging mission: handle hundreds of millions of requests per day from mostly free users. Marc von Brockdorff, Co-Founder & Director of Engineering at Hotjar, summarized the lessons they've learned in: 9 Lessons Learned Scaling Hotjar's Tech Architecture
Strategy
There’s a war between two visions of how the ubiquitous AI assisted future will be rendered: on the cloud or on the device. And as with any great drama it helps the story along if we have two archetypal antagonists. On the cloud side we have Google. On the