tag
App Engine
- #75 5 min
There and Back Again: Why PaaS Is Passé (And Why It’s Not)
In 10 years nobody will be talking about Kubernetes. Not because people stopped using it or because it fell out of favor, but because it became utility. Containers, Kubernetes, service meshes—they’ll all be there, the same way VMs, hypervisors, and switches will be. Compute is a commodity, and I don’t care how my workload runs so long as it meets my business’s SLOs and other requirements. Within AWS alone, there are now innumerable ways to run a compute workload.
- #52 22 min
So You Wanna Go Fast?
I originally proposed this as a GopherCon talk on writing “high-performance Go”, which is why it may seem rambling, incoherent, and—at times—not at all related to Go. The talk was rejected (probably because of the rambling and incoherence), but I still think it’s a subject worth exploring. The good news is, since it was rejected, I can take this where I want. The remainder of this piece is mostly the outline of that talk with some parts filled in, some meandering stories which may or may not pertain to the topic, and some lessons learned along the way. I think it might make a good talk one day, but this will have to do for now.
- #35 8 min
If State Is Hell, SOA Is Satan
More and more companies are describing their success stories regarding the switch to a service-oriented architecture. As with any technological upswing, there’s a clear and palpable hype factor involved (Big Data™ or The Cloud™ anyone?), but obviously it’s not just puff. While microservices and SOA have seen a staggering rate of adoption in recent years, the mindset of developers often seems to be stuck in the past. I think this is, at least in part, because we seek a mental model we can reason about. It’s why we build abstractions in the first place. In a sense, I would argue there’s a comparison to be made between the explosion of OOP in the early 90’s and today’s SOA trend. After all, SOA is as much about people scale as it is about workload scale, so it makes sense from an organizational perspective.
- #25 6 min
Understanding Consensus
A classical problem presented within the field of distributed systems is the Byzantine Generals Problem. In it, we observe two allied armies positioned on either side of a valley. Within the valley is a fortified city. Each army has a general with one acting as commander. Both armies must attack at the same time or face defeat by the city’s defenders. In order to come to an agreement on when to attack, messengers must be sent through the valley, risking capture by the city’s patrols. Consider the diagram below illustrating this problem.