Cool Stuff I’ve Read This Week

It is Friday. I’ve been cleaning Chrome tabs (as one does) and noticed that some of the stuff I have in my tabs may be interesting for other people. So, this is an experiment. Lets see how it goes :)

I met few Kafka users who use Mesosphere on EC2 and were wondering: “If we lose an EC2 instance, and need to rebuild the instance and the Kafka broker from scratch, how do we know which EBS volume to attach?” I didn’t know, so with the help of Joshua Buss, I found the following:

• External volumes in Mesos
• After you create an external volume in Mesos, you attach it to a Marathon service. I had to learn a bit about Marathon to figure this part out.
• I also looked at how EBS volumes work in Kubernetes.

I talked to a bunch of guys at Facebook about Scribe and LogDevice, their internal Kafka equivalents. We compared notes and discovered that (surprise!) each of our services is better in slightly different ways. It is interesting to see how different teams solved different problems, and how small differences in the priorities and values at the start of a project lead to different outcomes after 5–8 years.

• https://code.facebook.com/posts/357056558062811/logdevice-a-distributed-data-store-for-logs/
• https://atscaleconference.com/videos/logdevice-a-file-structured-log-system/

My colleague Yeva published a blog about securing KSQL. Since security is still a major challenge for me, I’ve read it and watched few of the videos she linked to. Worth reading and watching (especially parts 2–3 of the video), because some of the error messages that happen when you make a mistake are just… Kafkaesque.

I’ve also read an interesting non-work-related blog this week. It describes morality in physics terms, and I can’t figure out if its a parody or not. But it is without doubt the most Silicon Valley thing I’ve read this week.

Have a good weekend :)