After attending a conference called The Makers Summit a couple of weeks back where I saw two founders talk about “10x” products, I figured there must be experts who have looked for patterns in how they emerge and written about them? And sure enough, as I started reading, I discovered there is a market phenomenon called “Disruptive Innovation” which often provides a 10x experience for the right customers when a recent technological advance is applied to fulfil their needs. …
The AWS Firecracker paper is fascinating because Amazon has implemented a new Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) which closely matches the requirements of their AWS Lambda service. While doing so, they carefully navigated the space of existing virtualization options, reused the best parts where they could, and implemented the rest. They also describe how they successfully rolled this out in production. I thought this paper provides a great example of the big technical possibilities open to large Cloud providers. This post is my simplified notes from that paper. …
Given that database transactions have been around for decades, I was surprised to find that some concepts and implementations still don’t have generally agreed-upon terminology, especially across vendors. And even the ANSI SQL standard’s description of Isolation Levels has been found to be lacking in places.
I made some notes recently about selected topics in database transactions for my own reference as I was reading through these parts. Beware that my simplifications may have subtle errors too! I have added a few good references at the end.
Isolation Levels
When transactions execute concurrently, they can interfere with each other when…
TiDB is an interesting new database, and PingCAP is the company driving most of its development. Recently I read the paper written about it, titled TiDB: A Raft based HTAP database, partly due to my interest in its Rust-based TiKV component. I found the paper to be comprehensive and well written. Below is my bullet points style summary of it.
Overview
If you are familiar with Java or C/C++, understanding the assignment operator (=) in Rust will demystify a lot of its memory semantics. Assignment in Rust can have a range of outcomes depending on what you are assigning from and to, and on whether you are using the reference operator (&) and the mut keyword (short for mutable). In this post I will describe some scenarios of the assignment operation in Rust.
But first, two definitions:
This post describes the features k8s provides for Automated Scaling of applications. This is Part 3 of a series. Part 1 is an Introduction to K8S and Part 2 talks about Kubernetes Internals.
This post summarizes the internal architecture of Kubernetes (k8s). For my previous post on user-facing aspects, see Part 1 of the series.
I decided to start learning about Kubernetes (k8s) although I have not used it in production yet. These are my notes from the first part of the comprehensive book “Kubernetes in Action”. The second part gets into k8s’s internals. I will write about that as I read more of the book.
This is a crisp booklet by the famous management consultant Peter Drucker. It focuses on a few time tested general practices and hammers them home nicely rather than getting lost in the weeds — https://medium.com/pramod-biligiris-blog/book-review-the-effective-executive-854f69d04fd
This is a crisp booklet by the famous management consultant Peter Drucker. It focuses on a few time tested general practices and hammers them home nicely rather than getting lost in the weeds. It draws upon decades of the author’s practice and probably due to that, I was delighted to find subtle gems of practical insight tucked away in otherwise routine paras where I was least expecting them.
The book starts off by saying that “effectiveness” can be learned as a habit (a collection of practices) and need not be seen as a personality trait. Well, there would be no…