Link to Paper This paper was published originally in 1983 by the legendary folks from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The hints and tips should sound familiar but it’s interesting to notice the layer the author is talking about, these guys were designing at very low level. The fact that the same rules apply now it’s remarkable. It turns out breaking up a system into the right abstraction with a good interface it’s rather hard. ...
Link to Paper This paper is a list of recommendations for running a large-scale system that aims to keep quality high and costs low. The author comes from the Windows Live Services Platform but this might as well be read as an Amazon internal guide since I didn’t see a thing in this list that we don’t do (or aim to do) in AWS. EDIT: Of course all these things sound familiar! The author is James Hamilton! He’s a VP and distinguished engineer here at AWS, I know him from leading the weekly AWS Ops Review meeting. ...
Link to paper Today’s paper comes thanks to Will Larson this is a recommended paper in his book Elegant Puzzle This paper builds on the concepts from the the CAP Theorem which essentially says that when it comes to distributed systems you can only have 2 out of these 3 qualities: Consistency Avalaibility Partition Tolerance Then it introduces two concepts harvest and yield which is interesting because it’s not something you usually hear in distributed systems (this is a paper from the ’90s) and yet I think it’s import to know and to think in these terms. ...
Day three: Design patterns for container-based distributed systems Link to paper Containers provide the ability to package, deploy and reuse applications using a natural isolation boundary. Developers can expose application-specific functionality as interfaces as well as more generic hooks for many systems like metrics, health, etc. In this paper the authors present the readers with two types of container design patterns: Patterns for container in the same machine (Single node) and patterns where the containers are spread out in different machines (multi node) ...
Welcome to day 2 of my paper-every-day journey. Today we’re going to cover Borg, Omega and Kubernetes This paper goes over how Kubernetes, the de-facto, open-source orchestrator of containers was developed using the lessons learned from building Borg and Omega, Google’s internal job orchestrator. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that aims to make developing and deploying complex distributed systems easier. The Borg and Omega papers are excellent papers on their own right, but this explanation original published in ACM Queue is very insightful. These are the lessons I gathered: ...
I’ve decided to read a research paper each day. I am doing this in order to get better at my craft. I want to be better at designing software and it has been shown in research that the people who are really good at what they do are those that do “delibarate practice” I am most definitely NOT the best software system designer out there, but talent is overated and I intend to improve my knowledge one day at time. You are welcome to follow along. ...
Started a new page to write about tech stuff. Work in Progress