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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. k8s can automate horizontal scaling of pods and has experimental support for vertical scaling. Scaling can even extend to requesting new hardware […]
This post summarizes the internal architecture of Kubernetes (k8s). For my previous post on user-facing aspects, see Part 1 of the series. An architectural style that is followed throughout the control plane of k8s is of components communicating with each other using a data store (etcd) as the intermediary. Updates made to etcd are picked […]
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. k8s abstracts away the […]
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 […]
I read Jason Fried and David H Hansson’s book “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” and found it underwhelming. While the authors advocate a specific approach to running companies and building software, they base it all on the success of just their one company (Basecamp). They do not explain how companies of different […]
Recently I learnt a bit about Docker while using it on a project. I read large parts of a well written book called “Docker Deep Dive” by Nigel Poulton, and some other articles. Here are my notes about some key highlights of Docker. Docker is built on top of a Linux kernel feature called “namespaces”. […]