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”. […]
In my previous blog post I wrote about how Google Guava’s ListenableFuture is an improvement over Java 6’s Future class. But Java 8 ships with a CompletableFuture class that brings much of the same benefits into the standard Java API. The below code example (again with inline comments) shows how to use CompletableFuture to implement […]