News

Effective Secrets with Vault and Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration and Vault by HashiCorp is the de facto standard for secrets management. Now the question is: how do you combine those technologies so that you can use secrets from your central Vault instance in your Kubernetes applications? One solution would be to use the AppRole auth method.

Creating Bitcoin trading bots that don’t lose money

In this article we are going to create deep reinforcement learning agents that learn to make money trading Bitcoin. In this tutorial we will be using OpenAI’s gym and the PPO agent from the stable-baselines library, a fork of OpenAI’s baselines library. If you are not already familiar with how to create a gym environment from scratch, or how to render simple visualizations of those environments, I have just written articles on both of those topics.

Packets-per-second limits in EC2

While evaluating the performance of a server application, we eventually (and hopefully) run up against the most fundamental constraining factor: the network. Cloud providers tend to offer somewhat handwavy guidance on networking constraints, especially when compared to the exhaustive literature explaining the quotas for RAM, CPU, and I/O. While working on an unrelated stress test in EC2, we were surprised by some results that led us down the path of investigating EC2 network capacity claims, resulting in this writeup. EC2 documentation describes network performance in terms of maximum available bandwidth.

Tinder’s move to Kubernetes

Almost two years ago, Tinder decided to move its platform to Kubernetes. Kubernetes afforded us an opportunity to drive Tinder Engineering toward containerization and low-touch operation through immutable deployment. Application build, deployment, and infrastructure would be defined as code.

New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall

UCLA researchers and colleagues have designed a first-of-its-kind nanogenerator that can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries. It also acts as a weather station. The researchers call it a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG.

DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: “So today I’m going to be talking about different approaches to building…” He stalled, as though just realising that he was stating his momentous ambition out loud.

Kubernetes 1.14: Production-level support for Windows Nodes, Kubectl Updates, Persistent Local Volumes GA

What’s new in Kubernetes 1.14?

What’s new for Kubernetes 1.14. A preview of the enhancements and new features that Kubernetes 1.14 will contain when released on March 25 2019. A colossal effort spanning almost 3 years, SIG-Windows is promoting the support of Windows Containers to stable.

Hash Your Way To a Better Neural Network

The computer industry has been busy in recent years trying to figure out how to speed up the calculations needed for artificial neural networks—either for their training or for what’s known as inference, when the network is performing its function. In particular, much effort has gone into designing special-purpose hardware to run such computations. Google, for example, developed its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, first described publicly in 2016.

DNA Computer Shows Programmable Chemical Machines Are Possible

The DNA computer works by layers of DNA logic gates attaching to a DNA origami seed (grey). Adapter strands [red] attach at specific locations on the seed, encoding the 6-bit input. DNA single-stranded logic gates [blue, brown, yellow] attach in locations that match the input, solving the algorithm as the system grows.