MAKING THE LINKEDIN EXPERIMENTATION ENGINE 20X FASTER
At LinkedIn, we like to say that experimentation is in our blood because no production release at the company happens without experimentation; by “experimentation,” we typically mean “A/B testing.” The company relies on employees to make decisions by analyzing data. Experimentation is a data-driven foundation of the decision-making process, which helps with measuring the precise impact of every change and release, and evaluating whether expectations meet reality.
Read more2020 CLOUD REPORT
Read the 2020 Cloud Report from Cockroach Labs, and learn which cloud platform performs best for transactional workloads across TPC-C, Network Throughput, CPU, and Storage benchmarks. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our three years of benchmarking cloud providers on transactional workloads, it’s this: the results change often. Last year’s report showed AWS dramatically outperforming GCP across TPC-C performance, CPU, Network, and even cost. The 2020 Cloud Report shows GCP caught up to AWS’s performance and offers the best price per performance for transactional workloads, and that new-to-the-report Azure is broadly competitive with both GCP and AWS. In the 2020 Cloud Report, we’ve expanded our research by: TL;DR? Conventional wisdom is that hardware performance is plateauing.
Read moreSCALING BEYOND A BILLION TRANSACTIONS PER DAY WITH SUB-SECOND RESPONSES
Andrey Zolotov, Gideon Low present their journey of transition to distributed data processing using GemFire and the challenges faced along the way. Source: infoq.com
HOW THE U.S. AIR FORCE DEPLOYED KUBERNETES AND ISTIO ON AN F-16 IN 45 DAYS
Kubernetes, Istio, knative and an internally developed specification for “hardening” containers are now the default software development platform across the military. Just like almost everything else, military organizations increasingly depend on software, and they are turning to an array of open source cloud tools like Kubernetes and Istio to get the job done, according to a presentation delivered by Nicholas Chaillan, chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, at KubeCon 2019 in San Diego. Those tools have to be deployed in some very interesting places, from weapons systems to even fighter planes.
Read moreWHY DATABASES USE ORDERED INDEXES BUT PROGRAMMING USES HASH TABLES
The traditional answer is that hash tables are designed to be efficient when storing data in memory, while B-Trees are designed for slower storage that is accessed in blocks. However, this is not a fundamental property of these data structures. There are hash tables designed to be used on disk (e.g. MySQL’s hash index), many in-memory trees (e.g. Java’s TreeMap, C++’s map), and even in-memory B-Trees.
Read moreHOW THE INTERNET SPANS THE GLOBE
Undersea cables are responsible for moving data between countries and continents at high speeds, making everything from photo sharing to financial transactions possible. These cables use fiber optics to move data at high speeds to land, where the data is then conveyed via fiber optics to homes and businesses. Yet, despite the billions of people relying on the data moved by undersea cables, there are only about 380 of them worldwide as of 2019, according to CNN estimates, though they span more than 745,000 miles—or more than three times the distance to the moon.
Read moreHOW TO VERIFY THAT QUANTUM CHIPS ARE COMPUTING CORRECTLY
A new method determines whether circuits are accurately executing complex operations that classical computers can’t tackle. Researchers from MIT, Google, and elsewhere have designed a protocol called Variational Quantum Unsampling, based on a novel quantum neural network, that verifies when photonic Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) chips have accurately performed complex computations using light. Source: mit.edu
LYFT’S JOURNEY THROUGH MOBILE NETWORKING
In 5 years, the number of endpoints consumed by Lyft’s mobile apps grew to over 500, and the size of our mobile engineering team increased by more than 15x. To scale with this growth, our infrastructure had to evolve dramatically to utilize new advances in modern networking in order to continue to provide benefits for our users. This post describes the journey through the evolution of Lyft’s mobile networking: how it’s changed, what we’ve learned, and why it’s important for us as a growing business.
Read moreHOW WE BUILT THE GOOD FIRST ISSUES FEATURE
We’ve recently launched good first issues recommendations to help new contributors find easy gateways into open source projects. Read about the machine learning engine behind these recommendations. GitHub is leveraging machine learning (ML) to help more people contribute to open source. We’ve launched the good first issues feature, powered by deep learning, to help new contributors find easy issues they can tackle in projects that fit their interests. If you want to start contributing, or to attract new contributors to a project you maintain, get started with our overview of the good first issues feature. Read on to learn about how we leverage machine learning to detect easy issues.
Read moreFACEBOOK INVENTED A NEW LANGUAGE FOR MACHINES TO SOLVE COMPLEX MATH EQUATIONS
Using the same kind of technology that translates English into Mandarin, the neural network translates problems into solutions Despite being built by calculus, linear algebra, and an army of statisticians around the world, neural networks have trouble understanding math. Or at least, they have trouble understanding how humanity writes math equations. Facebook’s AI research team, however, claims to have developed a new approach to turn complex math problems into machine-readable data.
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