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Weekly Reading #40

04 October 2015

Inspired by @fleure, I’ll give a summary over what I’ve read in the past week. They can be academic papers or articles.

Eric Brewer talks about Kubernetes and CAP

https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/google-systems-guru-explains-why-containers-are-the-future-of-computing-87922af2cf95

There are two important things in an Internet company: 1. People 2. Machines. It’s probably equally important on how to manage them.

A Critique of the CAP Theorem

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.05393v2.pdf

I put the two CAP related articles together for an interesting read. This paper tries to give a rigid definition of CAP in order to resolve the confusion over the years.

Solving the Mystery of Link Imbalance: A Metastable Failure State at Scale

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1499322996995183/solving-the-mystery-of-link-imbalance-a-metastable-failure-state-at-scale/

This is probably the most interesting read last week. Essentially, Facebook hacked their own switches and selected a dumb algorithm for routing. As a result, it was really hard for them to debug and find the solution. It made me think at the hardware layer in my own cache project at work.

Ruby Metaprogramming

http://yehudakatz.com/2009/11/15/metaprogramming-in-ruby-its-all-about-the-self/

Understood Ruby Metaprogramming a bit.