Four short links: 6 March 2020
New Hardware, When Not to Kubernetes, Computability Proof, and Architecture Thinking
- Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer (Bryan Cantrill) — talk at Stanford, about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine—and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision.
- Let’s Use Kubernetes: Now You Have 8 Problems — If you’re part of a small team, Kubernetes probably isn’t for you: it’s a lot of pain with very few benefits. See also the discussion on Lobsters and HN.
- Landmark Computer Science Proof Cascades Through Physics and Math (Quanta) — Computational complexity may seem entirely theoretical, but it’s also closely connected to the real world. The resources that computers need to solve and verify problems—time and memory—are fundamentally physical. For this reason, new discoveries in physics can change computational complexity. Readable and interesting.
- Millions of Tiny Databases — talking through the reasoning behind the design of the control plane for Elastic Block Storage. Over the decade since [the introduction of Availability Zones], our thinking on failure and availability has continued to evolve, and we paid increasing attention to blast radius and correlation of failure. Not only do we work to make outages rare and short, we work to reduce the number of resources and customers that they affect, an approach we call blast radius reduction. This philosophy is reflected in everything from the size of our datacenter, to the design of our services, to operational practices. (via Morning Paper)
