Reading rollup, 2014-09-27
Some news: I will start writing code for Hosted Graphite next week.
It’s a (mostly) remote position, which makes it possible for me to spend winter in France with the family. We found a lovely place to live in an old medieval town on the Vienne. Spinning up a little French fluency now, remarkable how fast it comes when you’ve got a definite goal. :o)
Hat-tip (as is often the case!) to taint.org for the first two links below.
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Clever!
A Linux tool to show progress for cp, rm, dd, ...
It simply scans /proc for interesting commands, and then uses the fd/ and fdinfo/ directories to find opened files and seek position, and reports status for the biggest file.
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A great read. Lucid description of the replicated state machine problem, issues with Paxos, and how Raft works. Interesting that the primary goal was understandability. Maybe that should be the case for all software and algorithms ...
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There's Just No Getting around It: You're Building a Distributed System - Mark Cavage, Joyent
Good worked example of basic requirements & back-of-the-envelope work for an image resizing service. Separation of services, API-focused design: familiar approach.
"the goal is simply to highlight the realities and look at the basics required to build a distributed system... Too many applications are being built by stringing together a distributed database system with some form of application, and hoping for the best."
"Drawing parallels to a previous generation, services are the new process; they are the correct abstraction level for any discrete functionality in a system."