Advance boosts efficiency of flash storage in data centers

MIT researchers have modified solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash storage, to process key-value pairs to cut in half the energy and space required to store and manage user data. Advance boosts efficiency of flash storage in data centers New architecture promises to cut in half the energy and physical space required to store and manage user data. Data centers are server farms that facilitate communication between users and web services, and are some of the most energy-consuming facilities in the world.
Read more

The Right Way to Get Your First 1,000 Customers

Thales Teixeira, associate professor at Harvard Business School, believes many startups fail precisely because they try to emulate successful disruptive businesses. He says by focusing too early on technology and scale, entrepreneurs lose out on the learning that comes from serving initial customers with an imperfect product. He shares how Airbnb, Uber, Etsy, and Netflix approached their first 1,000 customers very differently, helping to explain why they have millions of customers today.
Read more

Disaster Tolerance Patterns Using AWS Serverless Services

In my previous post (Disaster Recovery for Cloud Solutions is Obsolete) I asserted that you should design your cloud architectures for Disaster Tolerance from the start (even if it is counter intuitive to do so by lean principles). I also argued that you should do this because it’s easy if you do it now, and it will help your business even if there is never a disaster. The problem is that while that’s all true, in practice there are enough gotchas that what should be easy can take you down a lot of rabbit holes before you get to where you need to be.
Read more

6 new ways to reduce your AWS bill with little effort

The last time we wrote about how to save AWS costs was at the end of 2015. AWS has changed a lot since then. AWS introduced AMD-powered EC2 instances that are 10% cheaper compared to the Intel-powered Instances. They provide the same resources (CPU, memory, network bandwidth) and run the same AMIs. The following table shows a mapping from Intel to AMD instance families. You can switch to an AMD family by stopping your EC2 instance, changing the instance type, and starting the instance again.
Read more

How we optimized Magic Pocket for cold storage

Ever since we launched Magic Pocket, our in-house multi-exabyte storage system, we’ve been continuously looking for opportunities to improve efficiency, while maintaining our high standards for reliability. Last year, we pushed the limits of storage density by being the first major tech company to adopt SMR storage. In this post, we’ll discuss another advance in storage technology at Dropbox: a new cold storage tier that’s optimized for less frequently accessed data.
Read more

New features planned for Python 4.0

With the release of Python 3.8 coming soon, the core development team has asked me to summarize our latest discussions on the new features planned for Python 4.0, codename ‘ouroboros: the snake will eat itself’. This will be an exciting release and a significant milestone, many thanks to the hard work of over 100 contributors. After heated debate on the mailing list, the 79-character line limit prescribed by PEP8 will be updated.
Read more

I’m Not A Robot!

There is no one way to secure your API that fits all situations. But, you can learn the schemes, study how the biggest social networks are dealing with it and find out the industry standard; then apply it to your project in the way you see fit. At the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of the different schemes. I won’t go in depth on these here but I’ll do a deep dive on OAuth, the most widely used authorization framework, another time.
Read more

AWS App Mesh

AWS recently released a new service App Mesh during the 2019 summit which has generated a lot of interest from developers world-wide. This service is a great example of how Amazon is highly customer-focused in delivery of products/features to the market. Besides that, there is no additional charge for using the service!:-) With the advent of cloud, the importance of microservices has increased tremendously. In microservices architecture, large monolithic code-bases/architectures are broken down into smaller, more independent modules.
Read more

CRI-O: An Open Source Container Runtime for Kubernetes

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted CRI-O as an incubation-level hosted project on April 8th. CRI-O, created by Red Hat, is an Open Container Initiative container runtime for Kubernetes that provides an alternative to Docker. Source: infoq.com

Visualizing Traffic Safety with Uber Movement Data and Kepler.gl

Learn how to use Kepler.gl for data visualization through our tutorial, where we show how easy it is to load multiple datasets into Kepler.gl to visualize traffic safety in Manhattan. Urban traffic can be dangerous, a point known all too well by city dwellers and drivers. Discovering the most dangerous street locations in a city can help urban planners take steps to enhance safety through strategies such as lower speed limits or traffic rerouting.
Read more