How to Ship an App Rewrite Without Risking Your Entire Business

This article is the fifth in a series covering how Uber’s mobile engineering team developed the newest version of our driver app, codenamed Carbon, a core component of our ridesharing business. Among other new features, the app lets our population of over three million driver-partners find fares, get directions, and track their earnings. We began designing the new app in conjunction with feedback from our driver-partners in 2017, and began rolling it out for production in September 2018.
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PostgreSQL across clouds and on-premises

PostgreSQL is a very popular open source relational database. It’s been in active development for over 30 years and has achieved a very high level of reliability and performance, as well as a very robust feature set. If your applications make use of PostgreSQL, you’ll now be able to use Crossplane to deploy both your application and its PostgreSQL database to many of the major cloud providers as well on on-premises.
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Running Envoy as an Edge Proxy at eBay: Replacing Hardware Load Balancers with a Software Solution

At the inaugural EnvoyCon that ran in Seattle, USA, the eBay engineering team talked about running the Envoy Proxy at the edge as a replacement for hardware-based load balancers. Key learnings included that having a “programmable edge” provides many advantages and also several challenges. Source: infoq.com

The Many Faces of Envoy Proxy: Edge Gateway, Service Mesh, and Hybrid Networking Bridge

At the inaugural EnvoyCon in Seattle, USA, engineers from Pinterest, Yelp and Groupon presented their current use cases for the Envoy Proxy. The overarching message was that the Envoy Proxy appears to be moving closer to fulfilling its vision of providing the “universal [proxy] data plane API” for modern networking, including edge gateways, service meshes and hybrid networking bridges. Source: infoq.com

Kubernetes Garbage Collection

The term “garbage collection” often refers to a memory management technique in computer programs where a garbage collector reclaims memory from objects that have gone out of scope or are no longer used. Interestingly, there is a garbage collector in Kubernetes which helps cleaning up Kubernetes objects that have gone out of scope. Source: medium.com

The Biggest IT Failures of 2018

This year provedonce againthat IT-related failures “are universally unprejudiced: they happen in every country; to large companies and small; in commercial, nonprofit, and governmental organizations; and without regard to status or reputation.” Below is a review that just scratches the surface of the sundry failures, glitches, and other IT hiccups that made the news in 2018. This year saw a slight reduction in the number of flight cancellations and delays due to computer-related problems as compared with the past three years, especially in the United States.
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The Kubernetes Scheduler

Kubernetes is a Container Orchestration Engine designed to host containerized applications on a set of nodes, commonly referred to as a cluster. Using a systems modeling approach, this series aims to advance the understanding of Kubernetes and its underlying concepts. The Kubernetes Scheduler is a core component of Kubernetes: After a user or a controller creates a Pod, the Kubernetes Scheduler, monitoring the Object Store for unassigned Pods, will assign the Pod to a Node.
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AWS Outperforms GCP in the 2018 Cloud Report

Customers rely on us to help navigate the complexities of the increasingly competitive cloud wars. This inspired the 2018 Cloud Computing Report, where we benchmark performance, latency, CPU, network, I/O, and cost of AWS and GCP. Note: As of December 20, 2018, we have updated two sections in this report: Network Throughput and I/O Experiment. The updates do not change the relative performance of either cloud — however, it does narrow the gap.
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Envoy Proxy at Reddit

Reddit’s engineering team and product complexity has seen significant growth over the last three years. Facilitating that growth has taken a lot of behind-the-scenes evolution of Reddit’s backend infrastructure. One major component has been adopting a service-oriented architecture, and a significant facet of that has been evolving service-to-service discovery and communication. As the number of services has grown, so has the complexity in how they interact with each other and legacy systems.
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8 emerging trends in container orchestration

Containerization is now officially mainstream. A quarter of Datadog’s total customer base has adopted Docker and other container technologies, and half of the companies with more than 1,000 hosts have done so. As containers take a more prominent place in the infrastructure landscape, we see our customers adding automation and orchestration to help manage their fleets of ephemeral containers. Across all infrastructure environments, our data shows increased usage of container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).
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