Identifiers

Vol. 16 No. 6 – November-December 2018

Identifiers

Design Patterns for Managing Up:
Four challenging work situations and how to handle them

Challenges come up all the time at work. Spend time now thinking about how you want to be seen at work, and then think about how that version of you would respond to the challenges that you could encounter. When you have a plan in place, you are much more likely to succeed.

by Kate Matsudaira

Edge Computing:
Scaling resources within multiple administrative domains

Creating edge computing infrastructures and applications encompasses quite a breadth of systems research. Let’s take a look at the academic view of edge computing and a sample of existing research that will be relevant in the coming years.

by Nitesh Mor

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Blockchain Universe:
Blockchain remains a mystery, despite its growing acceptance.

It is difficult these days to avoid hearing about blockchain. Despite the significant potential of blockchain, it is also difficult to find a consistent description of what it really is. This article looks at the basics of blockchain: the individual components, how those components fit together, and what changes might be made to solve some of the problems with blockchain technology.

by Jim Waldo

Know Your Algorithms:
Stop using hardware to solve software problems.

Knowing that your CPU is in use 100 percent of the time doesn’t tell you much about the overall system other than it’s busy, but busy with what? Maybe it’s sitting in a tight loop, or some clown added a bunch of delay loops during testing that are no longer necessary. Until you profile your system, you have no idea why the CPU is busy. All systems provide some form of profiling so that you can track down where the bottlenecks are, and it’s your responsibility to apply these tools before you spend money on brand new hardware.

by George Neville-Neil

Metrics That Matter:
Critical but oft-neglected service metrics that every SRE and product owner should care about

Measure your site reliability metrics, set the right targets, and go through the work to measure the metrics accurately. Then, you’ll find that your service runs better, with fewer outages, and much more user adoption.

by Benjamin Treynor Sloss, Shylaja Nukala, Vivek Rau

Identity by Any Other Name:
The complex cacophony of intertwined systems

New emerging systems and protocols both tighten and loosen our notions of identity, and that’s good! They make it easier to get stuff done. REST, IoT, big data, and machine learning all revolve around notions of identity that are deliberately kept flexible and sometimes ambiguous. Notions of identity underlie our basic mechanisms of distributed systems, including interchangeability, idempotence, and immutability.

by Pat Helland

Achieving Digital Permanence:
The many challenges to maintaining stored information and ways to overcome them

Today’s Information Age is creating new uses for and new ways to steward the data that the world depends on. The world is moving away from familiar, physical artifacts to new means of representation that are closer to information in its essence. We need processes to ensure both the integrity and accessibility of knowledge in order to guarantee that history will be known and true.

by Raymond Blum, Betsy Beyer