Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed relational database service that provides great features to make sharding easy to use in the cloud. In this post, I describe how to use Amazon RDS to implement a sharded database architecture to achieve high scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance for data storage. I discuss considerations for schema design and monitoring metrics when deploying Amazon RDS as a database shard. I also outline the challenges for resharding and highlight the push-button scale-up and scale-out solutions in Amazon RDS.

We introduce SMoTherSpectre, a speculative code-reuse attack that leverages port-contention in simultaneously multi-threaded processors (SMoTher) as a side channel to leak information from a victim process. SMoTher is a fine-grained side channel that detects contention based on a single victim instruction.

Killed by Google is a Free and Open Source list of dead Google products, services, and devices.
It serves to be a tribute and memorial of beloved products and services killed by Google.

This International Docking System Standard (IDSS) Interface Definition Document (IDD) establishes a standard docking interface to enable on-orbit crew rescue operations and joint collaborative endeavors utilizing different spacecraft.

This article builds upon Vivek Rau’s chapter “Eliminating Toil” in Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems [1]. We begin by recapping Vivek’s definition of toil and Google’s approach to balancing operational work with engineering project work. [1] B. Beyer, C. Jones, J. Petoff, and N. Murphy, eds., Site Reli- ability Engineering (O’Reilly Media, 2016).

The rogue code can disable safety systems designed to prevent catastrophic industrial accidents. It was discovered in the Middle East, but the hackers behind it are now targeting companies in North America and other parts of the world, too.

Mirai, the virulent Internet of Things malware that delivered record-setting denial-of-service attacks in 2016, has been updated to target a new crop of devices, including two found inside enterprise networks, where bandwidth is often plentiful, researchers said on Monday.

When you are working with a database, or any other kind of software, your experience is enhanced or hindered by the tools you use to interact with it. PostgreSQL has a command line tool, psql, and it’s pretty powerful, but some people much prefer a graphical editor.

VMware Cloud on AWS Quick Reference Poster.

Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX pathnames and filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes. A pathname lets you select a particular file, and may include zero or more “/” characters. Each pathname component (separated by “/”) is a filename; filenames cannot contain “/”. Neither filenames nor pathnames can contain the ASCII NUL character (\0), because that is the terminator. This lack of limitations is flexible, but it also creates a legion of unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws). It also makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users.

This website is a solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-tech Magazine. It has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

SUSE adds C-level executives to ensure continued success, momentum and growth as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions to enable hybrid and multi-cloud workload management

drist aims at being simple to understand and pluggable with standard tools. There is no special syntax to learn, no daemon to run, no agent, and it relies on base tools like awk, sed, ssh and rsync.

I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself. Some of them are, yes, quite nerdy. But they certainly help me be productive. And maybe in time more and more of them will become mainstream, as a few already have.

We have grown from a handful of regions to 15 locations around the world. Even as the demands increase, we are bound by hard physical constraints of power and optics supply availability. Because of these dual pressures of increasing demand and physical constraints, we decided to rethink and transform our data center network from top to bottom, from topologies to the fundamental building blocks used within them. In this post, we’ll share the story of this transformation over the last two years.

Exciting times are ahead for us. We expect that our Zion, Kings Canyon, and Mount Shasta designs will address our growing workloads in AI training, AI inference, and video transcoding respectively.

Easy flamegraphs for Rust projects and everything else, without Perl or pipes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to welcome the new shiny RFC8482, which effectively deprecates the DNS ANY query type. DNS ANY was a "meta-query" - think of it as a similar thing to the common A, AAAA, MX or SRV query types, but unlike these it wasn't a real query type - it was special. Unlike the standard query types, ANY didn't age well. It was hard to implement on modern DNS servers, the semantics were poorly understood by the community and it unnecessarily exposed the DNS protocol to abuse. RFC8482 allows us to clean it up - it's a good thing.

For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure.

Reinforcement learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are un- likely to behave optimally all the time. If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions — harmful either for the agent or for the environment — and lead the agent into a safer situation. However, if the learning agent expects to receive rewards from this sequence, it may learn in the long run to avoid such interrup- tions, for example by disabling the red button — which is an undesirable outcome.