Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

Ten years ago, if you wanted to build software, you probably needed to know how to write code. Today, the line between “technical” and “non-technical” people is blurring. Website designers can make a living building sites for people on WordPress or Squarespace–without knowing how to write code. Salesforce integration experts can help a sales team The post Cloud Marketplace with Zack Bloom ap...

Remember when the best game you could play on your phone was Snake? In 1998, Snake was preloaded on Nokia phones, and it was massively popular. That same year Half-Life won game of the year on PC. Metal Gear Solid came out for Playstation. The first version of Starcraft also came out in 1998. In The post Scalable Multiplayer Games with Yan Cui appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

The Internet was designed as a decentralized system. Theoretically, if Alice wants to send an email to Bob, she can set up an email client on her computer and send that email to Bob’s email server on his computer. In reality, very few people run their own email servers. We all send our emails to The post Decentralized Objects with Martin Kleppmann appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

Developers can build networked applications today without having to deploy their code to a server. These “serverless” applications are constructed from managed services and functions-as-a-service. Managed services are cloud offerings like database-as-a-service, queueing-as-a-service, or search-as-a-service. These managed services are easy to use. They take care of operational burdens like scalabil...

Functions as a service are deployable functions that run without an addressable server. Functions as a service scale without any work by the developer. When you deploy a function as a service to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will take care of running that function whenever it is called. You don’t have to worry The post Serverless Scheduling with Rodric Rabbah appeared first on Software Engi...

Are we a media company or a technology company? Facebook and the New York Times are both asking themselves this question. Facebook originally intended to focus only on building technology–to be a neutral arbiter of information. This has turned out to be impossible. The Facebook newsfeed is defined by algorithms that are only as neutral The post React and GraphQL at New York Times appeared fi...

Cloud computing changed the economics of running a software company. A cloud is a network of data centers that offers compute resources to developers. In the 1990s, software companies purchased servers–an upfront capital expense that required tens of thousands of dollars. In the early 2000s, cloud computing started, and turned that capital expense into an The post How IBM Runs Its Cloud with...

Thumbtack is a marketplace for real-world services. On Thumbtack, people get their house painted, their dog walked, and their furniture assembled. With 40,000 daily marketplace transactions, the company handles significant traffic. On yesterday’s episode, we explored how one aspect of Thumbtack’s marketplace recently changed, going from asynchronous matching to synchronous “instant” matching. In t...

The labor market is moving online. Taxi drivers are joining Uber and Lyft. Digital freelancers are selling their services through Fiverr. Experienced software contractors are leaving contract agencies to join Gigster. Online labor marketplaces create market efficiency by improving the communications between buyers and sellers. Workers make their own hours, and their performance is judged The post...

Facebook serves interactive content to billions of users. Google serves query requests on the world’s biggest search engine. Uber handles a significant percentage of the transportation within the United States. These services are handling radically different types of traffic, but many of the techniques they use to balance loads are similar. Vivek Panyam is an The post Load Balancing at Scale with...

As a system becomes more complex, the chance of failure increases. At a large enough scale, failures are inevitable. Incident response is the practice of preparing for and effectively recovering from these failures. An engineering team can use checklists and runbooks to minimize failures. They can put a plan in place for responding to failures. The post Incident Response with Emil Stolarsky appear...

There is a quote from Jeff Bezos: “70% of the work of building a business today is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Only 30% is creative work. Things will be more exciting when those numbers are inverted.” That quote is from 2006, before Amazon Web Services had built most of their managed services. In 2006, you had The post Run Less Software with Rich Archbold appeared first on Software Engineering...

A popular software application serves billions of user requests. These requests could be for many different things. These requests need to be routed to the correct destination, load balanced across different instances of a service, and queued for processing. Processing a request might require generating a detailed response to the user, or making a write The post High Volume Event Processing with J...

As the gig economy grows, that growth necessitates innovations in the online infrastructure powering these new labor markets. In our previous episodes about Uber, we explored the systems that balance server load and gather geospacial data. In our coverage of Lyft, we studied Envoy, the service proxy that standardizes communications and load balancing among services. The post Fiverr Engineering wit...

In an event driven application, each component of application logic emits events, which other parts of the application respond to. We have examined this pattern in previous shows that focus on pub/sub messaging, event sourcing, and CQRS. In today’s show, we examine the intersection of event driven architecture and serverless architecture. Serverless applications can be The post Serverless Event-Dr...

The Netflix API is accessed by developers who build for over 1000 device types: TVs, smartphontes, VR headsets, laptops. If it has a screen, it can probably run Netflix. On each of these different devices, the Netflix experience is different. Different screen sizes mean there is variable space to display the content. When you open The post Netflix Serverless-like Platform with Vasanth Asokan appea...

Serverless architecture is software that runs without an addressable server. Serverless is made possible by two types of technology: platform as a service providers like Auth0, and functions as a service like AWS Lambda. With both of these technologies, we can program logic that runs without being deployed to a server. Functions as a service The post Serverless Authentication with Bobby Johnson ap...

Augmented reality applications are slowly making their way into the world of the consumer. Pokemon Go created the magical experience of seeing Pokemon superimposed upon the real world. IKEA’s mobile app lets you see how a couch would fit into your living room, which has a significant improvement on the furniture buying process. Augmented reality The post Augmented Reality with Scott Montgomerie ap...

Computational load is the amount of demand that is being placed on a computer system. “Load” can take the form of memory, CPU, network bandwidth, disk space, and other finite resources. When we design systems, we need to prepare for high-load events. On a social network, people are much more active in the mornings. On The post Elastic Load Balancing with Ranga Rajagopalan appeared first on Softwar...

It’s 9pm at night, and you are hungry. You order a pizza from Domino’s. You live on a street that’s dark, and so you have installed a smart lightbulb in front of your mailbox that lights up the address. When the pizza at Domino’s is ready, you want the lightbulb on your mailbox to light The post IFTTT Architecture with Nicky Leach appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

Computer chips have physical limitations. When transistors get too small, electrons start to behave in ways that make the hardware modules less reliable. Our reliable technological progress has been enabled by Moore’s Law: the idea that the number of components we can fit on a chip doubles roughly every 12-18 months. We can’t keep shrinking The post Quantum Computing Introduction with Zlatko Minev...

How would you build a system for indexing and monitoring the entire Internet? Start by breaking the Internet up into IP address ranges. Give each of those address ranges to servers distributed around the world. On each of those servers, iterate through your list of IP addresses, sending packets to them. Depending on what sorts The post Internet Monitoring with Matt Kraning appeared first on Softwa...

Scala is a functional and object oriented programming language built on the JVM. Scala Native takes this language, loved by many, and brings it to bare metal. Scala Native is an optimizing ahead-of-time compiler and lightweight managed runtime designed specifically for Scala. Denys Shabalin is a Research Assistant at the EPFL and the primary creator The post Scala Native with Denys Shabalin appear...

Tinder is a rapidly growing social network for meeting people and dating. In the past few years, Tinder’s userbase has grown rapidly, and the engineering team has scaled to meet the demands of increased popularity. On Tinder, you are presented with a queue of suggested people that you might match with, and you swipe left The post Tinder Engineering Management with Bryan Li appeared first on Softwa...

Playing a video on the Internet seems simple. You press play, the video gets delivered, and boom–you are watching Game of Thrones, right? It’s a bit more complicated. Unless you have built an application that involves video, you probably have not dealt with the world of codecs, bitrates, and streaming. Depending on the bandwidth between The post Video Infrastructure with Matt McClure and Jon...