Software Engineering Daily

Ethereum allows developers to run decentralized applications. But the tooling for building and managing those decentralized applications is immature. Experienced software engineers have difficulty getting started with writing Ethereum applications because the stack of tools is so unfamiliar and different than traditional software tools. Whether or not Ethereum itself succeeds, developers in the fu...

A Kubernetes cluster presents multiple potential attack surfaces: the cluster itself, a node running on the cluster, a pod running in the node, a container running in a pod. If you are managing your own Kubernetes cluster, you need to be aware of the security settings on your etcd, your API server, and your container build pipeline. Many of the security risks of a Kubernetes cluster can be avoided...

Cloud computing has been popular for less than twenty years. Large software companies have existed for much longer. If your company was started before the cloud became popular, you probably have a large, data center on your companies premises. The shorthand term for this software environment is “on-prem”. Deploying software to your own on-prem servers can be significantly different than deploying...

Uber manages the car rides for millions of people. The Uber system must remain operational 24/7, and the app involves financial transactions and the safety of passengers. Uber infrastructure runs across thousands of server instances and produce terabytes of monitoring data. The monitoring data is used to understand the health of the software systems as well as relevant business metrics, such as dr...

Data infrastructure is advancing beyond the days of Hadoop MapReduce, single-node databases, and nightly reporting. Companies are adopting modern data warehouses, streaming data systems, and cloud-specific data tools like BigQuery. Every company with a large amount of data wants to aggregate that data into a data lake and make the data available to developers. All of this data can be used to power...

Infrastructure software is having a renaissance. Cloud providers offer a wide range of deployment tools, including virtual machines, managed Kubernetes clusters, standalone container instances, and serverless functions. Kubernetes has standardized the container orchestration layer and created a thriving community. The Kubernetes community gives the cloud providers a neutral ground to collaborate o...

Virtualization software allows companies to get better utilization from their physical servers. A single physical host can manage multiple virtual machines using a hypervisor. VMware brought virtualization software to market, creating popular tools for allowing enterprises to deploy virtual machines throughout their organization. Containers provide another improvement to server utilization. A virt...

Real estate is an asset that is not straightforward to invest in. Real estate can generate excellent returns for investors, but can require much more time and expertise than stocks. Cadre is a company that allows users to invest in real estate more easily and intelligently. Cadre provides users with lots of data about potential investments and enables investments in those opportunities within the...

RocksDB is a storage engine based on the log structured merge tree data structure. RocksDB was developed at Facebook to provide a tool for embedded databases. The code for RocksDB is a fork of LevelDB, an embedded database built by Google for the Chrome browser. Every database has a storage engine. The storage engine is the low level data structure that manages the data in the database. RocksDB is...

Hashicorp was founded seven years ago with the goal of building infrastructure tools for automating cloud workflows such as provisioning, secret management, and service discovery. Hashicorp’s thesis was that operating cloud infrastructure was too hard: there was a need for new tools to serve application developers. Hashicorp founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar began releasing open source...

Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments outlines a framework that individuals can use to make decisions grounded in economic philosophy. In his previous books, Tyler examined recent economic history. Stubborn Attachments gives his perspective for navigating the future. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also the host of Conversations with Tyler, a podcast that incl...

Artificial intelligence is reshaping every aspect of our lives, from transportation to agriculture to dating. Someday, we may even create a superintelligence–a computer system that is demonstrably smarter than humans. But there is widespread disagreement on how soon we could build a superintelligence. There is not even a broad consensus on how we can define the term “intelligence”. Information tec...

Mars is a cold, inhospitable planet far from earth. It presents one of the most complex challenges faced by engineers: how can we create a new world? To create a new world, first we have to get there. We can build new rockets with improved propulsion systems. We can build ships that allow us to survive the long, grueling trip from Earth to Mars. We can build robots that will help us construct our...

Social media has transformed our lives. It has also transformed how wars are fought. P.W. Singer’s new book “Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media” describes the far-reaching impact of social media on the tactics and strategies used by military, business, and everyday citizens. We have all read about stories such as Russian bots and Cambridge Analytica, but Likewar covers many more cases that...

Infrastructure software can be a great business. An infrastructure software company sells core technology to a large enterprise such as a bank or insurance company. This software has near zero marginal cost and generates a large annuity for the infrastructure software company. Once a bank has purchased your infrastructure software, the bank is likely to renew every year and never remove the softwa...

When TensorFlow came out of Google, the machine learning community converged around it. TensorFlow is a framework for building machine learning models, but the lifecycle of a machine learning model has a scope that is bigger than just creating a model. Machine learning developers also need to have a testing and deployment process for continuous delivery of models. The continuous delivery process f...

When a user interacts with an application to order a ride with a ridesharing app, the data for that user interaction is written to a “transactional” database. A transactional database is a database where specific rows need to be written to and read from quickly and consistently. Speed and consistency are important for applications like a user ordering a car, and riding around in that car, because...

React, Vue, and Angular are the most popular frontend JavaScript frameworks. Each of these frameworks lets frontend developers build components. A component is a high level visual abstraction that is used to compose a user interface. Frontend development has moved towards component-driven-development. At a typical technology company, a designer will put together a design file of different user int...

Netflix has thousands of service instances communicating with each other. When a Netflix client on a smartphone makes a request for a movie, that request hits Netflix’s backend, where the request is fulfilled by a chain of requests through different services. Services and clients communicate using several different interaction patterns. A service might send a single request and expect a single res...

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database. Prometheus includes a multi-dimensional data model, a query language called PromQL, and a pull model for gathering metrics from your different services. Prometheus is widely used by large distributed systems deployments such as Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Prometheus gathers metrics from your services by periodically scrapin...

When a developer provisions a cloud server, that server is called an “instance”. These instances can be used for running whatever workload a developer has, whether it is a web application, a database, or a set of containers. The cloud is cheap to get started on. New applications with few users can often be hosted on infrastructure that is less than $10 per month. But as an application grows in pop...

If a business has been operating successfully for a few years, that business has accumulated a high volume of data. That data exists in spreadsheets, CSV files, log files, and balance sheets. Data might be spread across local files on a user’s laptop, databases in the cloud, or storage systems in an on-premise data center. Older businesses have more data, in more places, in more formats. Legacy sy...

Robots are making their way into every area of our lives. Security robots roll around industrial parks at night, monitoring the area for intruders. Amazon robots tirelessly move packages around in warehouses, reducing the time and cost of logistics. Self-driving cars have become a ubiquitous presence in cities like San Francisco. For a hacker in a dorm room, or a researcher in a small lab, how do...

Netflix has petabytes of data and thousands of workloads running across that data every day. These workloads generate movie recommendations for users, create dashboards for data analysts to study, and reshape data in ETL jobs, to make it more accessible across the organization. Over the last ten years, data engineering has become a key component of what makes Netflix successful. There are many dif...

Chinese Internet companies operate at a massive scale. WeChat has over a billion users and is widely used as the primary means of payment by urban Chinese consumers. Alibaba ships 12 million packages per day, which is four times the amount of Amazon. JD.com, a Chinese ecommerce company, has perhaps the largest production Kubernetes installation in the world. China’s rapid adoption of Internet serv...