Software Engineering Daily

Google has built a microservices architecture on top of the internal container management system called Borg. These services communicate over an internal protocol known as Stubby. Borg and Stubby are tightly coupled to Google’s infrastructure–it would not make sense for Google to open source them–but Google has worked with the open source community to develop open source projects with the core fun...

At Netflix, 500 billion events and 1.3 petabytes of data are ingested by the system per day.  This includes video viewing activities, error logs, and performance events. On today’s episode, we dive deep into the data pipeline of Netflix, and how it evolved from their 1.0 version to the modern 2.0 version. Before listening to this episode, check out the blog post that inspired it.

Dropbox has been storing files on Amazon Web Services for 8 years, and Dropbox’s core business is storing files. For the past three years, Dropbox has been working on a project to migrate its file storage from Amazon Web Services to its own custom built infrastructure. Magic Pocket is the name of Dropbox’s new infrastructure layer, and it gives Dropbox more control and improved economics. James Co...

Almost a year ago, Software Engineering Daily aired a week of shows about decentralized technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and IPFS. Bitcoin has established itself as a stable network, but it can only be used for financial transactions. Ethereum is a global computer built on a blockchain, but it does not have the adoption of Bitcoin. IPFS is a distributed data store with an incentivization layer...

Distributed systems products are often marketed with terms like “real-time data” and “hassle-free scaling”, but what do those terms actually mean? Is data in a distributed system ever reliably “real time”? Do we ever have strong enough plans about our scalability strategy to say that scaling will be “hassle free”? Camille Fournier joins us today to discuss distributed systems in practice. Like eve...

Distributed databases are difficult to operate, and Crate.io wants to change that. Crate is a fast, scalable, easy-to-use SQL database that is built to run in containerized environments. An average software company runs several databases–MySQL for relational store, MongoDB for a document database, HDFS for blob storage and data warehouse, elastic search for search. On today’s show, Jodok Batlogg f...

Microsoft has built a suite of technologies on top of its Azure infrastructure as a service. Today, we discuss Azure Stream Analytics, a real-time event processing engine developed at Microsoft. Azure Streaming allows for constant querying of incoming data streams, and my guest Santosh Balasubramanian discusses Azure and the movement from batch processing to stream processing.

Apache Spark is a framework for fast, distributed, in-memory analysis. Apache Cassandra is a distributed database management system that provides high availability and fast throughput. Today, we are collecting fast, big data streams from user behavior, smart phones and sensors, and the disk checkpointing of and query language of Hadoop MapReduce is no longer adequate. Tim Berglund from Datastax ca...

React started as just a view layer–it was the V in MVC. React has moved down the stack, with Flux, Redux, GraphQL, and Relay providing opinions for how React applications should structure their data flow. Jared Forsyth works at Khan Academy, which uses React on the front end. At Khan Academy, Jared has experimented with many different ways of handling data flow for a React application, and in toda...

Applications on your phone can talk to each other, but the way that apps interact is still far from the way that web pages interact. Mike Wakerly is the CTO of Button, a service that connects mobile apps to each other. By embedding a component from Button into your app, you can easily request the functionality of an app while you are in a different app. In this episode, Mike and I discuss the futu...

The Changelog is one of the most popular Software Engineering Podcasts in existence. Open source software moves fast, and The Changelog helps developers keep up with that rapid pace by publishing consistent podcasts and newsletters. When I started Software Engineering Daily, Changelog was one of the shows that I looked at for inspiration on how to succeed as a software podcaster. Adam Stacoviak an...

Virtual reality is a new platform for software engineers to work with. Best practices for VR development have not become widespread throughout the developer community. If you are developing VR software, you need to know how to avoid making the user sick, and this requires an understanding of the hardware limitations. Andreia Gaita is a software engineer at github. On today’s episode of Software En...

Patients with Type-1 diabetes need to frequently pump insulin into their bodies. In order to know when to pump insulin, these patients have a continuous glucose monitor alarm which detects incorrect levels of blood glucose. When the alarm goes off, the diabetes patient administers insulin manually through the pump. In an ideal world, the alarm would communicate with the insulin pump, creating a cl...

At Netflix, building a user interface requires data about movies, actors, users, accounts, and much more. If each piece of data is coming from a different source, a programmer has to call each of the services that has access to that data. Falcor is a piece of technology designed at Netflix to solve this problem. Falcor creates a unified JSON model of all of the data you could want–and Netflix engi...

Kubernetes is an open-source distributed operating system that allows normal engineers to manage their resources at the scale that Google does. With Docker providing the APIs to make containers easy to work with, Kubernetes allows processes to be easily distributed and replicated across a data center. Kubernetes was created at Google, and today’s guest Kelsey Hightower is a staff developer advocat...

Exception monitoring services and log management services are two sides of a gradient. Exception monitoring services capture and aggregate the problems that occur on your application. Log management services aggregate all of your logs, so that you can decide for yourself what constitutes a problem. Brian Rue from Rollbar joins the show today to talk about Rollbar’s exception monitoring architectur...

As software engineering gets more popular, the resources that we use to read and understand software are growing and improving. Scale Your Code is an organization that seeks to improve accessibility to the world’s programming knowledge, and today’s guest Christophe Limpalair joins me to discuss Scale Your Code. Christophe is a podcaster and blogger who runs Scale Your Code.

Docker is an open platform for distributed applications. Docker allows for standardized container runtimes and will be an important piece of infrastructure for many years to come. But if you are new to Docker, the technology can be confusing and intimidating. What is a container? Why do I want to put my application in a container? Today’s guest Prakhar Srivastav wrote a long tutorial explaining th...

Apache Kafka has become the most popular open-source solution for persistent replicated messaging in the Hadoop ecosystem. But some software engineers who are working with “big data” don’t want to deal with the configuration and set up of Kafka. One way to side step this problem is to go with a managed solution, like Microsoft Azure Event Hubs. Dan Rosanova is today’s guest. He joins us to discuss...

Kubernetes has been a focus of several previous shows on Software Engineering Daily. The architecture and management of our distributed systems have changed, and widespread adoption of containers and container management systems is just beginning. Joseph Jacks from Kismatic joins the show today to give us a perspective on the past, present, and future of container management. He also talks about h...

“Graphing when your Facebook Friends are awake” was trending at the top of Hacker News when Alex Hogue first posted it. Alex wrote a blog post about this piece of software he built that interacts with public Facebook APIs to detect when any of his friends are awake or asleep. As I read that post, I wanted to talk to Alex, because it was such a creative and technical piece of software–but it is sur...

Applications crash, and engineers need to be able to quickly find the root cause of a crash. Apps have become distributed, and debugging workflows have changed. Developers need better tools to identify and troubleshoot problems with their apps. Ben Curtis joins us today to discuss Honeybadger, an exception and monitoring tool for web applications. We discuss how software tools can be used to detec...

Kubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications. Google developed Kubernetes after fifteen years of running containers in production. Brendan Burns is a founder of the Kubernetes project, and he joins us to talk about the lessons learned as Google has built containerized applications to distribute across its massive infrastructur...

Elixir is a programming language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir allows metaprogramming, polymorphism, and a web framework called Phoenix that has drawn positive comparisons to Ruby on Rails. Jose Valim is today’s guest. He built Elixir to augment a language that he loved–Erlang. On Software Engineering Daily, we interviewed Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang, which was a very...

Engineers who want to add search to their application usually deploy Elasticsearch, or write their own search engine that uses TF-IDF. These solutions work well for large documents, but are less effective for large volumes of small records–which is how many modern web and mobile applications are structured. In today’s show, Julien Lemoine discusses how his company Algolia thinks about search. Algo...