[Links of the Day] 07/05/2018 : Cryptocurrency Consensus Algorithms , Fast18 conference, Google 2 real world project translation

• A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consensus Algorithms: this post provides a quick and easy way to understand the classification of the various cryptocurrency consensus models. It's a gentle introduction to the concept of proof of work vs proof of stakes vs proof of authority vs ... Well, you got it many many more algorithm.
• Notes from FAST18 : a very good overview of the Storage conference. What is becoming obvious over the years is that a lot of the actual practical implementation of novel distributed storage solution is directly pushed into Ceph. Ceph is poised to become the defacto default private storage solution even if it has a long way to go in term of manageability and automation. I think it stems from the preconception that a lot of operations need a storage admin person. But the projects like Helm are helping it get there.
• xg2xg : a practical translation table of internal google tech and similar technology available to those that do not work in the chocolate factory. It is a very good list of production-ready project that can be leveraged in many devops (and non-devops) environment.

[Links of the Day] 03/05/2018 : Fundamental Values of Cryptocurrencies, Kafka SQL streaming engine, SaaS pricing

• Fundamental Values of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology : paper looking at the fundamental values of cryptocurrency. The authors propose fundamental models and framework to study the price of digital assets. It's an interesting approach, however, they limited their analysis to only two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and Ethereum. While there are loads of other cryptocurrencies out there that either derives from these two or are independent. By solely focusing on these two, there is a feeling that the authors are missing the bigger picture and especially the transient aspect of the cryptocurrency market. 
• KSQL : this project offers a streaming SQL engine for Kafka. It basically allows you to use the Kafka stream engine with the common SQL model.
• SaaS Pricing : a real-life example of why the right SaaS pricing model is SOOO.. important. It can make or break your business. And you rarely have more than one shot at it. 

[Links of the Day] 15/02/2018 : #a16z crypto readings, Unlocking network embedding black box, Pouch - Alibaba's OCI implementation

• The Crypto Canon : a16z crypto readings resources. Really well organised and will bring you up to speed at a gradual pace. It covers a wide range of topics from foundations (& history); and key concepts and beginners’ guides — followed by specific topics such as governance; development, privacy, and security; scaling; consensus; cryptoeconomics and investing; fundraising and token distribution; decentralized exchanges; stablecoins; and cryptoeconomic primitives (crytocollectibles, curation markets, games & culture).
• Unlocking the black box of network embedding : this can have a huge impact on network graph embedding ( word2vec , skipgraph , etc..). The authors claim that they can provide a theoretical explanation of popular methods used to automatically map the structure and characteristics of networks
• Pouch : container technology open-source project created by Alibaba Group. Basically the 3000 pounds Asian gorilla decided to push Open container initiative and help make container tech a commodity. It's interesting that we are seeing history repeat itself in the container domain the same way it happened, to some extent, with the virtualization stack. 

[Links of the Day] - 18/01/2018 : Stellar Cryptocurrency Consensus protocol, Optimizing linux server for high throughput and low latency, performance impact of meltdown patch on HPC Filesystem

• Stellar Consensus Protocol : from ripple for to full-blown rewrite. Stellar looks like an impressive protocol addressing many of the shortcoming and risk of Ripple. Also, the authors seem to be smart enough to avoid jumping to fast onto the smart contract aspect as it is a really tough nut to crack. Maybe, with all the mayhem surrounding cryptocurrency, the stellar approach seems to be rather measured. Worth keeping an eye on. 
• Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency : very good post on how to optimise your Linux system. A lot of it has already described many times, but it is never a bad thing to repeat them.
• The performance impact of Meltdown patches on HPC FS (Lustre) : no surprise here, IO intensive applications are the one the most heavily impacted. However, I wasn't expecting 40% performance penalty and up to 45% for large folders. 

[Links of the Day] 03/08/2017 : NVMe over TCP , Lineage mapping of cryptocurrency , Perceptions of probability

• NVMe Over TCP : interesting kernel module by solarflare that allow people to use NVMe over TCP. It will be really interesting to see what type of performance you can start to get out of such setup. Even if performance is significantly decreased ( but higher than other storage solution) the economic gain vs costly NVMe solution would make this worth it. Also, It can start to accelerate the arrival of a new type of high-performance low-cost storage applications by lowering the barrier to entry.  
• Map of Coins : Impressive lineage mapping of crypto currency. But what is more concerning is the amount of dead Bitcoin child cryptocurrency, a lot of pump and dump scheme going on
• Perceptions : this really cool graphics show the how human perceive probability and how fuzzy it can be.  This can explain why a certain type of person might take more risk or less based on certain information due to a different interpretation of the content. 

[Links of the Day] 27/06/2017 : Blockchain trust & authentication for IoT, K8s patterns, Ripple cryptocurrency Network analysis

• Kubernetes Production Patterns and anti-patterns :  a lot of common sense, actually a lot of the patterns and anti-patterns can be applied to the other environments. But still a good refresher. 
• Blockchain based trust & authentication for decentralized sensor networks : using blockchain to solve the trust issue in a swarm of IoT on a network. The critical bit missing is the power requirement for running all the crypto operations.
• Large-Scale Analysis of the Ripple Cryptocurrency Network : an overview of the paper analysing the Ripple p2p blockchain based money transaction network. Turns out it suffer the same issue that "old school" p2p network. Take out the highly connected nodes and you can bring down / split the network. Nothing new, but still a good read and reminder that small network tends to be resilient to attack. But, if their resiliency diminishes with the increased reliance on a small number of highly connected nodes.

Links of the day 10/08/2015 : Cryptocurrency architecture, Distributed data stream processing and Rump kernels

• Architecture Of A Cryptocurrency : good overview of what make a cryptocurrency and the five pillars of its architecture : Network consensus, transaction Protocol and internal state
• High-throughput, low-latency, and exactly-once stream processing with Apache Flink : on the evolution of fault-tolerant streaming architectures and their performance
• On rump kernels and the Rumprun unikernel : a very good overview of the rump kernel . As stated, One of the key advantage of this type of unikernel is that it can run unmodified "legacy" applications. By that I means you can use your tested, running application that wasn't design for unikernel and slap it on top of rump. To a certain extend it allow a easy and smooth transition without the pain of re-coding everything from scratch. 

Links of the day 12 - 03 - 2015

Today's links 12/03/2015: cryptocurrency landscape, vsphere memory state, hyperscale datacenter system, rowhammer bit flip

• Bitcoin Landscape : database and categorization of crypto based company [ database here ]
• Vsphere memory state : What technique vmware use to increase memory density depending of the system memory state . Bonus : memory management performance in vsphere 5.0
• HDS 8000 : Ericsson HDS 8000 (Hyperscale Datacenter System), built on Intel® Rack Scale Architecture. It uses optical interconnect. Combining a disaggregated hardware architecture with optical interconnect removes the traditional distance and capacity limitations of electrical connections.
• Project Zero - row hammer : how flipping bit in memory can allow you to gain root access to a physical machine. Basically by aggressively flipping 2 bits you can trigger the third one to switch. ECC can help prevent that to a certain extent but is not completely immune.