Links of the day 10/12/2015: Networks, Crowds, and Markets book, end to end encrypted DB, low level Datacenter devops

• Networks, Crowds, and Markets : Books on the different scientific perspectives and approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.
• ZeroDB : An end-to-end encrypted database protocol.
• Vapor : can't believe a company actually named themselves vapor .. anyway . While their hardware is semi interesting what really picked my interest is their Open Data Center Runtime Environment. It aims to offer capability to expose and manage low level DC capabilities such as Power and Temp. I am not sure if devops will really want to go that low but this might be a nice addition to orchestration framework for meta optimization. 

Links of the day 10/11/2015: #containers, #Unikernel & #virtualization power consumption, security, and streamlined

• Qubes with Rumprun : Interesting application of unikernel to deliver greater security at speed. the goal is to reduce the possible attack surface while maximizing performance.
• Power Consumption of Virtualization Technologies: empirical Investigation that confirm a lot of what we knew already, virtualization power consumption is higher than container.
• Vagga : containerisation tool without daemons. Slim down streamline version of container. No deamons or other process to run to support it. Looks like a solid contender to docker and other vagrant.

Links of the day 28 - 04 - 2015

Today's links 28/04/2015: #Rump Kernel Stack, Disque Distributed In Memory MQ, #FusionIO new PCIe product, Power level estimation of VM systems

• Ramp Stack : Nginx, MySQL, and PHP built on Rump Kernels without rearchitecting the application. Most of the work requires the app to be cross compile correctly (Nginx & MySQL). This implies that Unikernel-compatible unmodified POSIX C and C++ applications “just work” on top of Rump Kernels, provided that they can be cross- compiled.
• Disque :a distributed, in memory, message broker by Redis folk. Not production ready but a promising start.
• Pcie Flash : fusion IO is still kicking and deliver an interesting solution: up to 350,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) on random reads and 385,000 IOPS on random writes (on the 3.2 TB model) with a 15k nanosecond write latency and 2.8 GB/sec of read bandwidth. .. However I still don't get why they don't want to use NVMe tech
• Process-level Power Estimation in VM-based Systems : the authors describe a fine-grained monitoring middleware providing real-time and accurate power estimation of software processes running at any level of virtualization in a system. 

Smart Grids, Smart Meters, and the complexity of the power grid market

Voltalis sell energy management device to curb energy consumption. It can reduce the energy bill by up to 10% by switching on an off appliance, the aim is to reduce the demands at peak time. It allow energy producer to avoiding using expensive energy production systems to cope with the demands. And reduce the customer bill by reducing their energy consumption when the price is at its highest.

A couple of month ago I saw a very interesting news about this smart grid startup:

• Wy a french regulator is bullying a smart grid start up
• EDF will be compensated for the economy done by its customers (french)
  

The judgement created quite a turmoil however a lot of people complaining didn't understand very well the mechanism of the electricity grid and its market and jumped to the easy conclusion that the french regulator and EDF was trying to eliminate green competitor.However the reality is a little bit more complex...



Voltalis get (very well) paid when a energy provider ask them to reduce the energy consumption of some of its customers in order to ease the pressure. However when Voltalis does the same when it is not requested it is required by law that the company responsible for this reduction must either pay a compensation or consume the energy that was not consumed ( hard to do ).


Why is the law like that? Simple. You cannot just fire up or shut down a nuclear power plant like that. Increasing or decreasing energy production is a slow and expensive process . As a result energy providers try to match / predict the consumption to limit the waste. By reducing the energy consumption voltalis disturb the systems and in fact make it a lot more inefficient in a certain way ( the electricity is produced but not consumed).

Solving this issue would require Voltalis and the different actor to share information in order to optimize the system efficiency. However i suspect that the reactivity of the Volatlis system is an order of magnitude faster than the one the energy provider can have with their production systems. I think as long as the systems is not fully integrated with the energy production regulation it is basically just a way to exploit fail in the systems coated with the cloak of sustainability ( yes the customer consume less but the energy is still produced and wasted..)