Links

Wednesday 2024-07-03 Assorted Links
Assorted Links links
Published: 2024-07-03
Wednesday 2024-07-03 Assorted Links

Assorted links for Wednesday, July 3:

  1. Error and Transaction Handling in SQL Server: Part One – Jumpstart Error Handling
  2. Error and Transaction Handling in SQL Server: Part Two – Commands and Mechanisms
  3. Error and Transaction Handling in SQL Server: Part Three – Implementation
  4. SLICK: Adopting SLOs for improved reliability

    SLICK can help us locate metric and performance data regarding the reliability of a specific service just by knowing its name. It does this by building an index of onboarded services that link to dashboards with standard visualizations to analyze and assess the service reliability. So, with a single click, it becomes possible to know whether a service currently meets or doesn’t meet user expectations. We can then start asking why.

  5. Using Admission Controllers to Detect Container Drift at Runtime
Tuesday 2024-07-02 Assorted Links
Assorted Links links
Published: 2024-07-02
Tuesday 2024-07-02 Assorted Links

Assorted links for Tuesday, July 2:

  1. How to Measure DevSecOps Success: Key Metrics Explained

    Key DevSecOps metrics:

    1. Number of security vulnerabilities over time
    2. Compliance with security policies
  2. “Energy-smart” bricks need less power to make, are better insulation

    According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO2 emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US.

  3. Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs

    In the new paper, titled “Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling,” the researchers describe creating a custom 2.7 billion parameter model without using MatMul ([matrix multiplication]) that features similar performance to conventional large language models (LLMs). They also demonstrate running a 1.3 billion parameter model at 23.8 tokens per second on a GPU that was accelerated by a custom-programmed FPGA chip that uses about 13 watts of power (not counting the GPU’s power draw). The implication is that a more efficient FPGA “paves the way for the development of more efficient and hardware-friendly architectures,” they write.

  4. Enhancing Netflix Reliability with Service-Level Prioritized Load Shedding

    We implemented a concurrency limiter within PlayAPI that prioritizes user-initiated requests over prefetch requests without physically sharding the two request handlers. This mechanism uses the partitioning functionality of the open source Netflix/concurrency-limits Java library.

  5. Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone
Monday 2024-07-01 Assorted Links
Assorted Links links
Published: 2024-07-01
Monday 2024-07-01 Assorted Links

Assorted links for Monday, July 1:

  1. The Danger of Atomic Operations

    Most engineers reach for atomic operations in an attempt to produce some lock-free mechanism. Furthermore, programmers enjoy the intellectual puzzle of using atomic operations. Both of these lead to clever implementations which are almost always ill-advised and often incorrect.

  2. What an SBOM can do for you
  3. sched_ext: a BPF-extensible scheduler class (Part 1)

    sched_ext allows you to write and run your custom process scheduler optimized for your target workloads and hardware architectures using BPF programs.

  4. sched_ext: scheduler architecture and interfaces (Part 2)
  5. Leveraging AI for efficient incident response

    We’ve streamlined our investigations through a combination of heuristic-based retrieval and large language model (LLM)-based ranking to provide AI-assisted root cause analysis. During backtesting, this system has achieved promising results: 42% accuracy in identifying root causes for investigations at their creation time related to our web monorepo.