~lobsters | Bookmarks (3)

Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024. My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on large-scale systems, distributed systems, or...

Back in 2019, we started thinking about how allow Lambda customers to use container images to deploy their Lambda functions. In theory this is easy enough: a container image is an image of a filesystem, just like the zip files we already supported. The difficulty, as usual with big systems, was performance. Specific...

As I’ve written about before, best of two and best of k are surprisingly powerful tools for load balancing in distributed systems. I have deployed them many times in large-scale production systems, and been happy with the performance nearly every time. There is one case where they don’t perform so well, though: when...