News

AWS power outage with data loss

On August 31st, 2019, an Amazon AWS US-EAST-1 datacenter in North Virginia experienced a power failure at 4:33 AM, which led to the datacenter’s backup generators to kick on. Unfortunately, these generators started failing at approximately 6:00 AM , which led to 7.5% of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes becoming unavailable. ‘1:30 PM PDT At 4:33 AM PDT one of ten data centers in one of the six Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Region saw a failure of utility power.

New ways to make vertical farming stack up

Mr Elder is product manager for Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a “vertical farming” company based at Invergowrie, near Dundee, in Scotland. Each of the nine-metre-high towers in the demonstration unit that he runs occupies barely 40 square metres. But by stacking the trays one on top of another an individual tower provides up to 350 square metres of growing area.

How China Is Cashing in on Group Chats

One sunny afternoon this April, a Chinese teenager nicknamed Gallen was backpacking through Bali, hunting for things to do. But he didn’t turn to TripAdvisor for crowd-sourced suggestions (too time consuming) or scroll through Instagram for local geotags (too imprecise). Instead, Gallen enlisted recommendations from other nearby tourists through a WeChat group chat organized by the online travel provider Ctrip.

Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics, assembled gradually by a group of brilliant minds over the first decades of the 20th century, is an incredibly successful theory. We need it to account for how atoms decay, why stars shine, how transistors and lasers work and, for that matter, why tables and chairs are solid rather than immediately collapsing onto the floor. Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence.

Insiders say an ambitious MIT Media Lab project is mostly smoke and mirrors

Anatomy Of A Power Outage: Explaining the August Outage Affecting 5% of Britain

How Lyft Creates Hyper-Accurate Maps from Open-Source Maps and Real-Time Data

Introducing KiloGram, a New Technique for AI Detection of Malware

Why our team cancelled our move to microservices

Recently our development team had a small break in our feature delivery schedule. Technical leadership decided that this time would be best spent splitting our monolithic architecture into microservices. After a month of investigation and preparation, we cancelled the move, instead deciding to stick with our monolith.

Announcing etcd 3.4

In particular, etcd experienced performance issues with a large number of concurrent read transactions even when there is no write (e.g. “read-only range request … took too long to execute”). Previously, the storage backend commit operation on pending writes blocks incoming read transactions, even when there was no pending write. Now, the commit does not block reads which improve long-running read transaction performance.