241–250 of 456 posts
https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-...
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I write software as a developer. This is how I earn my livelihood. Four years ago, I determined that while development work might seem to be near the top of the food chain, there will at some point where my work will be replaced by AIs. This is not so different from how word processors replaced the specialist job of typesetters. Word processors make "good enough" typesetting. You can still find typesetters practicing…
I find this fascinating. There are a few ideas that are at play. One is the march of progress seeking to automate everything. The rationale of automation is to improve productivity. But what happens when everything is automatic? I don't see a corollary being played out at the moment. There are a small number of people reaping the benefits, and huge swathes of the population being marginalised and disenfranchised as a…
I don't know! :-D
I don't know what society would look like from a purely technological point of view. From a spiritualist point of view, though, it could either go very well or very badly. When everything is automated, would people have enough time and space to really start asking the really big questions? Or would it accelerate and intensify existential anguish?
> There are a small number of people reaping the benefits, and huge swathes of the population being marginalised and disenfranchised as a result.
Yeah. Arguably, this has already happened.
> The second idea that interests me is this idea of very high technology. It is built upon layer after layer of very clever tech year after year that I wonder how long it would take to start again from scratch if some disaster rendered a large part of one of these layers unusable.
The stuff of sci-fi :-D Among them, alt-history novels (what happens when someone drops into a lower-tech era; you'd have to start from 0 ... literally, 0, as in Arabic numerals).
Open Source Ecology is trying to preserve some of this tech base. I find their aims awesome, though I am not sure how effective it is.
The flip side are things being spoken from well outside the techno-sphere, (for example, shamans and mystics) It is the perspective that the further evolution of human consciousness will, at some point, no longer require a technology or artifacts. Technology seen as the last crutch. The collapse of a high-technic civilization then sets the stage for a removal of that crutch, and humans learn to stand with two feet (so to speak).
Congratulations to the Spanner team for becoming part of the Google public cloud! And for those wondering, this is why Oracle wants billions of dollars from Google for "Java Copyright Infringement" because the only growth market for Oracle right now is their hosted database service, and whoops Google has a better one now. It will be interesting if Amazon and Microsoft choose to compete with Google on this service. If…
How is Google's cloud MySQL better than Oracle?
> Unlike most wide-area networks, and especially the public internet, Google controls the entire network and thus can ensure redundancy of hardware and paths, and can also control upgrades and operations in general I know this is a single system, but I'll still say it. This seems like another step in a scary trend for our internet.
Why is it a scary trend that Google has made their part of the internet more resilient?
For those trying to compare this with AWS Aurora, Aurora is more a regular database (MySQL / Postgres) engine with a custom data storage plugin that's AWS/ELB/SSD/EFS-aware. Because of this the database engine can make AWS specific decisions and optimizations that greatly boost performance. It supports master-master replication in the same region, master-slave across regions. Global Spanner looks like a different bea…
> Aurora... supports master-master replication in the same region I don't believe that's true, but I could be mistaken? (Work at Google, not on Cloud Spanner)
> Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta for Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that lets customers have their cake and eat it too: ACID transactions and SQL semantics, without giving up horizontal scaling and high availability. This is a bold claim. What do they know about the CAP theorem that I don't? Separately, (emphasis mine): > If you have a MySQL or PostgreSQL system th…
Why? Strong consistency isn't mutually exclusive with scalability. Google has written about it at length[1][2][3]. Furthermore, there are already more than a few attempts underway to build scalable relational databases ("NewSQL") outside Google.[4] 1: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html 2: https://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html 3: http://datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/F1%20A%20Dist... 4:…
Totally agree with your comment. While the "NewSQL" category is pretty broad and hard to define cleanly, one common theme is understanding the trade-offs that matter to your applications & operators as you distribute & scale SQL services.
For instance, with NuoDB we've decided that standard ANSI SQL with complete DML/DDL support is a must-have for migrating existing applications. As you distribute the database, the ACID contract you expect with those tools also has to be maintained, and we do that. As others have noted in this thread, however, there are many variants of "consistency." I believe if you're trying to exploit distributed scale, and low-latency through locality of reference, then you're probably willing to trade-off serializability. Using MVCC, logical timestamps (not globally coordinated clocks) and a few other well-understood techniques we provide a scale-out solution that maintains standard levels of isolation and consistency. In practice our customers are traditional enterprises using these capabilities to migrate legacy, high-value systems into modern architectures.
What Google has done is something very few other organizations can do: exploit their massive scale and hardware capabilities to offer something unique. From that perspective, they've also chosen to make trade-offs around syntax, indexing, transaction models etc. There's good commentary from my peer at Cockroach about this already on this thread, but the point is that Google picked a view of the database that makes sense for some applications and not others. Personally, I'm excited that Google has opened up this service and I'm sure it will lead to a lot of good introspection on what we need from modern data management services.
For those who haven't read it yet, I'd highly recommend the Quizlet blog referenced elsewhere on this thread. It's a really good discussion about some trade-offs that Cloud Spanner has made, and why they would or wouldn't map well a given application.
Bottom-line: both Cloud Spanner and NuoDB are examples of the modern, distributed, scale-out systems we're moving towards that focus on consistency, fault-tolerance and modernizing traditional SQL applications.
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Aurora is very cool but won't help you much after you vertically scale your master and still need more write capacity. With Cloud Spanner you get horizontal write scalability out of the box. Critical difference.
So if I'm understanding you, with Aurora all writes go to one master and you're constrained by the biggest instance AWS offers. Is that right? Do you have a sense of what that limit is? There's a pretty big price difference between Spanner and Aurora at the entry level so it's useful to explore this.
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>well that would be a lot of choice for the developers! A sad choice though. The centralization of computation is likely not a good thing in the long run.
> The centralization of computation is likely not a good thing in the long run. I agree. It only makes sense if you need special data for statistics, AI training, etc. In all other cases the classic way of programming on pc and notebook is smarter. If you do everything in the cloud, what if you lose Internet connection? I had that experience several times over the last years.
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Presumably a reference to the classic "Pencil myth": Americans when faced with a need to write things down spent millions of dollars inventing a low gravity ballpoint pen and Russians just used a pencil. As cutesy of a sentiment as it is, it's also full of misconceptions. The pens were invented by an American corporation that wanted better pens to sell in general (a smoother flow in a pen, regardless of gravity/orien…
You presume wrong. Pens are not a space program. I meant the differences in design philosophy that permeate aerospace engineering on both sides. Russian, built ugly but for strength and longevity. American, built for high capability with finesse and finer tolerances. The emergent properties of these different principles explain why Soyuz is still a preferred launch vehicle, but it was the Americans who got to the moo…
It is an interesting analogy this dichotomy you see in the design philosophies (both between the space programs and the mega-corporations), but perhaps my point, if I were attempting a point, is to beware of false dichotomies.