jroper · HackerTrans

5 years agodiscuss

I think the pertinent part of the comment you're replying to was graalvm, not so much Scala. I was compiling a small Scala codebase that took 15 minutes to compile - most of that was not my code, it analyses the reachability of the entire classpath and compiles it to native machine code.

jroper

5 years agodiscuss

With Akka Serverless, the mental model is that you are deploying entities, not code. Depending on the state model you select for a particular entity, Akka Serverless will shard or replicate these entities across many nodes to serve them - with the replicated entity state model, this means your state is at the place it needs to be already before a request is received regardless of where that request is received, with event sourced and value entity state models, this will route the requests to the correct node so that the processing is brought to where the state is. When you receive a request, there is no need to go get the state first, like you would with a key value store. Your entity already has the state, your entity is the state. You just write the logic to process the request given the state. You can do whatever operations you want on your entity without worrying about consistency or conflicts, because Akka Serverless ensures that that entity only lives on one node (or for replicated entities, using CRDTs to ensure conflict free updates). This is revolutionary compared to using a key value store - with a key value store, two nodes trying to update the same value at the same time will overwrite each other. With a key value store, two nodes trying to update the same value will contend with each other and potentially slow each other down, whereas with the sharded entity models, only one request operates on an entity at a time, or with replicated entities, two nodes can update the same entity independently and their updates will be merged without conflict asynchronously, they won't contend with each other or slow each other down.

Akka Serverless then also lets you define views on these entities - this is not something that is easy to do with a key value store, keeping the projection and the values in sync, ensuring that even when there's an error part way through an operation, that you don't end up with partial updates where the value is updated but the view isn't, ensuring that updates of the view are isolated from updates of the value to maximise performance, etc.

Akka Serverless is about inverting your view of how you see state. State isn't something that lives somewhere else that you manipulate, separate from your code. State is what you deploy. Akka Serverless gives you state models that are designed for distributed systems (which a serverless platform is), they scale, are fault tolerant, and are built on decades of computer science research.

jroper

7 years agodiscuss

Number 3 - thinking in events instead of REST actions, can't be stressed enough. Of course, some things must be actions (or another for that is commands), and in those situations, you need something that will turn a command into an event, this is one of the features of CloudState (https://cloudstate.io), which offers serverless event sourcing - you handle commands, and output events that can be further processed downstream by other functions.

jroper

7 years agodiscuss

I don't think Netflix puts their content on CDNs. A prerequisite for Netflix entering a country is whether AWS has a datacenter in that country (or for smaller countries, near that country). For example, Netflix only offered services in Australia when AWS opened an Australian datacenter. If Netflix were distributing their content via CDNs, then it wouldn't matter so much where AWS datacenters are, it would only matter where the CDN edge nodes were. I suspect that Netflix has far too much content to host it economically on a CDN.

jroper

8 years agodiscuss

My company hires engineers wherever they are. We're only incorporated in a few countries, the way we work is to engage a firm whose business it is to be incorporated in many countries so that they can hire people in those countries as full time employees, and contract them to our company. This firm charges a flat fee per person per year, and it's not a lot. I've been told that we'd have to have at least 5 people in a single country before incorporating in that country would cost the same as using this firm. They handle all the local obligations, payroll, entitlements, tax, superannuation, etc. I don't know how it works, but we even are able to get stock options, and I've never heard of any problems with that from any of my coworkers in any other countries. Other things like leave - our local job contracts conform to local law for leave allowances, and then we just work it out with our managers - we have an HR system that seems to be able to easily handle different leave policies for each employee, and if there's any problems, you just tell your manager and it gets sorted, no big deal.

comments