Ten Years of AWS Lambda

Garbage Collection and Metastability Cleaning up is hard to do. I’ve written a lot about stability and metastability, but haven’t touched on one other common cause of metastability in large-scale systems: garbage collection. GC is great. Garbage collected languages like Javascript, Java, Python, and Go power a big chunk of the internet’s...

Resource Management in Aurora Serverless Systems, big and small. My favorite thing about distributed systems is how they allow us to solve problems at multiple levels: single process problems, single machine problems, multi-machine problems, and large-scale cluster problems. Our new paper Resource management in Aurora Serverless1 describes what...

Let’s Consign CAP to the Cabinet of Curiosities CAP? Again? Still? Brewer’s CAP theorem, and Gilbert and Lynch’s formalization of it, is the first introduction to hard trade-offs for many distributed systems engineers. Going by the vast amounts of ink and bile spent on the topic, it is not unreasonable for new folks to conclude that it’s an...

Not Just Scale Bookmarking this so I can stop writing it over and over. It seems like everywhere I look on the internet these days, somebody’s making some form of the following argument: You don’t need distributed systems! Computers are so fast these days you can serve all your customers off a single machine! This argument is silly and...

It’s always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time. It's not the 1980s anymore, thankfully. The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option,...