FoundationDB proves your primary datastore is the worst place in your stack to bet on new tech

Kevin Gallo just announced Bash support on Windows. If you have never had to interact with the Windows Batch language, this might not seem like such a big deal. Surely Batch could not be substantially worse than Bash, right? Bash: a language that was neither designed, nor evolved. An adequate solution to a problem that has since become orders of...

This morning, TechCrunch broke the story that Mesos support is coming to Windows. This story is meant to coincide with Ben Hindman’s MesosCon keynote, in which there will be a real, end-to-end demo showing us scheduling work on a cluster with a mix of Linux and Windows nodes. For the vast majority of the project, I have been the only dedicated...

The performance of live site systems — everything from K/V stores to lock servers — is still measured principally in latency and throughput. Server I/O performance still matters here. It is impossible to do well on either of these metrics without a performant I/O subsystem. Oddly, while the last 10 years have seen remarkable improvements in the...

IBM was at the top of the news aggregators a couple days ago as irresponsible rumors spread that it was laying off more than 100,000 people. IBM eventually posted a scathing denial, though not quickly enough to stem the flow of Internet pundits who showed up in droves (at, e.g., Hacker News) to explain just how irrelevant IBM really is. This is a...

Bond is a performant serialization system developed and deployed across dozens of mission-critical, high-scale infrastructure projects internally here at Microsoft. Today the technical lead, Adam Sapek, is open sourcing the project on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license. Since there is going to be no official MSFT announcement, I would...