I checked off one of my bucket list items yesterday: catching a fish, cleaning it, and eating it.
This was the last day of a family vacation in Port St. Lucie in Florida. My original plans to go deep sea fishing fell through, so I went to the surprisingly well-stocked local Walmart to pick up some freshwater gear. I was lucky enough to nab a healthy-looking 15″ largemouth bass with a silver Mepps spinner from the lake behind our timeshare.
It’s been a while since I did one of these! I did a previous review of Facebook Haystack, which was designed as an online blob storage system. f4 is a sister system that works in conjunction with Haystack, and is intended for storage of warm rather than hot blobs. As is usual for Facebook, they came up with a system that is both eminently practical and tailored for their exact use case.
This paper, “f4: Facebook’s Warm BLOB Storage System” by Muralidhar et al., was published at OSDI ’14.
My coworker Colin McCabe and I recently gave a talk at Hadoop Summit Amsterdam titled “In-memory Caching in HDFS: Lower latency, same great taste.” I’m very pleased with how this feature turned out, since it was approximately a year-long effort going from initial design to production system. Combined with Impala, we showed up to a 6x performance improvement by running on cached data, and that number will only improve with time.
Slides: pptx
Video: Youtube
I received two interesting pieces of advice at the AMP Lab retreat this past week, which concisely state some of my favorite software engineering principles: