Linux.conf.au 2016 – Thursday – Session 1

Jono Bacon Keynote

  • Community 1.0 (ca 1998)
    • Observational – Now book on how to do it
    • Organic – people just created them
    • Technical Enviroment – Had to know C (or LaTex)
  • Community 2.0 (ca 2004, 2005)
    • Wikipedia, Redhat, Openstack, Github
    • Renaissance – Stuff got written down on how to do it
    • Self Organising groups – Gnome, Kde, Apache foundation – push creation of tech and community
    • Diversity – including of skills , non-technical people had a seat at the table and a role.
    • Company Engagement – Starting hiring community managers, sometimes didn’t work very well
  • Community 3.0 ?
  • Why?
    • “Thoughtful and productive communities make us as species better“
  • Access and power is growing exponentally
  • But stuff around is changing
    • Cellphones are access method for most
    • Cloud computering
    • CD-printers, drones, cloud, crowdfunding, Ardinino
    • Lots for channels to get things to everybody and everybody can participate
  • “We need to empower diversity of both people and talent”
  • Human brain has not had a upgrade in a long time
  • Bold and Audacious Goals
    • Openness is at the heart of all of these
    • Open source in the middle of many
  • Eg Drone
    • Runs linux
    • Open API
  • “Open Source is where Society innovates”
  • “Need to make great community leadership accessible to everybody”
  • “Predictable collaboration – an aspirational goal where we won’t *need* community managers”
  • Not just about technology
    • We are all human.
  • Tangible value vs Intangible value
    • Tangible can be measured and driven to fix the numbers
    • Intangible – trust, dignety
  • System 1 thinking vs System 2 thinking
    • Instant vs considered
  • SCARF Model of thinking
    • Status – clarity of relative importance, need people to be able to flow between them
    • Certainty – Security and predictability
    • Autonomy – People really want choices
    • R – I got distracted by twitter, I’m sure it was important
    • Fair – fairness
  • Two Golden Rules
    • We accomplish our goals indirectly
    • We influence behaviour with small actions
  • We need to concentrate to building an experience for people to who join the community
  • Community Workflow
    • Communication – formal, inclormal? Coc? Tech to use?
    • Release sceduled, support?
    • How to participate, tech, hackthons
    • Government structure
  • Paths for different people
    • New developers
    • Core Developers
    • Consumers
    • Downstream Cosutomers
    • Organizations
  • Opportunity vs Belonging
  • Questions
    • Increasing Signal to Noise ratio – Trolls are easy[er], harder for people who are just no deft in communication. Mentorship can help
    • Destructive communities (like 4chan) , how can technology be used to work against these – Leaders need to set examples. Make clear abusive behavour towards others. Won’t be able to build tools that will completely remove bad behaviour. Had to tell destructive vs direct automatically but they can augmented.
    • What about Linus type people? – View is that even though it works for him and it is okay with people he knows. Viewed inwards by others it sets a bad example.

Using Persistent Memory for Fun and Profit by Matthew Wilcox

  • What is it?
    • Retains data without power
    • NV-DIMMs available – often copy DRAM to flash when power lost
    • Intel 3D X-point shipping in 2017. will become more a standard feature
  • How do we could use it
    • Total System persistence
      • But the CPU cache is not backed up, so pending writes vanish
    • Application level persistence
      • Boot new kernel be keep the running apps
      • CPU cache still
    • Completely redesigned operating system to use
      • But we want to use in 2017
    • A special purpose filesystem
      • Implementation not that great
    • A very fast block device
      • Usaged as very fast cache for apps really need it. Not really general purpose
    • Small modifications to existing file systems
      • On top of ext2 (xip)
      • DAX
  • How do we actually use it
    • New CPU instructions ( mostly to make sure encourage that things are flushed from the CPU cache)
    • Special purpose programming language shouldn’t be needed for interpreted languages. But for compiled code libraries might be needed
  • NVML library
  • Stuff built on NVML library so far.
    • Red-Black tree, B-tree, other data-structures
    • Key-value store
    • Fuse file system
    • Example MySQL storage engine
  • Resources
  • Questions
    • In 2017 will we have mix of persistent and non-persistent RAM? – Yes . New Layer in the storage hierarchy
    • Performance of 3d will be slower a little slow than DRAM but within ballpark, various trade-offs with other characteristics
    • Probably won’t have native crypto

Dropbox Database Infrastructure by Tammy Butow

  • Dropbox for last 4 months, previously Digital Ocean, prev National Australia Bank
  • Using MySQL for last 10 years. Now doing it FT.
  • 400 Million customers
  • Petabytes of data across thousands of servers
  • In 2012 Dropbox just had 1 DBA, but was huge then.
  • In 2016 it has grown to 9 people
  • 6000 DB servers -> DB Proxy -> DB as a service (edgestore) -> memcache -> Web Servers (nginx)
  • Talk – Go at Dropbox, Zviad Metreveli on Youtube
  • Applications talk directly to edgestore not directly to database
  • vitess is mysql proxy (by youtube) similar to what dropbox wrote. Might move to that
  • Details
    • Percona 5.6
    • Constantly upgrading (4 times in last year)
    • DBmanager – service we manage mysql via
  • Each Cluster is proiamry + 2 replicas
  • Use xtrabackup ( to hdfs locally and s3)
  • Tools
    • Tasks grow and take time
    • DBmanager
      • Automating DB operations
      • Web interface with standard operations and status of servers
      • Cloning Screen
      • Promotion Screen
      • Create and restore backups
      • WebUI gives you feedback and you can see how things are going. Don’t need magic command lines. Good for other teams to see stuff and do stuff (options right in front of them).
      • Benchmarking
      • Database job scheduling and prioritization. Promotion will take priority over anything else.
      • Common logging, centralized server and nice gui that everyone can see
    • HERMES
      • Availbale on dropbox github
      • Visable all quests and actions that need to be done by the team
    • Monitoring
      • Grafana
  • Performance
    • Improving backup and restore speed.
      • LZOP
      • xtrabackup
  • Auto-remediation (naoru) – up on github at some point
  • Inventory Management
    • Machine Database (MDB)
    • Has tags for things like kernel versions
  • Diognostics
    • Automated periodic tcpdump
    • Tools to kill long running transactions
    • List current queries running
    • atop
  • The Future
    • Reliabilty, performance and cost improvements
    • Config management
    • Love the “Go Programming Language” by Kernighan
    • List of Papers they love
  • Questions
    • Using percona not mariadb. They also shard not cluster DBs
    • Big Culture change from Back to Dropbox – At Bank tried to decom old systems, reduce risk. At Dropbox everyone is very Brave and pushing boundarys
    • machine database automatically built largely
    • Predictive Analysis on hardware – Do some , lots of dashboards for hardware team, lifecycle management of hardware. Don’t hug servers. Hug the hardware class instead.
    • Rollbacks are okay and should be easy. Always be able to rollback a change to get to back to a good stack.
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