Ben Christensen describes how the Netflix API evolved from a typical one-size-fits-all RESTful API designed to support public developers into a web service platform optimized to handle the diversity and variability of each device and user experience. The talk will also address the challenges involving operations, deployment, performance, fault-tolerance, and rate of innovation at massive scale.

A parallelizing combination of ping/traceroute

COMPLETE HALT and CATCH FIRE SOUNDTRACK

             In the last two decades the Internet has changed a lot in terms of its bandwidth, types of applications and number of users, however, what has not changed is the fact that TCP is still the most popular transport protocol, accounting for more than 80% of the Internet traffic. Given TCP's wide-spread usage, its performance fundamentally impacts the performance of Internet transfers. Packet losses are known to affect TCP performance by impacting two important aspects of TCP - reliable delivery and congestion control. However, what is not well understood is exactly how much they affect TCP performance. The extent to which losses affect TCP performance depends on how well TCP deals with these losses. Current analysis techniques for TCP lack the level of details or accuracy required to illuminate the above issues. To achieve the required level of details and accuracy, We have developed a new analysis tool and have used it to study two different interactions between TCP and losses -- (i) TCP's efficiency in detecting packet losses when they occur and (ii) TCP's efficiency in avoiding losses when possible. We describe both our methodology and analysis below.

Several analytic frameworks have been announced in the last year. Among them are inexpensive data-warehousing solutions based on traditional Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) architectures (Redshift), systems which impose MPP-like execution engines on top of Hadoop (Impala, HAWQ) and systems which optimize MapReduce to improve performance on analytical workloads (Shark, Stinger/Tez). This benchmark provides quantitative and qualitative comparisons of five systems. It is entirely hosted on EC2 and can be reproduced directly from your computer.