Andrew Ng (Wired) — I think self-driving cars are a little further out than most people think. There’s a debate about which one of two universes we’re in. In the first universe it’s an incremental path to self-driving cars, meaning you have cruise control, adaptive cruise control, then self-driving cars only on the highways, and you keep adding stuff until 20 years from now you have a self-driving car. In universe two you have one organization, maybe Carnegie Mellon or Google, that invents a self-driving car and bam! You have self-driving cars. It wasn’t available Tuesday but it’s on sale on Wednesday. I’m in universe one. I think there’s a lot of confusion about how easy it is to do self-driving cars. There’s a big difference between being able to drive a thousand miles, versus being able to drive anywhere. And it turns out that machine-learning technology is good at pushing performance from 90 to 99 percent accuracy. But it’s challenging to get to four nines (99.99 percent). I’ll give you this: we’re firmly on our way to being safer than a drunk driver.
Google Cloud BigTable — Google’s BigTable, with Apache HBase API, single-digit millisecond latency, and “fully managed”. G are hell-bent on catching up with Amazon and Microsoft at this cloud serving thing.
Call Me Maybe: Aerospike — We’re setting a timeout of 500ms here, and operations still time out every time a partition between nodes occurs. In these tests we aren’t interfering with client-server traffic at all. Aerospike may claim “100% uptime”, but this is only meaningful with respect to particular latency bounds. Given Aerospike claims millisecond-scale latencies, you may want to reconsider whether you consider this “uptime”.
31 Continuous Delivery Architectures (Slideshare) — from a vendor, so one name crops up repeatedly (other than “Jenkins”), but it’s still good devops voyeurism/envy.
