The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

By Hussein NasserTechnology

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser episodes

April 10, 2022 The Limitations of Today's SSDs | The Backend Engineering Show
Backend database applications relay on good storage systems for performance, durability and low latency. SSDs have been a great invention that changed the storage game compared to mechanical drives. However, SSDs came with their own sets of problems which can cause database reads and writes to plummet after a while. This episode discusses the current limitations of SSDs include garbage collection, wear leveling, over provisioning and how zoned name spaces “may” fix this.
0:00 Intro
1:40 Block
4:00 Logical Block Addressing
6:00 Flash Translation Layer
6:50 DRAM
8:50 Erase unit
11:11 Namespace
12:00 Summary
13:40 Garbage collection
16:49 Over provisioning
18:00 Write amplification
21:28 Wear leveling
Resources
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/new-malware-bypasses-security-measures-by-using-ssd-over-provisioning.html
https://www.snia.org/educational-library/zoned-namespaces-zns-ssds-disrupting-storage-industry-2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbX3P56Jp0o&feature=emb_title
27 min
March 30, 2022 Google thinks Linux is slow to reboot, so they patch it
Google linux boxes have over 16 NVMe SSD PCIe Express drives.When a shutdown signal is sent to linux, the OS iterate through each NVMe and send synchronous request to shutdown that takes 4.5 seconds. This adds up to over a minute to achieve a reboot. Google patches linux with asynchronous Shutdown APIs

Resources https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1316262-google-has-a-problem-with-linux-server-reboots-too-slow-due-to-too-many-nvme-drives

patch https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

Sync vs async https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=asynchronous+vs+synchronous+hussein
10 min
March 29, 2022 The cost of Hash tables | The Backend Engineering Show
Hash tables are effective for caching, database joins, sets to check if something is in a list and even load balancing, partitioning and sharding and many other applications. Most programming languages support hash tables. However they don’t come without their cost and limitations lets discuss this.
0:00 Intro
1:50 Arrays
3:50 CPU Cost (NUMA/M1 Ultra)
6:50 Hash Tables
10:00 Hash Join
16:00 Cost of Hash Tables
20:00 Remapping Cost Hash Tables
22:30 Consistent hashing
27 min
March 23, 2022 Understanding Aggregate Functions Performance | The Backend Engineering Show
Aggregate functions like Count, max, min, avg performance really depends on how did you tune your database for that kind of workload. Let us discuss this.
0:00 Intro
1:22 SELECT COUNT(*)
4:30 SELECT AVG(A)
5:15 SELECT MAX(A)
8:00 Best case scenario
11:30 Clustering
14:00 Clustering Sequential Writes
17:19 Clustering Random Writes
20:30 Summary
24 min
March 22, 2022 Why checking the URL won’t prevent all phishing attacks
99% of phishing attacks can be avoided by looking at the URL. However this secuirty researcher proves that not enough. https://mrd0x.com/browser-in-the-browser-phishing-attack/
7 min
March 18, 2022 Its always Microservices - The Spotify Outage Explained (March 8 2022)
On March 8 2022 Spotify and Discord experienced an outage latest 2-3 hours. The reason was a configuration on the xDS formats on Google Traffic Director. Let us discuss how this change caused the outage and what Spotify did to mitigate that outage without relying on Google restoring the service back up.
Resources
Spotify outage
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/03/incident-report-spotify-outage-on-march-8/
Google Cloud outage
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/LuGcJVjNTeC5Sb9pSJ9o
Envoy xDS
https://blog.envoyproxy.io/the-universal-data-plane-api-d15cec7a
Microservices scaling with common sense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsIeAV5aFLE
CARDS
4:36 Miicros https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsIeAV5aFLE
9:30 Spotify Hermes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMq3IpPE3TU&t=21s
0:00 Intro
2:00 Spotify Outage
3:30 Microservices
6:10 Service Discovery
10:00 Spotify Quick Workaround
12:15 Google Traffic Director Outage
23 min
March 07, 2022 The Many Ways of DDoS | Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar
The Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar has reached a peak this past week. In this video I explain the multiple ways a Denial of Service attacks can happen and how to protect against them
Intro 0:00
What is DOS? 1:00
Long running requests 1:42
Crash backend processes 3:30
Exhaust Max connections 4:25
Large response (web traffic) 5:42
Lots of requests 8:27
Complex request (Regex bug) 9:57
Prevention 12:27
16 min
February 24, 2022 Why the next Chrome version will break websites
Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://database.husseinnasser.com
Chrome, Edge and Firefox are approaching version 100. that version is 3 digit version where most websites only checked two digits. You can imagine what can go wrong. Lets discuss
9 min
February 23, 2022 The Slack 2/22/22 Outage
On 2/22/2022 Slack experienced a 3 hours outage from 6AM to 9AM PST because of a configuration change. That change lead to increase load to their database infrastructure which causes queries to starve. Lets discuss
https://status.slack.com/2022-02-22
13 min
February 22, 2022 Should NodeJS Support HTTP/3?
It looks like there is demand for bringing QUIC and HTTP/3 to NodeJS, someone donated $1000 dollar to make it happen. However, what are the use cases for supporting HTTP/3 in Nodejs? I talk about whether HTTP/3 should come to NodeJS in this video.
https://rysolv.com/issues/detail/863986ce-c8d5-466d-abf4-476d3177452d
15 min

About The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own.