In the most recent NewsBits (NewsBits at Compose.com’s Articles) there’s some minor DB and driver updating, a DB that branches like git, a fresh Vault, what happens to SSDs when they meet database write loads, the new Go 1.11 (and 2 drafts) and… oh yeah who wants to see round corners?
(Apologies for the lateness… I’ve been playing with MicroPython, CircuitPython, ESP32s, ESP8266s and a selection of tiny light emitting things…. more on that soon… promise)
- MongoDB 4.0 gets another August update.
- Better host verification closes a hole in PostgreSQL JDBC.
- LiteTree adds branches to SQLite.
- SSDs vs databases - how write heavy loads affect lifetimes.
- $9M Kubernetes grant assists project independence.
- Hashicorps Vault gets an agent.
- Rocky is OpenStack’s new bare-metal-centric release.
- Go 1.11 is out and Go 2 planning is in full swing.
- ZGC, the interesting new garbage collector for Java.
- And finally can you see around corners?
Here’s those bits in full thanks to the Wayback machine…
Database Bits
MongoDB
Some minor updates on the MongoDB front with a 4.0.2 release for the leading version of the database. The update’s changes cover replication, sharding, queries, aggregation and storage with close to 200 fixes and other modifications in the changelog for 4.0.2.
PostgreSQL
Users of the PostgreSQL JDBC driver should look to upgrade to the new version 42.2.5 where there’s a fix for a TLS/SSL host name verification error. Other changes in 42.2.5 make ssl=true require full verification and there’s support for allow and prefer SSL modes.
LiteTree
Built on SQLite, LiteTree is a database that supports branching. That is, you can insert data into a table, then create a branch in that table and insert into either that or the original branch. The idea create a database with “git-like” views of transactions. It’s suggested that this would be good for recording blockchain related transactions and the code is being developed to work at the heart of Aergo’s blockchain offerings.
Databases vs SSDs
SSDs are great for performance, but they do wear out. The question is how quickly and what kind of workloads wear them out quickest. If this SSD wearout report from okmeter.io is anything to go by, the answer is they wearout pretty quickly with databases. Okmeter looked at the SMART drive statistics for drives where Redis and PostgreSQL were running. Both showed rapid wearout though for different reasons. For Redis, it looked like very regular RDB backup snapshots were eating up the SSD’s life while PostgreSQL’s use of temporary files was the cause of the faster wearout. These timings though do map out to years of service under heavy loads.
Cloud Bits
Kubernetes
Google’s given the Cloud Native Computing Foundation $9M in the form of Google Cloud credits to support the CNCF’s infrastructure for supporting and developing Kubernetes. The announced grant will allow the CNCF to manage all the infrastructure of the Kubernetes project, rather than rely on Google staff and infrastructure. With over 150,000 containers on 5000 virtual machines used in Kubernetes testing and integration, that’s a lot of infrastructure to manage.
Vault
Hashicorp has announced Vault 0.11, the latest version of their store for secrets in cloud infrastructures. The new version sees the introdiction of a Vault Agent which lets Vault automatically rotate access tokens, ACL templates make it easier to control access for a range of different entities, Alibaba cloud support and support for Azure’s Secret Engine. Other features include FoundationDB support on the backend and a UI support of a CLI for reading, writing, listing and deleting vault contents. Enterprise users will find new Namespace and Performance Standby Node support.
OpenStack
The latest version of OpenStack, “Rocky”, is now out after a busy 26 weeks of development. The big focus for this release has been on automating managing physical hardware. That includes managing server BIOS settings remotely and booting from RAM disks so bare metal behaves more like a virtual machine. Other features include Cyborg accelerator management to handle GPUs and FPGAs in the datacenter, Qinling functions-as-a-service/serverless capabilities and the Masakari high availability service.
Developer Bits
Go
Literally hours after the last NewsBits went out, the Go developers released Go 1.11. Top of the new features, albeit in a preliminary form, is Go modules which takes on the thorny issue of package management and dependencies. From our preliminary use, it looks really good for the Go ecosystem. There’s also a new experimental WebAssembly option for Go to produce code that runs in the web browser. Go 1.11 sees no changes to the language itself though…
The drafting and consultation for Go 2 has begun. Go 2 is specifically taking on the challenges of error handling, error values and the top requested feature, generics. There’s drafts of “discussion starter” proposals out now.
Java
There’s yet another garbage collector coming to Java 11, ZGC, and in Java’s new ZGC is very exciting the authors take a look at it. It does sound good with average pause time of 1ms and a max pause of 4ms (compared to existing GCs with pause times around 200ms).
And Finally
Could we see round corners? Researchers think so and can show that shadows can be key to the process. In The New Science of Seeing Around Corners, they look how research into accidental cameras and indirectly reflected light, combined with algorithms that extract data from the resulting images can let us glimpse what’s not in our line of sight.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog