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Links for 2014-04-11

  • Basho LevelDB supports tiered storage

    Tiered storage is turning out to be a pretty practical trick to take advantage of SSDs:

    The justification for two types/speeds of storage arrays is simple. leveldb is extremely write intensive in its lower levels. The write intensity drops off as the level number increases. Similarly, current and frequently updated data tends to be in lower levels while archival data tends to be in higher levels. These leveldb characteristics create a desire to have faster, more expensive storage arrays for the high intensity lower levels. This branch allows the high intensity lower levels to be on expensive storage arrays while slower, less expensive storage arrays to hold the higher level data to reduce costs.

    (tags: caching tiered-storage storage ssds ebs leveldb basho patches riak iops)

  • Forbes on the skeleton crew nature of OpenSSL

    This is a great point:

    Obviously, those tending to the security protocols that support the rest of the Web need better infrastructure and more funding. “Large portions of the software infrastructure of the Internet are built and maintained by volunteers, who get little reward when their code works well but are blamed, and sometimes savagely derided, when it fails,” writes Foster in the New Yorker. […] “money and support still tend to flow to the newest and sexiest projects, while boring but essential elements like OpenSSL limp along as volunteer efforts,” he writes. “It’s easy to take open-source software for granted, and to forget that the Internet we use every day depends in part on the freely donated work of thousands of programmers.” We need to find ways to pay for work that is currently essentially donated freely. One promising project is Bithub, from Whisper Systems, where people who make valuable contributions to open source projects are rewarded (with Bitcoin of course). But the pool of Bitcoin is still donation based. The Internet has helped create a culture of free, but what we may need to recognize is that we get what we pay for. Well-funded companies pulling critical code from open source projects for their sites should have formal fee arrangements, rather than the volunteer group simply hoping these users will pony up some Benjamins for “prominent logo placement” on a website most people had never heard of before Heartbleed.

    (tags: open-source openssl free sponsorship forbes via:karl-whelan)

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