Some users of Hudson have already started to notice a subtle addition to the latest release, 1.343, a new background watermark image.
The commit message (r26728) from Kohsuke, the incredibly talented founder and maintainer of the Hudson project, adds a bit of sadness to the whole affair:
In tribute to Sun Microsystems and all my colleagues who had to go today. I hope the community would forgive me for doing this.
Given the incredible speed at which the tech industry grows and moves, it's easy to forget that there are a number of talented engineers that have spent their careers at Sun building technologies that have helped change the face of modern computing, regardless of whether or not Sun could figure out how to sell them: SunOS/Solaris, Java, DTrace, SPARC 64-bit chips, Sun Grid Engine, JRuby, the W3C XML specification, ZFS, OpenOffice (acquisition), MySQL (acquisition), and VirtualBox (acquisition).
As a corporation, I personally think Sun was a failure, as a foundation of engineering in Silicon Valley, I think Sun has been quite successful.
To those that are being pushed out as part of the merger with Oracle, I want to sincerely thank you for your contributions to computing and wish you the best of luck.
One of my most favorite sites on the internet, reddit, took some downtime this evening while doing some infrastructure (both hardware and software) upgrades. On their down-page, the reddit team invited everybody to join the #redditdowntime channel on the Freenode network, ostensibly to help users pass the time waiting for their pics and IAMAs to come back online.
Shortly after reddit started their scheduled outage, I joined the channel to pass the time while I debated what I should do with my evening. Within minutes the channel was flooded with a number of users, varying between spouting reddit memes in caps. link-spamming or engaging in casual chit-chat. I complained to one of the ops and fairly well-known-to-redditors employee: jedberg about the lack of moderation and he nearly instantly gave me +o (ops) in the channel. Not one to take my ops duty lightly, I started kicking spammers, warning habitual caps-lock users and tried to keep things generally civil through the deluge of messages consuming the channel.
Towards the end of the scheduled outage, some automated link-spamming started to appear and once it started it triggered more and more link-spamming. Clearly whatever was behind the bit.ly link was responsible for the self-propagating nature of the spamming. While the other moderators and myself tried to keep up with banning people I used wget to fetch the destination of the clearly malicious bit.ly URL to determine what we were dealing with.
Yesterday I was pointed to this post on ReadWriteWeb, suggesting that Facebook should acquire Apture next. Being an Apture employee, I would like to take some time to fuel the rumormill with these COMPLETELY TRUE (read: false) rumors:
Unsubstantiated Rumor #1:
A shadowy figure in a black Northface jacket has been spotted lingering around 539 Bryant St in San Francisco
Unsubstantiated Rumor #2:
Apture's CTO is seen regularly in Palo Alto
Unsubstantiated Rumor #3:
Apture employees were issued company Adidas sandals last December
Unsubstantiated Rumor #4:
Mark Zuckerberg and Tristan Harris talk regularly at meetings of the Bay Area Strip-Parcheesi Club in Redwood City
Unsubstantiated Rumor #5:
Apture is hiring aggressively in order to bump up their acquisition price
I'm not going to cross-post but I wrote a little something on the Apture Blog about some of the things we've been doing lately to scale up with Django among other things. I suppose over the coming days I'll have to write a few posts here getting into the nitty-gritty about Spawning vs. Apache and so on, but it's a good start.
These days, the majority of my day job revolves around working with Apture's Django-based code which, depending on the situation, can be a blessing or a curse. In some of my recent work to help improve our ability to scale effectively, I started swapping out Apache for Spawning web servers which can more efficiently handle large numbers of concurrent requests. One of the mechanisms by which Spawning accomplishes this task, is by using eventlet's tpool (thread pool) module in addition to some other clever tricks. With Apache, we used pre-forked workers to accomplish the work needed to be done and while still using forked child processes with Spawning, threading was also thrown into the mix, that's when "shit got real" (so to speak).
We started seeing sporadic, difficult to reproduce errors. Not a lot, a trickle of exception emails throughout the day. Digging deeper into some of the exceptions, careful stepping through Apture code, into Django code and back again, I started to realize I had thread-safety problems. Shock! Panic! Despair! Lunch! Disappointment! Shock! I felt all these things and more. I've long lamented the number of globals used in Django's code base but this is the icing on the cake.
Apparently Django's threading problems are sufficiently documented in a few places. Using a slightly older version of the Django framework certainly doesn't help but it doesn't appear that recent releases (1.1.1) can guarantee thread-safety anyways. I think it's safe to assume the majority of Django framework users are not using threaded web servers in any capacity, else this would have become a far larger issue (and hopefully of been fixed) by now. From NoReverseMatch exceptions, to curious middleware problems to thread-safety issues in the WSGI support layer, Django has potholes lying all along the road to multithreadedness.
Beware.
Lately I've fallen in love with a couple of fairly simple but powerful technologies: haproxy and WSGI (web server gateway interface). While the latter is more of a specification (PEP 333) the concepts it puts forth have made my life significantly easier. In combination, the two of them make for a powerful combination for serving web applications of all kinds and colors.
HAProxy is a robust, reliable piece of load balancing software that's very easy to get started with, For the uninitiated, load balancing is a common means of distributing the load of a number of inbound requests across a pool of processes, machines, clusters and so on. Whenever you hit any web site of non-trivial size, your HTTP requests are invariably transparently proxied through a load balancer to a pool of web machines.
I started looking into haproxy when I began to move Urlenco.de away from my franken-setup of Lighttpd/FastCGI/Mono/ASP.NET to a pure Python stack. After poking around some articles about haproxy I discovered it can be used for virtual hosts as well as simple load balancing. Using a haproxy's ACLs feature (see Section 7 in the configuration.txt), you can redirect requests to one backend or another.
