The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through the main job of the network interface controller (NIC for short) and how the datacenter is pushing it to the limit by allowing it to do more TCP/IP processing, creating what is being popularized as smartNIC. 0:00 Intro 1:20 What is a NIC? 3:40 NIC job 8:00 When does the OS get involved 12:40 Promiscuous mode 14:00 SmartNIC 18:30 Disadvantages Resources https://developer.nvidia.com/networking/ethernet-adapters https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/11/smartnics_network_market/ https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09615 Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com

In this episode of the backend engineering show I discuss consistent hashing a very important algorithm in distributed computing specially in database systems such as Apache Cassandra and DynamoDB. 0:00 Intro 2:00 Problem of Distributed Systems 5:00 When to Distribute 7:00 Simple Hashing 9:30 Where Simple Hashing Breaks 11:40 Consistent Hashing 18:00 Adding a Server 21:15 Removing a Server 22:30 Limitations Buy me a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr

In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through and discuss the Homa Protocol paper which attempts to replace TCP as a protocol in the data centers. I learned a lot from this paper, I have my criticisms of certain aspects, timestamps for topics discussed below. It appears there is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter and professor John tries to explain this path. Referenced materials mentioned in the episode Overview paper https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/replaceTcp.pdf Homa 2018 paper (Details) https://people.csail.mit.edu/alizadeh/papers/homa-sigcomm18.pdf NIC Offloading in Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_offload_engine#Support_in_Linux Curl disabling Nigel Algo https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/4732ca5724072f132876f520c8f02c7c5b654d9 0:00 Intro 3:00 The nature of networking data center 5:30 TCP Segments 7:30 There is no “Request” in TCP 12:00 What so unique about Data centers? 14:00 Message Throughput vs Data throughput 18:25 Congestion Control 22:38 Homa’s Congestion Control 25:00 Server Core Load Balancing 28:30 NIC offloading 30:00 Everything Wrong about TCP 37:00 Why not QUIC? 40:00 Limitation of Streaming 44:10 Load Balancing Stream Reading 47:15 Can we treat Segments as Messages? 51:00 Dispatching Messages is Easier 53:00 Connection Orientation 1:00:00 Sender Driven Congestion Control 1:03:00 In Order Packet Delivery 1:07:00 DCTCP 1:08:30 Homa is Message Based 1:11:00 Home is Connection Less 1:12:00 Receiver Driven Congestion Control 1:15:19 Out of Order Packets 1:16:20 Homa API is not Compatible with TCP 1:17:40 Will Homa come to HTTP? 1:18:45 Conclusion

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok is proposing few patches to the linux kernel to make kernel reboots via kexec go from 500ms down to 15 ms saving huge time in updating kernel on thousands of machines. Let us discuss this 0:00 Intro 1:30 Linux Kernel Reboot Options 2:30 how kexec works 4:00 The optimization 5:00 Going through the patch 6:00 Updating Servers at TikTok scale 9:00 Summary https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bytedance-Faster-Kexec-Reboot https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220725083904.56552-1-huangjie.albert@bytedance.com/

We discuss the CVE-2022-2274 OpenSSL Vulnerability. The OpenSSL 3.0.4 release introduced a serious bug in the RSA implementation for X86_64 CPUs supporting the AVX512IFMA instructions. This issue makes the RSA implementation with 2048 bit private keys incorrect on such machines and memory corruption will happen during the computation. As a consequence of the memory corruption an attacker may be able to trigger a remote code execution on the machine performing the computation. 0:00 Intro 1:00 CVE-2022-2274 3:00 AVX512IFMA CISC 5:00 How the bug works 7:10 How can it be triggered Resources https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20220705.txt https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/18625 https://guidovranken.com/2022/06/27/notes-on-openssl-remote-memory-corruption/ https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/335 https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/4d8a88c134df634ba610ff8db1eb8478ac5fd345 https://linux.die.net/man/3/bn_internal https://www.microfocus.com/documentation/enterprise-developer/ed60/ES-WIN/GUID-E3960B1E-C42E-4748-A5EB-6E12507C9CD7.html https://www.microcontrollertips.com/risc-vs-cisc-architectures-one-better/ Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com

Postgres 15 introduces a new syntax to treat nulls as not distinct. This will allow developers to create a unique constraint on nullable fields and have inserts with nulls fail instead of having it allowed based on today's standard. Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://database.husseinnasser.com https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2022/07/postgres-15-unique-improvement-with-null https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/84e5ee1b-387e-9a54-c326-9082674bde78%40enterprisedb.com

memchr() is a function that searches in a memory block for a character, this has been recently improved in the latest linux patch and we can learn something from this improvement I think, lets discuss. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kernel-Faster-memchr Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 14 (14.3). Let us discuss this news. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/06/amazon-aurora-supports-postgresql-14/ 0:00 Intro 1:00 Database on the Cloud options 3:45 Amazon Aurora supports Postgres 14 6:00 Postgres 14 vs Postgres 13

Rogers Communications, the Canadian ISP is down. One of its ASNs (they have many) is AS812 with over 5 million IP addresses. Tried a few and none of them can be pinged from the US (not sure if ICMP is disabled or not) This is a huge deal for all Canadians and businesses affected. So sorry for every one who is affected by this, and kudus to all the engineers at Rogers working to fix this for the past what? 11 hours now? If an ASN goes dark like a Facebook or a Cloudflare that isn't a big deal you can go without using Facebook for a day. But if this is your ISP's ASN that connects you to the rest of the World goes down, actual users won't be able to connect. We still don't know the cause but my guess it might be a bad BGP entry? that's what happened to Cloudflare or FB, could be something different. again so sorry for all my Canadian followers affected. Will make a video when I get a chance Resources https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS812 https://www.bigdatacloud.com/asn-lookup/AS7018

In this episode of the backend engineering show I’ll discuss Fill Factor index property, an important key parameter for a good performing database. I will also discuss how it is a double edge sword and can break or Make your db. Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:48 Start of the Show 4:30 Database Storage Representation 6:30 IO Cost 10:00 Index Page 13:30 Page Splits Cost 18:00 Indexing UUIDs 19:45 FillFactor 23:15 Bad FillFactor values 26:40 Fragmentation In Indexes 30:30 Summary Fundamentals of Networking for Effective Backends udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://network.husseinnasser.com Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course (link redirects to udemy with coupon) https://database.husseinnasser.com