Great session by @MarcJBrooker earlier on building technology standards at Amazon scale, and some interesting tidbits about the secret sauce behind Lambda and how they make technology choices - e.g. in whether to use Rust for the stateful load balancer v2 for Lambda.

🧵

Nice shout out to some of the benefits of Rust - no GC (good for p99+ percentile latency), memory safety with its ownership system https://t.co/2ShIC786S5 great support for multi-threading (which still works with the ownership system)
And why not to use Rust.

The interesting Q is how to balance technical strengths vs weaknesses that are more organizational.
And it all boils down to this..

which is basically the same question that organizations all over the world have to answer when they consider adopting #serverless technologies like Lambda.
And I love Marc's answer - to innovate (ie. try new things) with guard rails that mitigate the risks.

As a consultant, I often find myself being one of those guard rails for organizations that want to adopt #Serverless

(nice plug, self hi-five! ✋)
Ha, I have heard @heitor_lessa mention "tenets" many times.

This line about avoiding baking language-specific choices into your contract and data is so important. It gives you an easier path to back out of that language choice if it turns out to be wrong.
Which, actually reminds me of what Bezos said in this article about the 2 types of decisions - one-way (aka, "no coming back from this decision!") and two-way doors.

https://t.co/qBh6wgGuz1
"Baking these tensions into tenets and making it really obvious to everyone means we're upfront about the conversation that we're really having"

👍👍👍
Standards: top-down decision, comes with risk (e.g. limits upside - losing ideas that are better than what's baked into the standards)

"We use standards very sparingly, only in areas where we deeply understand the context and innovation has little upside"
"It all starts with the right incentives"

This, so much this👆

Why? because incentives drive outcomes.
And then there's ownership - because people making these decisions are on the hook for its long term success.

That's why the ivory tower architect is such a bad model - they make all the decisions but you're on the hook for it.
Yup, 100% agree here. A leader's job is to provide the necessary context so that others can make the best decisions they can. A leader's job is NOT to make all the decisions for others.
And then Marc describes his job as enabling end-to-end understanding of the business and technology and getting teams talking to each other so they can make the best decisions without those technical standards.
So did they end up using Rust?

Yes!
"When you try new things and they turn out to be successful, then you double down on those. And take the learnings of what's great and make sure you can multiply that"

And that's how many organizations has adopted #serverless successfully, starting with one success story.
And that's also been the story of the adoption of Rust at AWS. Both Firecracker and BottleRocket are built with Rust.
And great to see they're investing into the community itself, doubling down both internally and externally.

Love to see more details on how formal methods is applied here.
btw, AWS uses formal methods all over the place, I hear that TLA+ is widely used by its service teams. Someone told me that they used it to find a bug in DynamoDB during design that would have resulted in data loss in extremely rare cases.

https://t.co/6p5MfXCyfR
"Building technology standards is a short-term thing that limits a company's creativity. Setting up incentives and helping people understand the decisions they're making and giving them full ownership of those decisions is the way I like to think about tech standards."
Well, that was great!

Make sure to catch this on a replay or when it becomes available on-demand.

More from Education

Time for some thoughts on schools given the revised SickKids document and the fact that ON decided to leave most schools closed. ON is not the only jurisdiction to do so, but important to note that many jurisdictions would not have done so -even with higher incidence rates.


As outlined in the tweet by @NishaOttawa yesterday, the situation is complex, and not a simple right or wrong https://t.co/DO0v3j9wzr. And no one needs to list all the potential risks and downsides of prolonged school closures.


On the other hand: while school closures do not directly protect our most vulnerable in long-term care at all, one cannot deny that any factor potentially increasing community transmission may have an indirect effect on the risk to these institutions, and on healthcare.

The question is: to what extend do schools contribute to transmission, and how to balance this against the risk of prolonged school closures. The leaked data from yesterday shows a mixed picture -schools are neither unicorns (ie COVID free) nor infernos.

Assuming this data is largely correct -while waiting for an official publication of the data, it shows first and foremost the known high case numbers at Thorncliff, while other schools had been doing very well -are safe- reiterating the impact of socioeconomics on the COVID risk.
Last month I presented seven sentences in seven different languages, all written in a form of the Chinese-character script. The challenge was to identify the languages and, if possible, provide a


Here again are those seven sentences:

1) 他的剑从船上掉到河里去
2) 於世𡗉番𧡊哭唭𢆥尼歲㐌外四𨑮
3) 入良沙寢矣見昆腳烏伊四是良羅
4) 佢而家喺邊喥呀
5) 夜久毛多都伊豆毛夜幣賀岐都麻碁微爾夜幣賀岐都久流曾能夜幣賀岐袁
6) 其劍自舟中墜於水
7) 今天愛晚特語兔吃二魚佛午飯

Six of those seven sentences are historically attested. One is not: I invented #7. I’m going to dive into an exploration of that seventh sentence in today’s thread.

Sentence #7 is an English-language sentence written sinographically — that is, using graphs that originate in the Chinese script. I didn’t do this for fun (even though it is fun), or as a proposal for a new way to write


I did it as a thought experiment. Why? Because thinking about how the modern Chinese script might be adapted to write modern English can give us valuable insights into historical instances of script borrowing, like those that took place centuries ago in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

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