Brian Parsons

This clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a really great overview of the pros and cons of the encryption debate. Hilarious too!

Link: The Encryption Debate

Whenever I am in a building with multiple elevators, I ponder the logic and programming behind how the elevators respond to calls and if it is optimal or not. This simulator is a great way to geek out on this for real...er simulated, at least

Link: Elevator Logic

This doesn't surprise me, I've often wondered why Varnish is so popular when there are better and sometimes even easier solutions out there.

Link: BBC Digital Media Distribution: How we improved throughput by 4x

[PDF] Interesting research report from IBM comparing performance of docker vs KVM. I would have liked to see Xen instead of KVM. Obviously full virtualization has more overhead than containers, but there are decent trade offs to this in terms of flexibility and security. Docker is getting to be quite flexible though, and has some benefits. I don't know that performance will be the key criteria for picking a side (Containers vs. Virtualization)

Link: IBM Research Report: An Updated Performance Comparison of Virtual Machines and Linux Containers

Dr Who references aside, there is an interesting debate forming over implementing virtualization with containers instead of hypervisors. Many application servers use the container model and while there are some benefits I don't know that I agree about the concept of delivering more services. There is much duplication in the container model and hypervisors try to reduce that since it is essentially wasteful. Some of the problems with hypervisors, such as hoggy neighbors and "cpu stealing" are not addressed with the container approach.

Link: Containers vs Hypervisors