đDowntime, Ghost Valets, and Open Source.
Good morning! Letâs have ourselves a Friday! Go and tell someone that they have great posture.
More Like Slowly. Am I Right?
Fastly, is a content delivery network that, according to their website is âall about control and reliability: deliver faster sites and apps, broadcast videos in the highest quality, and get real-time visibilityâ.
On Tuesday, that claim was pretty hard to stand behind. Early in the morning, websites including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay, Twitch, Pinterest experienced a mass outage. All of them were supported by the Fastly network. You probably didnât notice because the issue was detected within 1 minute and after 49 minutes, 95% of their network was operating as normal.
The best part of the entire story is that the whole incident was triggered by just a single, unnamed Fastly customer. We now know that Tuesday's internet outage was caused by a service configuration change by one of Fastly's customers that triggered a bug hidden in Fastly's network. The bug had been lying dormant since a software update deployment by Fastly on May 6. So as a word to the wise, donât try and mess around with the internet because you might just break half of it.
This outage raises major questions on the dangers of power consolidation in the cloud market. Hopefully next time you try and log on to Pinterest at 4am, they wonât be using the Fastly network.
Read More Here
Nobody Home
âHonk! Honk!â Itâs not a goose. Itâs not a train conductor. Itâs no one.
Spooky, I know. But that is the reality we are living in. Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary and autonomous vehicle manufacturer, and logistics company J.B. Hunt have partnered to bring self-driving trucks to Texas.
Waymoâs trucking service will transport goods along Interstate 45 between Houston and Fort Worth, Texas and the trucks will be powered by the Waymo Driver autonomous platform. However, a commercially licensed truck driver and a software technician will be riding in each truck to monitor the operations which I think we can all agree is way less exciting than driverless Mario Kart on the highway.
This is just a further signal that self-driving cars are where the market is moving. Waymo has also partnered with Daimler Trucks to equip Daimler freightliners with the Waymo Driver platform. Thatâs in addition to partnerships with Volvo to develop electric robotaxis, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles for autonomous cargo vans.
Donât be sad when you make the honking motion at a passing 18-wheeler and get no response, there is just no one at the wheel.
Bonus: here is the platform in action
Read More Here
An ~Open~ Relationship
Guy Martin is the executive director of OASIS Open, one of the most respected nonprofit standards organizations in the world. This past week he wrote an op-ed article on why the open source and open standards communities need to live in harmony and it is worth the read.
Taking a step back, âOpen sourceâ describes software that is publicly accessible and free for anyone to use, modify and share. By contrast, the term âstandardâ refers to agreed-upon definitions of functionality. These guidelines ensure that products, services and systems perform in an cohesive way with quality, safety and efficiency.
He gives a real life example of these communities working together by saying,
I served as a volunteer firefighter in California for 10 years and witnessed firsthand the critical importance of technology in helping firefighters communicate efficiently and deliver safety-critical information quickly. Typically, multiple agencies show up to fight these fires, bringing with them radios made by different manufacturers that each use proprietary software to set radio frequencies. As a result, reprogramming these radios so that teams could communicate with one another is an unnecessarily slow â and potentially life-threatening â process. If the radio manufacturers had instead all contributed to an open-source implementation conforming to a standard, the radios could have been quickly aligned to the same frequencies. Radio manufacturers could have provided a valuable, life-saving tool rather than a time-wasting obstacle, and they could have shared the cost of developing such software.
I geek out about examples of tech impacting the real world so I highly recommend reading into how the open source and open standards community can change the way we do life and business. Give it a read if youâre feeling nerdy!