System Analysis and Design *

Many programmers struggle when using formal methods to solve problems within their programs, as those methods, while effective, can be unreasonably complex. To understand why this happens, let’s use the model checking method to solve a relatively easy puzzle:

Conditions

You’re in a hallway with seven doors on one side leading to seven rooms. A cat is hiding in one of these rooms. Your task is to catch the cat. Opening a door takes one step. If you guess the correct door, you catch the cat. If you do not guess the correct door, the cat runs to the next room.

This is the final part of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous part here). Now I’m going to talk about one more type of outages and the conclusions we made about them, how we modified the development process, what automation we introduced.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail.

1. Bad release: database overload

Let me begin with a specific example of this type of outage. We deployed an optimization: added USE INDEX in an SQL query; during testing as well as in production, it sped up short queries, but the long ones — slowed down. The long queries slowdown was only noticed in production. As a result, a lot of long parallel queries caused the database to be down for an hour. We thoroughly studied the way USE INDEX worked; we described it in the Do’s and Dont’s file and warned the engineers against the incorrect usage. We also analyzed the query and realized that it retrieves mostly historical data and, therefore, can be run on a separate replica for historical requests. Even if this replica goes down due to an overload, the business will keep running.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here and here). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail. But first let me highlight something I should’ve talked about in the first article but didn’t. I found out about it from my readers’ feedback. This article gives me a chance to fix this annoying shortcoming.

This is a second article out of a series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups». You can read the first part here. Let’s continue to talk about the way we managed to improve the availability of Citymobil services. In the first article, we learned how to count the lost trips. Ok, we are counting them. What now? Now that we are equipped with an understandable tool to measure the lost trips, we can move to the most interesting part — how do we decrease losses? Without slowing down our current growth! Since it seemed to us that the lion’s share of technical problems causing the trips loss had something to do with the backend, we decided to turn our attention to the backend development process first. Jumping ahead of myself, I’m going to say that we were right — the backend became the main site of the battle for the lost trips.

In this first part of an article series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups» I’m going to break down the way we managed to dramatically scale up the availability of Citymobil services. The article opens with the story about our business, our task, the reason for this task to increase the availability emerged and limitations. Citymobil is a rapid-growing taxi aggregator. In 2018, it increased by more than 15 times in terms of number of successfully completed trips. Some months showed 50% increase compared with the previous month.

The business grew like a weed in every direction (it still does): there was an increase in server load, team size and number of deployments. At the same time the new threats to service availability emerged. The company faced a task of the most importance — how to increase availability without compromising company growth. In this article, I’ll talk about the way we managed to solve this task in a relatively short time.

Greetings to all readers of Habr! My name is Yuriy, I have been teaching high technologies, Oracle, Microsoft and others for more than 20 years, as well as creating, developing and supporting loaded information systems for various business customers. Today I would like to tell you about the current direction: interviews on data processing technologies. The Russian variant of this post you can find here.

It doesn't really make sense for an employer to ask the applicant about traditional programming technologies. That is why I'm going to tell you how to prepare for an interview in only one narrow area related to information processing languages, namely, the processing of long integers(long arithmetic) and the identification of information properties of real world objects, which are described in long integers.

In this report, Bitfury shares analysis completed by its Crystal Blockchain Analytics engineering team on the movement of bitcoin from the Zaif exchange, Bithumb exchange and Electrum wallets.

The Rust ecosystem is still growing. As a result, new libraries with improved functionality are frequently released into the developer community, while older libraries become obsolete. When we initially designed Exonum, we used the Iron web-framework. In this article, we describe how we ported the Exonum framework to actix-web using generic programming.

IT technologies evolution allowed to control huge data flows. Business has a lot of IT solutions: CRM, ERP, BPM, accounting systems or at least just Excel and Word. Companies are different too. Some of companies are composed of plenty branches. Let’s name such as “Pyramid”. Pyramids have data synchronization issue for pile of IT systems. Software vendors and versions differ for branches significantly. In addition management company continuously modify reporting requirements that causes frustration assaults in the branches. This is a story about the project I happened to encounter chaos that needed to be systematized and automated. Low budget and tight deadlines limited the use of most existing industrial solutions but opened up scope for creativity.

Last year 2018, a theatre production series called Tale of the Century was launched in Estonia. Throughout the year, 22 local theatres presented their interpretations of the past hundred years of Estonian history to the audiences. In the draw, the Russian Theatre was assigned the topic of the future of Estonia.

There are a lot of posts about what a typical coding interview at Google looks like. But, while not as widely described and discussed, there is also quite often a system design interview. For an SRE position it’s NALSD: non-abstract large system design. The key difference between SWE and SRE interviews consists in these two letters: NA.

So, what is the difference? How to be prepared for this interview? Let’s be non-abstract, and use an example. To be more non-abstract, let’s take something from the material world, such that you won’t be asked the exact same thing at the real interview (at least, not at the Google interview) :)

So, let’s design a public library system. For the paper books, like you have seen everywhere around. The whole text below was written all at once within around one hour, to roughly show you the areas that you should be able to cover / touch during the interview. Please excuse some disorder, that’s how I think (therefore I am).