Software

Cluster membership management on AWS

2025-02-07

In continuation with my previous post, I have now finished porting hedge to AWS. It’s a trimmed-down version for now; only the features directly related to cluster membership are ported. I decided to make a separate repo, called hedge-cb (in keeping with the -cb theme), instead of updating hedge directly. And it’s mainly due to CGO. I didn’t really fancy the idea of introducing CGO to hedge as it could break a lot of the CI builds at work.

Aws · Cgo · Clockbound · Cluster · Distributed-Systems · Ffi · Go · Golang · Hedge · Leader-Election · Memberlist · Programming · Software · Systems · Tech · Timesync · True-Time

2 minutes

Distributed locking on AWS (ClockBound)

2025-02-02

After some testing time, I now have a working port of spindle in AWS. There were some slight changes from the original library to account for some of the differences between Cloud Spanner and PostgreSQL, but not really by much. It’s called spindle-cb, if you’re interested. It’s still half the battle though; I still have to port hedge as well before I could really use it for some of the planned projects in my pipeline.

Aws · Cgo · Clockbound · Distributed-Locking · Ffi · Go · Golang · Locking · Programming · Software · Spindle · Systems · Tech · Timesync · True-Time

2 minutes

AWS ClockBound client for Go (update)

2025-01-27

A week ago I published a short blog about clockbound-client-go. After some testing, turns out there’s an issue in reading the actual time from ClockBound’s shared memory segment; it seems to provide only the elapsed time since boot. However, using the Rust client and the FFI bindings produce the correct results. Either there is a problem in the code that reads the shared memory segment, or the SHM contents are wrong.

Aws · Cgo · Clockbound · Ffi · Go · Golang · Programming · Software · Systems · Tech · Timesync · True-Time

1 minute

AWS ClockBound client for Go

2025-01-22

I’ve written a Go client for AWS ClockBound called clockbound-client-go. It uses the newer, shared memory segment protocol instead of the older, socket-based protocol. This is a prerequisite library needed to port spindle (and maybe even hedge) to AWS (for an upcoming project). As great a tech Google’s TrueTime is, there is no available API for it. It is only through Spanner that spindle achieves its locking mechanisms with TrueTime. Currently, it’s the cheapest way, surprisingly, to do distributed locking that I’ve tried so far, compared to the likes of Redis, Zookeeper, etcd, Consul, etc.

Aws · Clockbound · Go · Golang · Programming · Software · Systems · Tech · Timesync · True-Time

1 minute

Know your target

2024-12-28

I remember ages ago, a friend asked me what my tips would be to transition from a typical programmer to a “systems programmer”. And I distinctly remember answering him along the lines of “Y’know what, I don’t really know, maybe just get more experience?” And now, being an engineering leader to some extent, I get this question once in a while, but even now, I don’t really have a default answer, and a good one at that, to give.

Programming · Programming · Software · Software · Systems · Tech

6 minutes

How valuable is your source code?

2024-10-18

I had a think about this topic when I saw a recent Ars Technica news article about Winamp releasing their source code to GitHub and then deleting it after some backlash from the open source community. And we also hear about instances of leaked source codes as well, such as that of The New York Times, Okta, Intel’s UEFI source, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, among others. Until now, I haven’t really put too much thought into this.

Programming · Programming · Software · Software · Tech

6 minutes