Four short links: 28 November 2018
FaaS, Space as a Service, Bot Yourself, and Facebook's RL Platform
- Firecracker — Amazon’s open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multitenant containers and functions-based services. Docker but for FaaS platforms. Best explanation is on lobste.rs: Firecracker is solving the problem of multitenant container density while maintaining the security boundary of a VM. If you’re entirely running first-party trusted workloads and are satisfied with them all sharing a single kernel and using Linux security features like cgroups, selinux, and seccomp, then Firecracker may not be the best answer. If you’re running workloads from customers similar to Lambda, desire stronger isolation than those technologies provide, or want defense in depth, then Firecracker makes a lot of sense. It can also make sense if you need to run a mix of different Linux kernel versions for your containers and don’t want to spend a whole bare-metal host on each one.
- Amazon Ground Station: Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites — a sign that space is becoming more mainstream. Also interesting because they’re doing a bunch of processing in EC2 rather than at the basestation. General-purpose computers often beat specialized ones.
- Me Bot — A simple tool to make a bot that speaks like you, simply learning from your WhatsApp Chats. (via Hacker News)
- Horizon — FB open sources reinforcement learning platform for large-scale products and services, built on PyTorch.
