docker VS foundationdb

Deploying AI models into production requires tools that can package applications and manage them at scale. Docker simplifies the deployment of AI applications by containerizing them, ensuring that the application runs smoothly in any environment. Kubernetes, an orchestration system for Docker containers, allows for the automated deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, essential for AI applications that need to scale across multiple servers or cloud environments.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

Note: Before running your application in the next step, make sure you have Docker installed and running. It's required to locally run Encore applications with databases.

Developing WordPress plugins and themes often requires a reliable development environment. Current we have good solutions as wp-env from Autommatic, Local WP from WP Engine, Docker, XAMPP (for old ones) and so on. All this can be good suits for a development environment, specially Local WP that is probably the easiest one to get up and running and wp-env that leverages Docker as a development environment in a very easy way to use.

Docker, an open-source development platform, provides containerization technology for building and packaging applications along with their dependencies into portable images.

With each app containerized with Docker, this allows it to be run on any other developer's machine also running Docker. Although I had automated deployments to Heroku without this, I decided to upload each service to a container registry.

Docker

Today we are going to see all the power that a CLI (Command line interface) can bring to development, a CLI can help us perform tasks more effectively and lightly through commands via terminal, without needing an interface. For example, git and Docker, we practically use their CLI all the time, when we execute a git commit -m "commit message" or docker ps -a we are using a CLI. I'm going to leave an article that details what a CLI is.

Docker (required): Understanding Docker is crucial for deploying software in containers, making your project portable and scalable. I use it for start Folo server.

Actually, Apple does this for iCloud! They use FoundationDB[1] to store billions of databases, one for each user (plus shared or global databases).

See: https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-apple-built-icloud-to-...

Discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028672

[1]: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoundationDB

Is this the language in question? https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/main/flow/README....

> I wondered if perhaps this WASM use case for a cross-language library was already just as possible and ergonomic using language bindings and maybe thats why this use case doesnt seem like a big deal to people.

Yeah that’s the reason. You don’t notice it a lot of the time, but FFIs are everywhere already. The most common foreign function interface is basically the ability to call C code, or have functions made available to C code. C is used because everyone knows it and it’s simple. And most languages either compile to native code (eg rust) - which makes linking to C code easy. Or the runtime is implemented in C or C++ (eg V8, Ruby). In languages like that, the standard library is already basically implemented via a FFI to C/C++ code.

I’ve got an iOS app I’m working on that’s half rust and half swift, with a touch of C in the middle. The bindings work great - the whole thing links together into one binary, even with link time optimizations. But the glue code is gross, and when I want to fiddle with the rust to Swift API I need to change my code in about 4 different places.

Most FFIs are a one to many relationship in that if you write a clean C API, you can probably write bindings in every language. But you don’t actually want to call naked C code from Ruby or Javascript. Good bindings will make you forget everything is done via ffi. Eg numpy. I haven’t looked at the wasm component model proposal - I assume it’s trying to make this process cleaner, which sounds lovely.

I maintain the nodejs bindings for foundationdb. Foundationdb bindings are all done via ffi linking to their C code. And the API is complex, using promises and things. I find it really interesting browsing their official bindings to go, Java, Python and Ruby. Same bindings. Same wrapped api. Same team of authors. Just different languages. And that’s enough to make the wrapper wildly different in every language. From memory the Java ffi wrapper is 4x as much code as it is in Ruby.

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/tree/main/bindings

Isn’t apple server on C/C++?

They have their own db in that

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb

> Any meaningful technology is open source.

Clearly untrue, however FoundationDB is open source, with a permissive license.

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb

So is much of the operational tooling for it:

https://github.com/FoundationDB/fdb-kubernetes-operator

I don't recall any of those details but the test involved injecting a bogus block device that always returns garbage, and noting that this results in garbage records returned from client queries. And I don't think those kinds of issues have been eradicated, browsing through their github issues there are people trying to recover corrupted clusters. https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/issues/2480

For my current job, I have to install FoundationDB (they have a github repo) as a dependency for the project's code.

To clarify, FoundationDB has some documented multi-region features, but it's not at all clear that anybody who runs it at scale relies on those multi-region features [1]. Even if they do, it's not obvious they run this Fearless DR mode at any appreciable latency.

Geo-replication is an area where Anna really shines, and foundation pays severe costs. All of the concurrency control problems have contention footprints on the order of round-trips. Fully optimistic concurrency control needs to expose backoffs quite a few round-trips to be live. Even pessimistic concurrency control requires some number of round trips, probably at least 1.5 optimally, but in practice in most tuned systems, probably 3. A heck of a lot of use cases make sense at 0 global RTTs and don't at 1+. The ability to tell the database how to manage concurrency, and then providing causal is ultimately the best you can do. That's awesome.

At the end of the day, I have to believe that there's a whole big mess of applications we'll build this, on systems in the portion of the design space Anna is choosing, one day. This is only recently not cutting edge research, but it's definitely still research. We don't know how to model these concepts at a high-level and in a composable way where the masses of software developers can engage with them.

It's interesting to think about how long ago we were graced with BAYOU [2], that thing was ahead of its time. I suspect it's going to take a little while longer before these sorts of techniques make their way into data storage primitives we think of as part of the standard vernacular, but I believe we'll get there eventually.

Databases are fun!

[1] https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/wiki/Multi-Region-Repl...