One of the toughest bugs to fix I’ve run into had to do with Apache Thrift’s golang library. I thought it would be fun to dive into how the bug got spotted, how I finally managed to reproduce it, and how I finally managed to fix it (or well, make it easier to handle).

Background

As part of my job at PayPal, I created a library to interact with Apache Aurora which I named gorealis.

At work I ran into the need to mock an HTTP call to a fixed address.

The code being tested verifies that the URL being called is legitimate and follows a certain set of rules. Therefore it was impossible to use the address of a local server (at least not directly).

To write tests for my code, I needed to write something that mocked the return values of a valid endpoint without actually making a call to the original, validated address.

Almost 8 years ago to the date, I got an e-mail from my PhD advisor asking me if I’d like to spend a summer working for eBay/PayPal.

It was a golden opportunity to join a well established company in Silicon Valley.

Needless to say, I was also ecstatic about the opportunity to go out to California for the first time. As someone who grew up on the East Coast, I had always heard about the awesome weather and I’d always identified with Californian culture through skateboarding.

With the announcement that DC/OS will be deprecated and the imminent death of Mesos, it feels like the right time to write about the awesome journey I’ve been through these past 6 years with Mesos and the Mesos community.

I had originally enrolled in the PhD track after earning a scholarship from the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP). At the time I earned the scholarship wasn’t really sure if I wanted to finish a Doctorate but my interview with Microsoft in Seattle at the end of senior year had brought me down a few notches and I was unable to clear Bloomberg’s interviews. I wasn’t having much luck getting any interest from any other outfits either.

Why

For a long time now, the web has shifted towards centralized points. The most clear sign of centralization for me was when Social media took root at the center of people’s online identity and started crossing over into their real lives. Coupled with this, a few years earlier a slightly different, sneakier, centralization started to take a foothold of the web in the form of Gmail.

Once upon a time, it was unfathomable to think we could get gigabytes worth of storage for our online correspondence for free. So when Google announced Gmail, we thought we we’re getting a killer deal. Little by little, we realized those services were never and have never really been free.

Very happy to announce that Elektron, a power aware Mesos framework used in several of my published works, is now open source.

You may find the source code here: https://gitlab.com/spdf/elektron

This would not have been possible without the help of Pradyumna Kaushik, Abhishek Jain, and Akash Kothawale.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions regarding the design or operation of this framework.

My PhD Thesis is now avaliable for those that are interested in reading it.

A version of the framework Electron, used heavily in this thesis, will hopefully be released by the end of July.

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The Thesis can be found here.

Today I’m happy to share that I sucessfully defended my thesis titled Towards Mitigating Co-Incident Peak Power Consumption and Managing Energy Utilization in Heterogeneous Clusters on April 29th, 2018.

In March 5th, 2000, the day after my tenth birthday, my mom and I landed in New York City. We arrived at the airport with two suitcases, a few personal belongings, and a laundry list of hopes and dreams. Looking back on that moment, writing this acknowledgement section to thank all the people that helped me along the way to getting a PhD feels surreal.

I have received, and accepted, an invite to become a PMC member of Apache Aurora.

Very happy and humbled to be invited to be part of the PMC for this great project.

-Renan