Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Let's get in touch. Do you have an email I can reach you at?
Comment · 4 years ago
I run the infrastructure (k8s+helm on GCP) for a PoS validator of a top 50 crypto project. My client is a big whale who bonded ~$15.6M at the projects all-time high. It’s about 1-2 hours of work per month and my 10% cut of the rewards nets me anywhere from $4k-$40k/mo. depending on the price. Given the fact that crypto is in the gutter now I haven’t been selling any to USD, but it’s a nice way to stack an asset with high upside potential while doing very little work.
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
What specifically about this firmware version worries you?
Comment · 6 years ago
Can confirm that running Spark at scale is difficult. Not even necessarily talking about scale of data or scale of performance, but organizational scale. Getting dozens or hundreds of engineers aligned around best practices, tooling and local development for Spark is both challenging and extremely rewarding. When you have everyone buy into Spark as not just an execution environment but a programming paradigm, it really unlocks some cool potential. If anyone cares this is how I've found to best get Spark users riding on rails:

* Use a monorepo to "namespace" different projects/teams/whatever. Each namespace has its own build.sbt for Scala jobs and Conda/Pip requirements file for PySpark. This gives you package isolation so that different projects can bump requirements at their own pace. This is crucial in larger organizations where you might have more siloed development or more legacy applications.

* Build each project in the monorepo into a separate Docker image and tag it accordingly with some combination of the branch and namespace.

* Deploy applications onto Kubernetes by invoking the SparkOperator (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/spark-on-k8s-operator), This abstracts away a lot of the hassle of driver/executor configuration and gives you nice out-of-the-box functionality for scraping Spark metrics.

* For local development, use some type of CLI or Makefile to build/run the image locally. This is where the implementation diverges somewhat from using SparkOpelrator (unless you want to tell your employees that everyone needs to run Kubernetes on their local machine, which we thought would create too much friction).

* For orchestration, write a custom operator for Airflow that submits a SparkOperator resource to the Kubernetes cluster of your choosing. The operator should supervise the application state, since the SparkOperator doesn’t quite do that well enough for you. This is something I wish we had the opportunity to open source.

* Where it gets tricky is building Spark applications locally and running remotely, Say you built a job locally and tested it on a small subset of your data. Now you want to see what happens when you run across a full dataset, requiring more than 16gb of memory (or whatever the developer has on their laptop). You need some way to build your image locally but schedule it remotely. This could be done via the same CLI or Makefile, but you end up with a lot of images and it gets pretty costly. I’m sure we would have figured it out eventually if we didn’t all get laid off last month :P

* BONUS: Use Iceberg or Delta (https://iceberg.apache.org/) (https://delta.io/). These are storage formats that work with distributed file storage like HDFS or S3 to partition and query data using the Spark DataFrame API. You get time travel, schema evolution and a bunch of other sweet features out of the box. They are an evolution of Hadoop-era partitioned file formats and are an absolute must for organizations dealing with lots of data & ML infrastructure.

This post took up more time than I had wanted, but it actually feels good to write down before I forget. I hope it is useful for someone building Spark infrastructure. I'm sure others have a completely different approach, which I'd be curious to hear! As someone whose full time job was basically just to orchestrate Spark application development, I can say for certain products like this are needed in order for the ecosystem to thrive, and I would probably have given you my business had the circumstances been correct. Good luck to you and your team.

Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Neo4j, and graph databases in general, are an excellent use case for IoT access management.

Our schema involved taking physical assets/personnel and representing them as different labels: machine, factory, production line, user, usergroup, etc. We then drew complex relationships between different user/groups in the organization and the assets they were responsible for.

At first, we used a relational database, but it soon became difficult to go more granular than simply: user belongs to usergroup, usergroup belongs to client, client has factories, factories have lines, lines have machines.

As many have pointed out here, it's not that you can't do this with non-graph databases, it just requires a more complex query layer. Neo4j allowed us to represent complex business relationships as natural language, and that really helped us as the business scaled.

Comment · 8 years ago
> The first explosion was triggered by an overpressurized gas line, WBZ News reported

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/us/politics/russian-hacke...

I'm willing to bet money this was a cyber-terrorist attack. Unfortunately we'll never know. If a link were established, it would be the subject of a gag order on grounds of national security. But more likely, the true root cause will never be found because the authorities didn't do a deep enough forensic analysis. It's too easy to blame something this on mechanical failure, especially in America's aging infrastructure. They won't even think to look at the PLCs and control systems that control the gas pumps :/

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Rewrite all of your jobs using Apache Beam. Then use whatever runner you want: Spark, Flink, Google Cloud Dataflow, etc.
Comment · 8 years ago
Oden Technologies | New York, NY | Full Time, Onsite

We're a small but rapidly growing team focused on building products that allow manufacturers to improve their production processes using data. We’re working across a range of cutting edge disciplines including industrial Internet-of-Things, big data, and machine learning.

We have openings across the board:

- Frontend: help build the next iteration of our manufacturing analytics platform, a first of its kind suite of applications for analyzing real-time data, optimizing production processes, and modeling the factory of the 21st century.

- Backend: build highly available APIs in Python / Go that efficiently and reliably capture machine and human data.

- DevOps Engineer: tackle interesting problems with infrastructure in a hybrid cloud & IoT environment, such as quorum-based distributed systems and cloud/edge application deployment strategies.

- Data Scientist: build statistical and machine learning models that improve efficiency of manufacturing using the telemetry collected from machines in the field.

- Forward Deployed: integrate with different production machines, allowing for seamless transmission of data to our platform.

- Customer Success Manager: ensure that our clients are using the product to achieve the best possible outcomes for their business. This person is ideally an operations/logistics/industrial consultant, engineer, lean expert, or similar with a proven track record for demonstrating ROI.

Reach out directly: mykola [at] oden [dot] io

Comment · 9 years ago
I'll take a stab at it. I'm not an electrical engineer but I do have some experience with industrial control systems.

From Wikipedia: "Generally substations are unattended, relying on SCADA for remote supervision and control." These SCADA systems may or may not be connected to Internet, which could allow an attacker to remotely access and modify the code that controls transformers and other electrical equipment.

In another comment, someone mentioned the power company was, in this case, pumping C02 into the substation in order to contain smoldering electrical insulation. This means that, most likely, the copper conduit heat up beyond defined tolerances. This could be due to more current being carried than those conduits are rated for. Normally, the SCADA system would be responsible for keeping these currents within tolerances. What I am saying is that they could deliver a payload to the PLCs via the SCADA that could trick the transformers into taking more load than they could handle.

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