--- title: "CPU cores that disobey instructions" publication: "StatusCode Weekly" issue: 320 published_at: "2021-06-09" canonical_url: "https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/320" --- Plus Terraform 1.0, WWDC 21 news, and Stack Overflow's acquisition. | #​320 — June 9, 2021 [Web Version](https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/320) StatusCode Weekly What's happening in software development, ops, platforms and tools. [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/ybctkpujqbkvefnf8jua.jpg)](https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/04/google_chip_flaws/) [On 'Mercurial' Cores: CPU Cores That Misbehave](https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/04/google_chip_flaws/) — CPUs are now so advanced they are "more mercurial than precise," claims a Google engineer. At huge cloud scales, anything with even a tiny risk of corruption eventually becomes a problem! Peter Hochschild spoke on the behalf of his team at Google in [a snappy nine-minute talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMF3rqhjYuM) about the problem and shared [an academic paper](https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s01-hochschild.pdf) (PDF). Facebook has also recently written about [silent data corruption at scale](https://engineering.fb.com/2021/02/23/data-infrastructure/silent-data-corruption/). The Register [Stack Overflow Acquired for $1.8 Billion](https://www.forbes.com/sites/vijaygurbaxani/2021/06/08/the-18-billion-acquisition-of-stack-overflow-aims-to-turbocharge-the-worlds-software-knowhow/?sh=2967221968ce) — Literally minutes after we hit send last week, this pretty big news dropped. Joel Spolsky’s [blog post](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announcement/) focuses on his thoughts and the history that led to SO being created, but apparently despite the sale, it’ll be business as usual for our foreseeable copy and pasting future. Forbes [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/4fae4369.png)](https://bridgecrew.io/webinar/2106-aws-dev-day-cloudformation-devsecops-bridgecrew?utm_medium=sponsorednewsletter&utm_source=statuscodeweekly&utm_campaign=scw210609&utm_content=awsdevday) [AWS DevSecOps Day: Bridgecrew for CloudFormation](https://bridgecrew.io/webinar/2106-aws-dev-day-cloudformation-devsecops-bridgecrew?utm_medium=sponsorednewsletter&utm_source=statuscodeweekly&utm_campaign=scw210609&utm_content=awsdevday) — Learn how to codify your AWS security in our hands-on DevSecOps workshop. Bridgecrew and the AWS team walk through how to automate and embed security throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Register for free with AWS credits included for a limited time. Bridgecrew sponsor [Making JavaScript Run Fast on WebAssembly](https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/making-javascript-run-fast-on-webassembly) — Once upon a time, JavaScript was seen as slow but a huge amount of time, money and research went into making it super fast in the browser. Now, the Bytecode Alliance is supporting work to do the same with optimizing JavaScript performance in new environments opened up by WebAssembly (including server side). Lin Clark (Bytecode Alliance) [Terraform 1.0 Released](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp-terraform-1-0-general-availability) — The increasingly popular ‘infrastructure as code’ tool that only seems to be on the up lately. The 1.0 release is less a revolution and more a landmark release around stability and interoperability – congratulations to them. HashiCorp - A large number of major sites went down earlier this week due to [an outage at Fastly](https://www.fastly.com/blog/summary-of-june-8-outage). Amazingly, the company's share price has grown by 11% since and they're [better known than ever before](https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1402263370255024142). - Python's original creator Guido van Rossum has [done a Q&A](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/programming-languages-why-python-4-0-will-probably-never-arrive-according-to-its-creator/) where he speculates there won't be a Python 4.0 in any reasonable span of time. - It may be no surprise that [open-source maintainers are under a lot of stress,](https://www.zdnet.com/article/hard-work-and-poor-pay-stresses-out-open-source-maintainers/) as a Tidelift survey has revealed. - In 'legal wrangling that will probably come to nothing' news, [the US state of Ohio is suing Google](https://eu.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/08/ohio-sues-google-seeks-declare-search-engine-public-utility/7602213002/) and wants to declare that Google is a public utility and should be regulated as such. - Apple's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) is taking place this week and here's [a list of links to docs](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/New-Technologies-WWDC-2021) for the new technologies and frameworks unveiled. Or if you'd rather, you can [watch the keynote](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TD96VTf0Xs). # Tutorials, Opinions and Stories 📖 [On the Diverse and Fantastical Shapes of Testing](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2021-test-shapes.html) — Does your testing follow a pyramid, a honeycomb, or a trophy? How many unit tests vs integration vs other? Is mocking and stubbing OK? The testing world is certainly full of opinions and shapes. Martin Fowler [A Look Into POKEGB: A Game Boy Emulator That Only Plays Pokémon](https://binji.github.io/posts/pokegb/) — This is less about the code (which is less than 100 lines!) and more about how it works. Ben Smith [12 Common Misconceptions About DynamoDB](https://dynobase.dev/dynamodb-11-common-misconceptions/) — DynamoDB’s approach is different enough to most other databases that it’s not surprising there are a variety of common misconceptions. Rafal Wilinski [[Free Download\] Guide to Effective Feature Management](https://learn.launchdarkly.com/effective-feature-management/?utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=q4-cooperpress&utm_content=ebook_oreilly_efm) — Learn feature management practices to accelerate release cycles and deploy every 6 hours, instead of every 6 weeks. LaunchDarkly sponsor [How an Engineering Team Used Python's AST to Patch Thousands of Lines of Code](https://engineering.soroco.com/abstract-syntax-tree-for-patching-code-and-assessing-code-quality/) — This isn’t a new technique but it’s always impressive to see it working at scale. Essentially code is turned into structured ASTs, manipulated in an automated fashion, then turned back into code again. Abdul Qadir [How Netflix Uses eBPF Flow Logs at Scale for Network Insight](https://netflixtechblog.com/how-netflix-uses-ebpf-flow-logs-at-scale-for-network-insight-e3ea997dca96) — Netflix has a network observability sidecar that uses eBPF to capture TCP flows in ‘near real time’ for getting insight into network usage at its large scales. Netflix Technology Blog [Building Python Projects at Scale with Pants](https://semaphoreci.com/blog/building-python-projects-with-pants) — Pants is a fast, scalable build system for Python apps specifically aimed at working with large repos and monorepos. Tomas Fernandez [First Impressions of Rust Programming on Solana](https://brson.github.io/2021/06/08/rust-on-solana) — [Solana](https://solana.com/) is a developer-focused blockchain. Brian Anderson [On the Scaling of Uber's API gateway](https://eng.uber.com/scaling-api-gateway/) Abhishek Parwal (Uber Engineering) # Code and Tools 🔧 supported by [![Okta\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/v1602154330/de7dtktheistsfpqdem4.png)](https://developer.okta.com/?utm_campaign=newsletter_cooperpress_all_multiple_inc_dev_sponsored-section_null&utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=cpc) [Links to 1211 (and Counting) Interesting Datasets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4juclhjFgqIY8fQFMemwKL2c64vk/edit#gid=0) — A wide variety of delights from datasets of [every death in Tarantino’s movies](https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/tarantino) and [cruise ship inspections](https://github.com/marks/cdc-cruise-ship-inspections) to [the coins in 22,500 French wallets](https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/f257j67ym6/2). Data Is Plural [Amazon SQS Now Supports a High Throughput Mode for FIFO Queues](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/amazon-sqs-now-supports-a-high-throughput-mode-for-fifo-queues/) — Originally SQS (Simple Queue Service) didn’t promise what order messages would arrive in, but FIFO queues, launched in 2016, changed all that at a cost of lower total throughput. Now, however, there’s a _high throughput mode_ allowing up to 3000 messages per second per API action – a 10x increase over the standard FIFO queue quota. Amazon Web Services [Free Chat & Activity Feed APIs for Qualifying Teams](https://getstream.io/blog/maker-account/?utm_source=statuscode_weekly&utm_medium=promoted_newsletter&utm_content=developer&utm_campaign=06_09_2021) Stream sponsor [Serverless Rules: Rules to Validate Infrastructure-as-Code Templates Against Recommended Practices](https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-rules) — An initial preview of an AWS Labs project for extending CloudFormation and Terraform linters to provide quick serverless-specific feedback on your app templates. Amazon Web Services - Labs [AllenNLP: An Open-Source NLP Research Library, Built on PyTorch](https://github.com/allenai/allennlp) — You’d use this for developing deep learning models to perform linguistic tasks. A new feature in this release is being able to determine [fairness and bias](https://guide.allennlp.org/fairness) in texts. AI2 [Althttpd: The HTTP Server That Runs SQLite.org](https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md) — It’s twenty years old, it’s written in C, and you can see [all the code in one file.](https://sqlite.org/althttpd/file?name=althttpd.c) A true example of achieving a lot with a little. SQLite Project [Introducing the SMS Sandbox for Amazon SNS](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-the-sms-sandbox-for-amazon-sns/) — Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) lets you deliver notifications via numerous methods, including SMS text messages. The SMS sandbox provides a safe environment to try the SMS features without risking your reputation. Amazon Web Services **QUICK RELEASES:** - [Notepad++ v8](https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v8/) – Popular Windows source code editor. - [Podman 3.2.0](https://github.com/containers/podman) – Tool for managing OCI containers and pods. - [Grafana 8.0](https://github.com/grafana/grafana) – The open source observability and data viz platform. - [Electron 13.0](https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-13-0) – Build desktop apps using Node, HTML and CSS. - [Vivaldi 4.0](https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-4-0/) – Alternative Web browser. 📭 **Got a new email?** You can [change your address here.](https://weekly.statuscode.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) --- **Bored of us?** [Click here to stop getting StatusCode Weekly.](https://weekly.statuscode.com/leave/*|UID|*) --- **Got a link for us?** Reply and tell us. We can't include everything but we'll look at anything you send. 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