A technical overview of blockchain technology Before the prevalence of the Blockchain technology, Internet applications are mostly based on the central trust paradigm. For example, our financial data are stored on the servers managed by the banks and the security of the data and the financial transactions depends largely on…

An introduction to Google’s Pregel graph processing framework In the part 1 of the blog, we introduced the PageRank algorithm, which is used by Google to rank its search results, and from that we talked about the need to process graph data efficiently. Pregel is the framework develop for this…

A detailed introduction to Uber’s fulfillment architecture on top of Googles’ cloud Spanner In the previous post, we introduced the previous generation of Uber’s fulfillment service. The service was not able to scale to serve the rapid growing number of users, which led Uber’s fulfillment team to rewrite the service…

A detailed introduction to Uber’s fulfillment architecture As described in [1], fulfillment service is to “capture a consumer’s intent and fulfill it by matching it with the right set of providers”. For example, one possible customers’ intent is to travel from one location to another location and providers are the…

Introduction to Open AI’s DALL*E Deep Neural Network It used to be super challenging for a computer to automatically generate images based on some text descriptions. Some examples are A copybara sitting in a field at sunrise. An armchair in the shape of an avocado. The exact same teapot on…

Machine learning made possible with zero background Machine learning has been the foreground of the rising popularity of data-driven software systems. However machine learning has a comparative high entry barrier. Shortage of Machine Learning expertises could potentially prevent many companies from benefiting from Machine Learning. Facing such challenges, both the…

What it is about and why it matters to us? Amazon Web Service (AWS)’s annual re:Invent conference is one of the most anticipated event in the global cloud computing community. This year, it is a 3-week conference starting from November 30 to December 18. …

How Facebook designed a database with 10X write throughput and 2X compression rate compared to InnoDB Databases are at the heart of virtually all internet applications. Database throughput and latencies are normally the bottleneck of many internet services and have attracted attentions from many researchers. As the amount of data…

How your social media data on Facebook are organized and stored — There is no need for an introduction to Facebook. Facebook has more than 1 billion active users who record their relationships, share their interests, upload and comment on text, images and videos. In this blog, I will mainly discuss two aspects of Facebook’s backend system: How the social graph is…