top is a program available in most Unix systems. It allows us to see the processes or threads running on a computer and help understand what they are doing at a high level (How much CPU or memory they are using, etc).

The top command with no modifiers will show something like this:

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top - 11:44:51 up 13:24,  1 user,  load average: 0.58, 0.56, 0.63
Tasks: 247 total,   1 running, 246 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  9.3 us,  2.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 88.1 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.2 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 20296196 total, 15693616 free,  2027196 used,  2575384 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 20713468 total, 20713468 free,        0 used. 17373856 avail Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 6541 adriana+  20   0 1711996 371500 179160 S  14.6  1.8   2:48.36 chromium-browse
 6086 adriana+  20   0 3204864 397544 143956 S  11.3  2.0   5:20.30 chromium-browse
 6560 adriana+  20   0 1299604 152364  77924 S   7.0  0.8   0:36.41 chromium-browse
 6521 adriana+  20   0 1338048 192696  94196 S   6.6  0.9   0:58.36 chromium-browse
 2860 adriana+  20   0 2000924 238864  68368 S   3.0  1.2   4:54.79 gnome-shell
 1440 root      20   0  233260  83616  25896 S   1.0  0.4   0:14.25 splunkd
 1914 root      20   0  500940  34424  20004 S   1.0  0.2   0:25.60 docker-containe
12367 adriana+  20   0   35600   3464   2896 R   0.7  0.0   0:00.05 top
    8 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.3  0.0   0:03.92 rcu_sched
  345 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   0.3  0.0   0:01.65 kworker/u9:3
 1387 root      20   0  299452  64072  39456 S   0.3  0.3   2:24.16 Xorg
 1833 root      20   0  756772  68200  39192 S   0.3  0.3   0:11.96 dockerd

To get information about the CPU architecture of the system we can use lscpu, which is a frontend for /proc/cpuinfo. A run of lscpu on my system gives this output:

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Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                4
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-3
Thread(s) per core:    2
Core(s) per socket:    2
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 142
Model name:            Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7600U CPU @ 2.80GHz
Stepping:              9
CPU MHz:               900.020
CPU max MHz:           3900.0000
CPU min MHz:           400.0000
BogoMIPS:              5808.00
Virtualization:        VT-x
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              256K
L3 cache:              4096K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-3
Flags:                 fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc art arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch cpuid_fault epb invpcid_single pti retpoline intel_pt rsb_ctxsw spec_ctrl ssbd tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rtm mpx rdseed adx smap clflushopt xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves dtherm ida arat pln pts hwp hwp_notify hwp_act_window hwp_epp

It might be a little confusing, but CoreOS is not actually the name of an operating system. CoreOS is the name of the company that develops a set of tools for the container ecosystem. The name of the operating system that runs on each of the hosts in a CoreOS cluster is Container Linux. Realizing this made it a lot easier to find the information I was looking for while trying to understand how all the tools work together.

As I mentioned before, Container Linux is a Linux distribution. The selling point of this distribution is that it contains the bare minimum for it to operate. It is designed to run applications inside of containers, so it doesn’t provide things that other Linux distributions provide (Browser, Office suite, GUI, etc…). Stripping the things that are not needed saves some disk space and probably some memory and CPU cycles (Assuming some daemons included in most distributions will not be running). Is it worth to change the distribution we are used to using just for a little more resources? Probably not, but lets talk about the things we would get if we decide to do it.

• Automatic software updates – In other distributions, the system remains the same until a system administrator updates it. Linux container constantly updates the underlying system (including the kernel) with security and stability patches.
• Cluster configutaion – Allows you to declaratively configure (partition disks, add users, etc…) all the machines in your cluster.
• Kubernetes – CoreOs makes it easy to build a Kubernetes cluster in most cloud providers.

If you have written C++, you have most likely already used copy-assignment. Variables are copy assigned by using the equal sign:

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#include <iostream>

int main() {
  std::string first = "tacos";
  std::string second;

  second = first;

  std::cout << &first << std::endl;
  std::cout << &second << std::endl;
}

One of the outputs from the program above is:

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0x7ffc36841b70
0x7ffc36841b90

Why use Mutexes?

Mutexes are a technique for concurrency management. They are called Mutex because of their MUTual EXclusion property (Only one thread can be doing work at a given time).

Mutexes are used to prevent race conditions on shared data between threads. Lets look at a stack backed by an array. At some point it could look like this:

If we want to insert a value on this stack we need to follow these steps:

1 – Get the index of the head

2 – Increment the index of the head by one

3 – Save a value in the head

If two threads need to insert a value into this stack at the same time, one of the inserted values could get lost:

IPv6 has been an Internet Standard since July 2017. Although I had heard of it since far back, I never had to know much about it until now. In this post I’m going to explain what are some of the differences between IPv4 (The previous and most widely used standard) and IPv6.

Address space

Probably the most commonly known reason behind IPv6 is that we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses soon. An IPv4 address looks like this: 192.168.100.255. In binary it would look something like this: 11000000.10101000.1100100.11111111. That is 32 bits (2^32) which equals 4,294,967,296 values.

IPv6 addresses look a little different. They are represented by 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits separated by a colon. For example: 1234:5678:9abc:def1:f00d:1560:0d7a:c055. This is 2^128 different combinations which is a little more than 3*10^38. This is a very high number we’re probably not going to exhaust any time soon.

Because addresses can get very long, a few conventions have been made to make them shorter to write on paper. One of them is that leading zeros in a group can be omitted. For example:

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1234:0abc:9abc:00f1:f00d:1560:0035:0001
1234:abc:9abc:f1:f00d:1560:35:1

The two addresses above are the same.

Today I discovered that there are some interesting behaviors when you use a function that takes a reference as an entry point for a thread.

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#include <iostream>
#include <thread>

struct container {
  int numThings;
};

void setThings(container& cont)
{
  cont.numThings = 3;
}

int main()
{
  container c;
  std::thread t(setThings, c);

  t.join();

  std::cout << c.numThings;
}

A couple of years ago I wrote a post explaining how to develop and Android application inside a Docker container. After some time away from Android development I tried to follow the instructions in my post but they didn’t work quite well.

A lot has changed in the way Android applications are developed since my last post. Installing SDK elements is easier and Kotlin is the language of choice now. Luckily, once we put everything inside Docker, we don’t have to worry much about the environment and just code.

Create a folder for your project and add a Dockerfile inside that folder:

In a previous post I covered the basics of Terraform. In this post I’m going to cover a few more things that I find necessary in most infrastructures I create.

The machines

I’m going to start with a couple of machines:

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// Configure Google Cloud
provider "google" {
  credentials = "${file("credentials.json")}"
  project = "ncona-1504"
  version = "~> 1.13"
}

// Machines
resource "google_compute_instance" "us-central1-c--f1-micro--001" {
  name         = "us-central1-c--f1-micro--001"
  machine_type = "f1-micro"
  zone         = "us-central1-c"

  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "ubuntu-1604-xenial-v20170815a"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"
  }
}

resource "google_compute_instance" "us-central1-c--f1-micro--002" {
  name         = "us-central1-c--f1-micro--002"
  machine_type = "f1-micro"
  zone         = "us-central1-c"

  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "ubuntu-1604-xenial-v20170815a"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"
  }
}

Google uses the concept of Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to refer to their capability for creating your own private network withing their infrastructure. There are a few terms that will allow us to create a network of our design:

• Network – This is a virtual (because everything is virtual in the cloud) network that can span across the globe
• Subnet – This is an IP range that can be used by machines in a single region
• Firewall – Used to limit communication between machines in the same network

Network

A network (or VPC) is just a name used to group your network infrastructure. Subnets are defined inside a network and each host is part of one subnet.

Subnets

Subnets can be defined by region. You can choose any IP range defined as private as specified in RFC-1918 (basically anything inside these ranges: 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 and 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255).