Posts by Thomas Desrosiers

  In an earlier blog post, we analyzed the performance impact of Meltdown and Spectre on big data workloads in the cloud. In this blog post, we explain these exploits, their mitigation strategies and how they impact Databricks from a security and performance perspective. Meltdown Meltdown breaks a fundamental assumption in operating system security: an...

  Last week, the details of two industry-wide security vulnerabilities, known as Meltdown and Spectre, were released. These exploits enable cross-VM and cross-process attacks by allowing untrusted programs to scan other programs’ memory. On Databricks, the only place where users can execute arbitrary code is in the virtual machines that run Apache Spark clusters. There,...

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981 magine a cold, windy day at Lake Tahoe in California. When a group of Bricksters who were cross-country skiing stopped for lunch, one found a 4TB hard drive in their backpack. One brickster remarked that this...