Aggregated End-to-end Visibility and its Application on Rapid and Automatic Outage Triage in Monitoring Microservices

In a microservice architecture, a user request can go through a large number of servers owned by several different teams before a response is returned. The request can fail due to failure in any of the servers. Troubleshooting an outage that affects the end user experience in microservice architecture can involve multiple teams and can take a substantial amount of time. This disclosure describes techniques to rapidly locate the root cause entity of a customer-facing failure to node(s) deep within the infrastructure of the service. Per the techniques, end user product teams mark requests with metadata known as critical user interactions (CUI). The metadata is propagated along with the request. Performance metrics are gathered from servers that the requests go through. The performance metric is keyed by CUI, server node, and peer node for every adjacent pair of nodes. These piecemeal metrics keyed by CUI together offer end-to-end visibility for a set of requests grouped by the CUI of the end product, enabling the rapid and automatic triage of an outage to an interior server without requiring domain expertise on the product or the server

Simple Fabrication of Asymmetric High-Aspect-Ratio Polymer Nanopillars by Reusable AAO Templates

We present a simple method of utilizing anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) as a reproducible template for fabricating high-aspect-ratio uniformly bent polymeric nanopillars that can be used as a physical adhesive. It is shown how to achieve straight high-aspect-ratio nanopillars with concepts of the work of adhesion and lateral collapse between polymer pillars without serious damage to the master template. With the support of manufacturing polymeric nanopillars from the reusable AAO, a simple route to asymmetric dry adhesive nanopillars bent by residual stresses was demonstrated

Efficiency Improvement of Organic Solar Cells by Tuning Hole Transport Layer with Germanium Oxide

Improving optical property is critical for optimizing the power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells. In the present research, we show that modification of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) layer with GeO2 leads to 15% improvement of power conversion efficiency in a polymer solar cells through enhancement of short circuit currents. Modified PEDOT:PSS layer with optimized concentration of GeO2 assists active layer absorbing much light by playing a role of optical spacer. Using AFM and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) data, we also present the evidence that an addition of GeO2 does not affect crystallinity of active layer