Architecture Weekly #128

Architecture Weekly Issue #128. Articles, books, and playlists on architecture and related topics. Split by sections, highlighted with complexity: 🤟 means hardcore, 👷‍♂️ is technically applicable right away, 🍼 - is an introduction to the topic or an overview. Now in telegram and Substack as well.

Highlights

Using Redis for real-time RAG goes beyond a Vector Database 👷‍♂️

LLMs are great, but they can lie to you if they don't have an answer or base the answer on the unreliable sources. Retrieval Augmented Generation is an approach to solve the problem while basically double checking on the LLM yield. Redis used as Vector Database can help with that and improve the generation performance at the same time. See the architecture in the article.

Using Redis for real-time RAG goes beyond a Vector Database - Redis

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) become the de facto standard architecture for GenAI applications that require access to private data. Nevertheless, some may wonder why it’s important to have real-time access to this data. The answer is quite simple: you don’t want your application to stop runni…

RedisYiftach Shoolman

#casestudy #performance #genai

Using S3 as a container registry 👷‍♂️

ECR is a default container registry in AWS, but if pushing the docker images is time sensitive for you, then you will find out that uploading the same image to S3 is 5 times faster than with S3 in minimum time. Find out the reasons why it happens in the article.

Using S3 as a container registry

For the last four months I’ve been developing a custom container image builder, collaborating with Outerbounds1. The technical details of the builder itself might be the topic of a future article, but there’s something surprising I wanted to share already: you can use S3 as a container registry! You…

Adolfo Ochagavía

#performance

The past, present and future of local-first 🤟

Martin Kleppmann discusses the development and principles of Local First software, tracing its roots from early CRDT research to current implementations like Automerge. Martin proposes a more precise definition that includes multi-device functionality and robustness against network and server failures. The talk outlines the benefits to both users and developers, suggesting a future direction involving a generic syncing service to standardize protocols and enhance app interoperability.

#video

Follow-Up

Defense-in-Depth: A Layered Strategy for Modern Cybersecurity 🍼

Security tactics include encryption, backups, access controls, DoS protection and many more. The modern software is so complex and hackers are so advanced, you can't merely apply couple of tactics here and there and feel safe. Instead you should be going with holistic approach like Defense-in-Depth where every layer is putting maximum effort into security assuming all the other layers already failed.

Defense-in-Depth: A Layered Strategy for Modern Cybersecurity

This post explores Defense-in-Depth, a comprehensive strategy with a multi-layered approach to modern threat protection.

zveloWe Categorize the Web®zvelo

#security

Event-driven = Loosely coupled? Not so fast! 🍼

Direct endpoint calls are considered coupled. But coupling can take different forms including semantic, time, topology and many more. Gregor Hohpe depicts those coupling and explains the difference between messages and events.

Event-driven = Loosely coupled? Not so fast!

Event-driven architectures (EDAs) are frequently pitched as loosely coupled, when compared to other forms of integration

Enterprise Integration Patterns

#patterns

TiDB - A Raft-based HTAP Database 🤟

And can't let you go without a paper! Typically you either go with an OLTP DB for operational loads, or augment it with OLAP DB for analytical queries. Another option is to have a single solution working in a hybrid model - HTAP. TiDB is exactly that and it is processing almost all the payload inside Bolt. Find a paper about this peculiar database and how it operates with multiple Raft groups of row and column stores

TiDB - A Raft-based HTAP Database.pdf

Google Docs

#db

A beginner’s guide to Phantom Read anomaly 👷‍♂️

Speaking about the database, I would like to continue sharing the articles about isolations anomalies. This time time it's phantom read - read the data in 1 transaction which is being inserted by another one. Find out how MVCC can prevent it.

A beginner’s guide to Phantom Read anomaly - Vlad Mihalcea

Phantom Read is a data integrity anomaly that can occur when one transaction observes two successive versions of the same multi-record query.

Vlad Mihalceavladmihalcea

Organization Architecture 🍼

Alex Ewerlöf discusses how the software architecture is impacted by the organizational structure in a pretty entertaining way, and how relationships in the organization tree affects system reliability. No practical solutions there, but funny read indeed.

Organization Architecture

The importance of organization design on service design and why consumer journey is the key to improve system reliability

Alex Ewerlöf NotesAlex Ewerlöf

#ea

WARNING 🇺🇦

The brutal and unjustified war against Ukraine continues already 2 years. If you want to help Ukraine directly visit this fund.

Big thanks to Nikita, Constantin, Anatoly, Oleksandr, Dima, Pavel B, Pavel, Robert, Roman, Iyri, Andrey, Lidia, Vladimir, August, Roman, Egor, Roman, Evgeniy, Nadia, Daria, Dzmitry, Mikhail, Nikita, Dmytro, Denis and Mikhail for supporting the newsletter. They receive early access to the articles, influence the content and participate in the closed group where we discuss the architecture problems. Join them at Patreon or Boosty!