Architecture Weekly #134
Architecture Weekly Issue #134. 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.
Intro
This is a special issue because I made significant changes to the website. First of all, the blog moved from vvsevolodovich.dev to blog.vvsevolodovich.dev. This change is a part of a bigger move: I am repurposing the main domain name to be more of a professional page, and blog is part of the content I create. Go check it out and let me know what do you think(for example, sign up for the course? Order a workshop? =)).
In order to make it happen I had to make some technical challenges, but that's worth a separate post, which will happen next week. I am also planning a big post on API Gateway purpose with examples of AWS API Gateway. Don't forget to subscribe if you're still not there!
So, it's time for the week highlights.
Highlights
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods 👷♂️
Unbelievably relevant article from 2013 on what is actually hard about building distributed systems and advices on what to pay attention to. Slow requests as the hardest to debug problem, partial availability, coordination issues - I beg you read carefully.
On a side note it's pretty surprising how I guessed to address the majority of those points in the course I am running. Feel free to enroll in the next cohort which starts mid-October!
#distributedsystems
Exactly-Once Payments at Airbnb 👷♂️
Well, don't expect Kafka and queue semantics here, but princinples of payments processing rather and the idea that true exactly-once is technically impossible, but you can successfully fake it with idempotency keys and the mutex at the database level. More details inside.
#distributedsystems #casestudy
Disaster Recovery 🍼
A year ago we had a great chat with Mikhail Druzhinin on what is a disaster in software, discussed several disaster stories and ways how to think about the disasters in the first place. I encourage you to watch the full conversation filled with stories, jokes and valuable lessons.
#video #interview
Follow-Up
Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases 🤟
Do you love long reads? I got you 1. 17 statements about databases you probably don't realize are true broken down in a 20 minutes read. ACID treated differently by database vendords, different isolation capabilities, anomalies, ordering problems and many more in this great article
#db
QA myth busing: more testing - better quality
Another great piece on quality assurance by Vitaly. Not only it brings the proper mindset on the testing vs QA, but it is also based on the scientific research rather than just observations from the past experience. I especially like the take on "build your QA strategy rather than just mimicking what others are doing". Words to live by.
#qa
CQRS != Read-only Database Replicas
Common misconception about CQRS pattern applied in microservices style is that it works primarily by leveraging additional replicas handling the read queries. However, this pattern is about a different data design which makes those queries efficient in the first place. Grab the explanation in the article by Yugabyte DB
#db #microservices
Postgres webhooks with pgstream 👷♂️
CDC is well-known idea of propagating db state change through an event stream to other components but how does it look in practice? Get a nice tutorial demonstrating the data change events on Postgres through webhooks with pgstream
#postgres #db #cdc
Event-Driven Core 👷♂️
Functional code is easy to reason about due to it's purity. However pure functional product can not be used by humans, as they need to give the system instructions what to do, so you wrap it up with the imperative stuff. The same line of thoughts can be applied to event-driven vs request-response. If you wrap up an event-driven system into a request response shell you will get a nice combination. Follow the article for the details.
#eventdriven #eda
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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, videos, influence the content and participate in the closed group where we discuss the architecture problems. Join them at Patreon or Boosty!