Architecture Weekly Issue #137. 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

Container Platform at CloudFlare 👷‍♂️

6,5 years ago Cloudflare started to allow you run custom JS code with their workers because you know, custom load balancing affinity algorithms or tailoring WAF. Now they make a step further allowing to run entire containers. Feeling small, that's actually a huge step forward, as now you can run containers without an attachment to region, decoupling it from local configuration, resources and all the hustle you have in traditional clouds. Some even speculate Cloudflare is gonna lead the cloud game. We'll see, but in the meantime - try it out!

Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here’s an early look
We’ve been working on something new — a platform for running containers across Cloudflare’s network. We already use it in production, for AI inference and more. Today we want to share an early look at how it’s built, why we built it, and how we use it ourselves.

#cloud #containers

Introduction to modern network load balancing and proxying 👷‍♂️

Extremely good long-read explaining the model load balancing at network layer, including the multiplexing, need for L7 load balancing, load balancing types and configuration. It lacks some configuration code examples to my taste, but still a thorough read.

Introduction to modern network load balancing and proxying
It was brought to my attention recently that there is a dearth of introductory educational material available about modern network load…

#network #availability #performance

Adding AI into Software Solutions at Miro 🍼

AI buzz is all over the place. SaaS solutions adding the AI everywhere: omnigraffle has it, Google Docs has it, like everyone is doing it. But how it works under the hood? What are the challenges of adding AI features to a SaaS product? I am talking with Seva Brekelov, a Principal Engineer at Miro, about all the caveats.

#video #interview

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Follow-Up

Software Architecture is team sport 🍼

I changed the title for this one - because it tells not about the complexity of Software Architecture, but rather about engineers doing it instead of dedicated specialists and reasons why you can't neither have no process nor having too much a process but find something in between,

Software Architecture is Hard
I live in one of the suburbs of Tel-Aviv. One day, I woke up to insane drilling sounds. It started! the construction work to build the…

#architecture

Microservices Architecture, The Hard Parts 👷‍♂️

Architecture Quanta is part of the system with the same quality attributes: performance, availability, security requirements. Microservices is a well fit when you have several quantas, so you can break the system up accordingly. However, the separation is much trickier and even if you know the domain well, it still can be a problem. Follow the case study insight.

Microservices Architecture, The Hard Parts : Trap of Distributed Monolith
When conversing with seasoned Senior Software Engineers who leverage Microservices Architecture for their product development, they…

#casestudy #microservices

Hacking Kia 👷‍♂️

Can you imagine that you can open locate the car, open it and even start it just knowing the license plate? Well, that was a reality just recently with Kia cars. As they are now equipped with a SIM card for weather, maps and traffic services, as well as the controlling app, the bug on the web portal allowed to add yourself as a car owner and do whatever you want. Perfect story to tell at Halloween party.

Hacking Kia: Remotely Controlling Cars With Just a License Plate
On June 11th, 2024, we discovered a set of vulnerabilities in Kia vehicles that allowed remote control over key functions using only a license plate. These attacks could be executed remotely on any hardware-equipped vehicle in about 30 seconds, regardless of whether it had an active Kia Connect subscription.

#security

The New Era of Flexible Infrastructure Deployment 🍼

Having a SaaS offering of a database or a queue is nice, but apparently customers want much more than that: they want to deploy the solution wherever they see fit: to their own cloud, to a local computer or anywhere else. Chris Riccomini spots the trend and demonstrates with the examples of Kafka and Clickhouse.

The New Era of Flexible Infrastructure Deployment
Flexible deployment is now table stakes. Infrastructure must run embedded, client-side, single-node, clustered, as SaaS, BYOC, and self-hosted.

#infrastructure

Heterogeneous SLI vs Homogeneous SLI👷‍♂️

The best metrics are the ones which are easy to reason about; that's not always the case; especially when the total space of values and the space of good values are different metrics. For example, measuring the payment flow availability can be done through a combination of 'Pay' button clicks and failed payment attempts. This is called heterogeneous SLIs. Alex Ewerlöf shows the comparison of such metrics to homogeneous ones.

Heterogeneous SLI vs Homogeneous SLI
Cons and pros of each approach and when to use which

#sre #availability

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, videos, influence the content and participate in the closed group where we discuss the architecture problems. Join them at Patreon or Boosty!