Architecture Weekly #137
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!
#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.
#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
Sponsored
Depot Managed GitHub Actions runners offer caching that's 10x faster than GitHub's own solution, and at half the cost. It’s the secret to boosting your CI/CD pipelines without breaking the bank. Find out how it works!
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,
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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!