Architecture Weekly Issue #167. Articles, books, and playlists on architecture and related topics. Split by sections, highlighted with complexity: 🤟 means hardcore, 👷‍♂️ is technically applicable right away,  đźŤĽ - is an introduction to the topic or an overview. Now in telegram and Substack as well.

Business Oriented System Design Course Cohort #5 is closed, but you can apply for Cohort #6(starting late July) waiting list here.

Highlights

Monitoring Minecraft with OpenTelemetry 👷‍♂️

Minecraft is just a game, right? Well, that's a worldwide product which makes good money. But even if you run your own server, you want to make sure that it runs smoothly. Once it's assured you probably want to know fun stuff too: number of users, blocks mind, death statistics etc. Grab the observability solution for a minecraft server with OpenTelemetry.

Monitoring Minecraft with OpenTelemetry · Blog · Dash0
One of the secret pleasures of life is to be paid for things you would do for free. On a completely unrelated note, this blog post documents my time figuring out how to monitor a Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and Dash0.
Michele Mancioppi

#observability

Business Won't Let Me and other lies you tell to yourself as a developer 🍼

Another awesome piece of the expectation from a software engineer. The code we write is not the only part of the working feature, but rather it makes only for ~30% of work. The quality control, communication, planning and running the feature in prod is all there too. Don't listen to me, listen to Oskar!

Business Won’t Let Me and other lies we tell to ourselves
Have you heard a surgeon say, “I won’t sterilise my tools, as patient won’t let me”? I didn’t, but I heard, multiple times, “Business won’t let us add unit tests.” Let’s discuss how real this phrase is. Is it about business or about ourselves trying to run away from accountability?
Architecture WeeklyOskar Dudycz

#quality

Simple, scalable and global: Containers for Cloudflare Workers 👷‍♂️

Workers at Cloudflare became a lambda offering from Cloudflare. Now you can deploy and run Containers there - easy and scalable way of running workloads - which is ideal if you want let's say try out some LLM-generated code for your experiments. Live as open beta in June 2025.

Simple, scalable, and global: Containers are coming to Cloudflare Workers in June 2025
Cloudflare Containers are coming this June. Run new types of workloads on our network with an experience that is simple, scalable, global and deeply integrated with Workers.
The Cloudflare BlogMike Nomitch

#serverless

Follow-Up

Evolution of Product Classification on Shopify 👷‍♂️

Classification is a classical(pun intended) task for the eCommerce apps. Shopify shares the story of transitioning from traditional machine learning approaches to using modern Visual Language Models.

Evolution of Product Classification at Shopify: From Categories to Comprehensive Product Understanding (2025) - Shopify
Shopify’s product classification system has evolved from basic categorization to an AI-driven framework using Vision Language Models and the Shopify Product Taxonomy. It accurately classifies products, extracts attributes, and processes over 30 million predictions daily, improving search, discovery, trust, and efficiency.
ShopifyKshetrajna Raghavan

#gm

Microservices are a tax your startup can't afford 👷‍♂️

Countless stories all over the LinkedIn how starting microservices killed young startups churning all the investor money on technical complexity. Here you will find why exactly this happens and get an explanation when it makes sense to split.

Microservices Are a Tax Your Startup Probably Can’t Afford
Why splitting your codebase too early can quietly destroy your team’s velocity — and what to do instead. In a startup, your survival depends on how quickly you can iterate, ship features, and deliver value to end-users. This is where the foundational architecture of your startup plays a big role; additionally, things like your tech stack and choice of programming language directly affect your team’s velocity. The wrong architecture, especially premature microservices, can substantially hurt productivity and contribute to missed goals in delivering software.
nexo blog

#microservices

About MADR 🍼

ADR - architecture decision records - is an absolute must for making and tracking architecture decisions. It is even better with the standardized format and tooling around. Check out Markdown for ADRs.

About MADR
MADR

#decisionmakins

Mastering Kubernetes Storage 👷‍♂️

Keep your Kubernetes apps from losing their stuff! This upbeat Medium guide explains—in plain words—what Persistent Volumes (PV) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) are, how they work together, and the five best habits (think Storage Classes, backups, right access modes) that make data truly stick. Handy kubectl snippets show you how to debug mounts like a pro, so your stateful pods can move around the cluster without ever dropping a byte. 

Mastering Kubernetes Storage: A Deep Dive into Persistent Volumes and Claims
Storage management in Kubernetes presents unique challenges for DevOps engineers and platform architects. While containers excel at running stateless applications, managing persistent data requires…
MediumMd Toriqul Islam

#kubernetes

Prompt Engineering 🤟

Yep, there are tons of tutorials on the best prompts for particular models, but there you will find a proper whitepaper, explaining the one-shot vs few-shot prompting, what is the temperature and Top-K and Top-P and many other internal details of LLMs. Must read!

Prompt Engineering
Kaggle is the world’s largest data science community with powerful tools and resources to help you achieve your data science goals.
Kaggle

#ai

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 on Patreon!