Architecture Weekly Issue #174. 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.

Highlights

Empowering Decisions and Embracing AI with Andrew Harmel-Law 👷‍♂️

I talk with Andrew Harmel-Law, Principal Architect at ThoughtWorks and author of 'Facilitating Software Architecture.' In this interview, Andrew discusses various aspects of software architecture including the InfoQ State of Architecture 2025 report, the architecture advice process, and the evolving role of AI in software design.

#interview #adr

How to review a software architecture diagram 🍼

Knowing how to make a good diagram is one thing, and reviewing a diagram is another. While you can fill something is off, it is still useful to have a checklist for documentation review. Simon Brown shares it in his post of a 5 years ago.

How to review a software architecture diagram
I see hundreds of software architecture diagrams every year, predominantly through my software…
DEV CommunitySimon Brown

#documentation

The lethal trifecta for AI agents 👷‍♂️

People going crazy using AI completely forgetting every new piece of tech comes with a set of vulnerabilities, and LLMs are no exception. Simon Willison warns us about the 3 major problems: private data access, external communication and untrusted content. Follow the article.

The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication
If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them “AI agents” if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of …
Simon Willison’s WeblogSimon Willison

#ai #security

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Follow-Up

Terraform resource dependency graph 👷‍♂️

Your infrastructure consist of compute nodes, storage resources, networks, load balancers and tons of other useful stuff. Here's the kicker: the resources depend on each other. LB should know about the compute to point to it; the compute in it's turn must be aware about storage nodes. With IaaC you should be cautios about those dependencies. Alexey shows how to do that properly with terraform.

Terraform resource dependency graph
This article demonstrates how to manage the creation and updating of Terraform resources by properly…
DEV CommunityAlexey Ryazhskikh

#iaac

Secondary Indexes and the Specialized Storage Dilemma 👷‍♂️

Nice post by Oskar Dudycz(who runs his own architecture newsletter) on the efficient state retrieval in streaming systems and key-value databases. In both cases - with Kafka and DynamoDB - the engineers opted with a secondary storage. Discover the details inside.

Secondary Indexes and the Specialized Storage Dilemma
In 2016, the Kafka team faced a problem that illustrates a fundamental challenge in distributed systems design: their users needed query capabilities that the original design wasn’t capable of. They had to add secondary indexing to enable that. Read more to learn what that is and how that helps specialised storages to extend their capabilities.
Architecture WeeklyOskar Dudycz

#db #performance

APIs Versioning 👷‍♂️

Franco Fernando’s latest Polymathic Engineer explores APIs versioning as an essential practice in API lifecycle management. He argues that once your API is in production and clients depend on it, versioning becomes non-negotiable: there's no other way to support developer trust and avoid breaking changes.

APIs Versioning
Best practices for managing API changes without breaking users’ trust.
The Polymathic EngineerFranco Fernando

#api

Model Once, Represent Anywhere 👷‍♂️

Netflix introduces UDA (Unified Data Architecture), a cutting‑edge, knowledge-graph–based framework designed to standardize and connect domain concepts—like actor and movie—across its sprawling content ecosystem. By bridging conceptual definitions with technical implementations, UDA eliminates semantic drift, enhances data quality, fosters discovery across systems, and accelerates development—especially vital in large, heterogeneous microservices landscapes.

Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix
Introducing UDA, the knowledge-graph-based architecture that translates conceptual domain models into consistent schemas and data…
Netflix TechBlogNetflix Technology Blog

#datamodelling

Diving Deep on S3 Consistency 🤟

I always talk about how business requirements should dictate technical requirements; but you don't have to listen to me, listen to Werner Vogels who tells us how the S3 itself was built based on the customer expectations. As always a great read on S3 consistency tradeoffs.

Diving Deep on S3 Consistency
A deep dive on why we changed Amazon S3’s consistency model
All Things DistributedDr Werner Vogels - uildFuture/

#serverless #aws

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!