Architecture Weekly #53
Architecture Weekly Issue #53. 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 as well.
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Video
Highlights
Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem? 🤟
As you folks love papers, I bring a fresh interesting one to the Highlights. Murat Demirbas from AWS posted an overview of a paper called "Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem?". The overview and the paper itself describe the shared-nothing, single-writer and multiple-writers designs of a scalable OLTP database and discuss their tradeoffs. Murat also highlights that the paper fails to consider metastable errors(which you can find a paper on here). The second part of the original paper is about a new DB and that's not that interesting, but the first part is gold.
#database #cloud #oltp #paper
Yandex Services Source Code Leak 🍼
The internet blew up this week with a major data source leak from a russian IT giant Yandex. The dump contains 44 GB of source code from their monorepository - which was not a single storage of the code in the company. The dump contains tons of services, configs, user-generated data like prompts for Voice Assistant and even database credentials for insider access. Although there are no trained models though, and you can't really build anything from it, as yandex infrastructure is required, you can still use it to learn how the things are done at a company of that scale.
#security #breach
System Design Interview Survival Guide 🍼
I know you folks read the newsletter partially because you want to be ready for the design interview. And the 3rd highlight today is the survival guide for exactly those. The article goes over the list of concepts to be aware of, the architecture patterns, database types, distribution system problems etc. Use as a nice checklist to prepare for the interview!
#systemdesign
Follow-Up
Software Trends Report: What to Watch for in 2023 🍼
As we just wrapped up 2022, it is good to get back and get an overview of the trends of the last year and see what we can expect in future. In this post at InfoQ, they mention the use of ADRs, the importance of the Senior IC role and the emergence of Platform teams. They also highlight that you would rather treat platforms and data as products and handle those accordingly. As regards the software architecture I've invited Uwe Friedrechsen for an hour-long interview, so book your calendars!
#architecture #review
How to autoscale your SaaS application Infrastructure 👷♂️
RedHat has a series on SaaS Architecture Checklist. Recently they shared Chapter 9 which is about autoscaling the infrastructure. Michael Hrivnak explains how autoscaling can be configured using Cluster API, Cluster Autoscaler and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler so that your SaaS resources are truly elastic.
#kubernetes #saas #autoscaling #scalability
Must Read Free Kubernetes Books 🍼
Speaking of Kubernetes, take a look at the set of free books which help you to study Kubernetes itself, it's performance and security. The set also includes books on integration patterns and designing distributed systems.
#kata #books
Solution Architecture Kata Example 👷♂️
One of the books I recommended in this post, was "Fundamentals of Software Architecture" by Neil Ford. He also knows as a promoter of "Architecture Kata" exercise and he shows an example of a task for such activity in the aforementioned book. What I want to share with you is solving a problem to that particular Kata in this post on Medium. It includes understanding the context and iterating over the design versions. Take a look.
#architecture #kata
Document your event-driven architecture 🍼
In a loosely coupled, event-driven architecture we still want to know What events/messages is a particular service producing, what events/messages can I consume from the service, what is the message schema and more. This short article shows the 3 ways how you can document the answers to those questions.
#documentation #eda
Metrics for quality
When you introduce any metric for your software project, team or whatever else, you will always find out that the metric stops being useful due to Goodhart's law. So if you need to optimize your product for quality, what do you do? Well, if you study the quality itself, you will find out the outer, inner and process quality parts. The article though does not answer what metrics to pick - just how to think about the quality itself.
#quality #qa
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