Architecture Weekly #87

Architecture Weekly Issue #87. 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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Highlights

Scaling the Instagram Explore recommendations system 🤟

Once you open "For you" tab in Twitter or "Explore" tab in Instagram, you might wonder how the system selects content, which You specifically would find interesting. In this post in Engineering blog, Instagram engineers explain how they use several stages of ranking to show you the most relevant content from multiple sources.  

Scaling the Instagram Explore recommendations system
Explore is one of the largest recommendation systems on Instagram. We leverage machine learning to make sure people are always seeing content that is the most interesting and relevant to them. Usin…

#ml #casestudy

Announcing the 2023 State of DevOps Report 🍼

Last time we discussed that DevOps in 2023 is in terrible state. But the Google Cloud report kinda disagress. They see the Elite category of performers back in charts and also give the advices on how to move close to it, like building with users and mind and caring for people so they feel belonging.

Announcing the 2023 State of DevOps Report | Google Cloud Blog
When it comes to building a successful DevOps practice, organizational culture and user-centricity are key, the 2023 State of DevOps Report finds.

#devops

From Big Data to Better Data: Data Quality at Lyft 👷‍♂️

We at Bolt Billing aim for quality - otherwise we face lot sorts of trouble, from finanacial to legal. Same challenge Lyft has(and no wonder). In their blog you will find an article on what does it mean for data to be correct and how Lyft built a platform to ensure data correctness at scale of petabytes a day.  

From Big Data to Better Data: Ensuring Data Quality with Verity
Author: Michael McPhillips, Tech Lead at Lyft

#casestudy

Follow-Up

Hints for Distributed Systems Design 🤟

The blog post by Murat Demirbas provides heuristic principles for designing robust and efficient distributed systems. Inspired by Butler Lampson's work, the post categorizes these principles into functionality, performance, and fault-tolerance. Key takeaways include the importance of abstraction for simplifying complex systems, minimizing coordination to improve efficiency, and ingraining fault-tolerance from the design phase. The author also emphasizes leveraging time for performance gains and the need for observability tools. A bonus hint suggests rethinking system design for the cloud era, moving away from traditional physical box models to a more flexible, cloud-based approach.

Hints for Distributed Systems Design
This is with apologies to Butler Lampson, who published the ” Hints for computer system design ” paper 40 years ago in SOSP′83. I don’t clai...

Seven Principles of Cloud-Native Architectures 🍼

Elasticity, Service-Orientation, Observability, Resilience, Maximum Automation - the post in Alibaba Cloud Community blog explains the principles behind truly cloud-native applications. A detailed read explainig why this or that principle is really important.

Seven Principles of Cloud-Native Architecture
This article explains the seven principles of cloud-native architecture.

#cloud

Enhancing Security and Developer Productivity: LinkedIn's Journey with Implementing Content Security Policy 👷‍♂️

At LinkedIn security standards are no joke, as they deal with PII(Personal Identification Information). So they need to make sure their security standards are applied across all the applications, including frontends. At first they implemented fully centralized approach to control Content, but then faced the scalability issue and moved it more towards the end applications. See how they did it(sequence diagrams included).

Enhancing Security and Developer Productivity: LinkedIn’s Journey with Implementing Content Security Policy
Co-authors: Covenant Goo, Matthew Lemons, Mira Thambireddy, and Roman Shafigullin

#security #casestudy

Sticky sessions and canary releases in Kubernetes 👷‍♂️

Sticky sessions and canary releases might sound contradictive, as you combine the experimentation with sessions landing the same pod, but no worries, it's perfectly achievable. In this post you will find how to configure Nginx in Kubernetes with separate ingress manifests.  

Sticky sessions and canary releases in Kubernetes
Sticky sessions or session affinity is a convenient strategy to keep subsequent requests always...

#kubernetes #k8s

Zomato's Tool to prevent data leaks 👷‍♂️

I don't think I need to convince anybody data leaks are bad. Zomato decided they want to tackle the problem at scale and created and automated solution started as a simple github monitoring tool. In this post you will find the current tool architecture and principles of working. The tool is called Vinifera and it's opensource btw :)  

Introducing Vinifera: A guide on how it prevents and mitigates accidental data leaks at scale

#security

Netflix's Backend Architecture 🍼

Short article on the high-level backend architecture of Netflix. Streaming platform, Chaos Monkey, CDN and some other tools. Definitely not a Deep Dive, rather a high-level overview.

Understanding Netflix’s Backend Architecture: A Deep Dive 🚀
How Netflix backend works Dive into the mesmerizing world of Netflix’s backend...