Architecture Weekly #100

Architecture Weekly Issue #100. 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.

Issue #100, can you believe it? 🎂

Highlights

Databases in 2023: A Year in Review 🍼

First issue of the year starts with a Databases review by Andy Pavlo! Find out why Vector Databases are on the rise(spoiler: LLMs), how investing rounds are going in the database world and how SQL as a language developers.

Databases in 2023: A Year in Review | OtterTune
From the rise of vector databases to SQL:2023 to MariaDB troubles and the FAA outage, 2023 was an exciting year in database history.

#db

Building a Large-scale Distributed Storage System Based on Raft 🤟

TiKV is a foundation for TitaniumDB, which we use at Bolt. Inside you will find a great detailed article explaining the sharding strategies for distributed stores, and how can range-based sharding be superior to famously promoted hash-based with consistent hashing algorithm(highlighting how system design interview actually differes from real life cases). Raft algorithm is applied there as well :)

Building a Large-scale Distributed Storage System Based on Raft
In recent years, building a large-scale distributed storage system has become a hot topic. Distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Raft are the focus of many technical articles. But those articles tend to be introductory, describing the basics of the algorithm and log replication. They seldo…

#distributedsystems

Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 🍼

2023 was indeed a great year for LLMs, ending up with opensource models which can be run locally(I personally just successfully used whisper to get some subtitles out of my videos, what pretty easy to do). In this post you will find a summary of what we know about LLMs now and some thoughts about practical applicability.

Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023
2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most interesting development in the academic field of …

#ai

Follow-Up

Stop Building Databases(in Frontend) 👷‍♂️

A peculiar observation that modern frontend apps are reinventing the wheel of a database starting small with caching and indexing features, and ending up with smart cache invalidation. I specifically loved the examples there. The author also created a solution - SQLSync - to tackle the issues. Give it a look!

SQLSync - Stop building databases
Join me as we take a look at common application data patterns, and how they relate to the inner-workings of databases. In this post, we discuss data caching, indexing, optimistic mutations, and recursive cache invalidation. We will see how life might be easier if we could just use a frontend optimiz…

#frontend #db

How does GenAI work with DevOps and Incident Response? 🍼

Find a discussion on how Generative AI should be applied in DevOps and Incident Response. The consensus now is that GenAI can be a great help in summarizing the information and helping understanding the potential reasons of an incident but definitely not will be able to make any decisions. Details inside.

How Does Generative AI Work with Devops and Incident Response? | Heavybit
DevOps and IM experts from Jeli, PagerDuty, AWS, and other leading outfits explain how generative AI will affect the future of site reliability engineering.

#ai #sre #devops

Consistency Patterns 👷‍♂️

A primer on what we understand as consistency in the software systems, what types of consistency we recognize and where this term has the biggest meaning.

Consistency Patterns
popular consistency models in distributed systems

#distributedsystems

DynamoDB for practical use 👷‍♂️

I love serverless, and I frequently pickup DynamoDB as a data storage. Please find a long read on how DynamoDB works including it's partition and sort keys, pricing and highlighted features like Streams and Global Tables.

Serverless 2 — DynamoDB
In the previous blog, I wrote about Lambda which is a function with that you can build anything including backend APIs and jobs. It is…

#aws #dynamodb

Search Speed: Making Expedia Flights Faster 👷‍♂️

Nice set of performance tactics used to improve the performance of searching the flights on the biggest travel site in the world. Expedia leverages the cache, preemptive search, static resource caching and microfrontends to decrease latency as much as possible.

Search Speed: Making Expedia Flights Faster
How we dramatically improved the performance of customer flight searches on Expedia

#performance

Innovations in high-quality transcoding 👷‍♂️

Once you upload a video to youtube, it's transformation to 4h may take several hours, as video processing is a long and compute-heavy task. In Disney they face similar issue, as videos is their primary product. Find out what exactly they do to speed up video processing.

Innovations in high-quality transcoding: Hotstar’s tale of 10x scale up
This article discusses how we upped the content transcoding game at Disney+ Hotstar

#performance

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