Architecture Weekly #103

Architecture Weekly Issue #103. 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 and Substack as well.

This issue contains less articles than usually, as I am helping one SaaS startup to get their first income in the field of compliance, and next week should be big for us. If you're interested in the technologies, development approaches and overall business subscribe on Patreon and Boosty.

Highlights

Flaws of the State of DevOps Reports 👷‍♂️

DevOps Report, the 4 DORA metrics and the whole Accelerate research inspired multiple companies to start tracking them and make the conclusions based on them, Bolt included. However we recognized, that there is a list of troubles with the methodology and independence of the research. Finally there is an article supporting those doubts. Find the piece below.

Bye Bye DORA: Flaws of the State of DevOps Reports | HackerNoon
DORA Four Key Metrics have become the “gold standard” of measurement in the software engineering industry, however several flaws have recently come to light.

#devops

Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99%   🍼

Cost is pretty much one of the few downsides of using a cloud. But in particular cases you can decrease it 100 fold. And data transfer cost is a great example of it. Find out how S3 with it's scalability and zero fees for upload/download can do the magic trick.

Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99%
There are lots of ways to accidentally spend too much money on AWS, and one of the easiest ways is by carelessly transferring data. As of writing, AWS charges the following rates for data transfer:Data transfer from AWS to the public Internet ranges from $0.09/GB in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) to $0.15…

#cloud #cost

Multi-Database Support in DuckDB 🍼

We were writing about DuckDB already. Now they announced a feature of attaching other databases on making selects on them, and in particular cases operating external db as it was DuckDB itself - including transactions.

Multi-Database Support in DuckDB
TL;DR: DuckDB can attach MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite databases in addition to databases stored in its own format. This allows data to be read into DuckDB and moved between these systems in a convenient manner. In modern data analysis, data must often be combined from a wide variety of different sour…

#db

Follow-Up

How much uptime can I afford? 👷‍♂️

When an architect asks business how much downtime they can tolerate, the first answer is usually 'none'. Little do they know, that it is extremely costly. And even less architects know where this cost comes from. This article from Hey explains the cost structure of the increased availability, covers what cloud providers SLA mean and give general advises on how to think about uptime from a cost perspective.  

How much uptime can I afford?
Software engineers love working on nice juicy problems, especially ones that are rich in CV-worthy buzzwords. It is a rare engineer that will admit: 💡 Engineering for 99.5% uptime is more cost-effective than 99.99% for most startups! “But why shouldn’t my engineers strive for excellence?” Of course…

#availability

Understanding of Platform Engineering  🍼

DevOps was a widespread term, but then got some critique. Then Platform Engineering emerged - so now the question is what exactly we should understand by that? What's a purpose of a Platform Engineering and what is the Platform in the first place? Find out here.

My Understanding of Platform Engineering
Gartner has listed Platform Engineering as one of the top strategic technology trends for 2024.

#devops

Generate HTML to PDF using AWS Lambda and Wkhtmltopdf 👷‍♂️

Generating PDFs from HTML is a common task: making invoices, generating reports and other business documents. However, if you have a serverless solution, you will face some troubles: you will need either a headless browser to do it, which is challenging in lambda or do something else. And here you will find a complete solution for AWS Lambda: it provides a Lambda layer with Wkhtmltopdf and a lambda on top to use it. It also has the terraform scripts to deploy it seemlessly. Tested by myself!

Generate HTML to PDF using AWS Lambda and Wkhtmltopdf | Hannes Karask
AWS Lambda microservice that wraps Wkthmltopdf and generates HTML to PDF from an URL or input HTML file.

#serverless

Druid Deprecation and ClickHouse Adoption at Lyft 👷‍♂️

Lyft used Druid for the pricing models and other big-data related stuff. But eventually the platform ceased to fullfill the increasing demands, so they started looking at ClickHouse. Discover the journey of lift of adopting ClickHouse and eventually deprecating Druid platform.

Druid Deprecation and ClickHouse Adoption at Lyft
Written by Ritesh Varyani and Jeana Choi at Lyft.

#bigdata

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