Architecture Weekly Issue #36. Articles, books, and playlists on architecture and related topics. Split by sections, highlighted with complexity: 🤟 means hardcore, 👷‍♂️ is technically applicable right away,  🍼 - introduction to the topic or an overview. Now in telegram as well.

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SurrealDB 🍼

A new database got my attention. Claim to combine the document-based, column and graph-oriented approaches. Inter-documents links look especially interesting.

SurrealDB | Why use SurrealDB?
SurrealDB is an innovative NewSQL cloud database, suitable for serverless applications, jamstack applications, single-page applications, and traditional applications. It is unmatched in its versatility and financial value, with the ability for deployment on cloud, on-premise, embedded, and edge comp…
SurrealDB

#databases

WiscKey: efficient key-value storage for SSDs 🤟

Cassandra, BigTable, RocksDB are all LSM-tree based databases. They use efficient optimizations to work on HDDs, but SSDs are better in terms of random vs sequential reads ratio and they support parallelism. It means new algorithms can be used for databases. Find a paper which describes WiscKey approach to key-value storages making advantages of SSDs.

#databases #whitepaper

A Disk-based System with In-memory Performance 🤟

Continuing the topic of databases using SSDs, please find a video on how Umbra system is working underhood. Using the advanced the buffer management and variable size pages they claim to obtain near in-memory performance using disks.

#databases #video

A report by Snyk on the security of a modern application. It goes over the last year's OWASP Top 10 and shows how it applied to a modern application. I agree, that the apps mostly consist of clients(mobile apps and frontends),  backend services and then infrastructure. Snyk shares the top threats and obviously shows how their software can help with them in particular. Hey, Snyk folks, I would appreciate it if it was a sponsored link!

Application Security Explained - Tools & Trends for 2022
Application Security is the actions taken during the development lifecycle of an application to reduce vulnerabilities and improve security.
SnykLiran Tal

#security #t00ls

Best tools to visualize your Terraform infrastructure 🍼

A deployment diagram is one of the views you definitely would like to have as part of your system documentation. Some teams do it manually, some write custom software to visualize it. For those, who use Terraform there is a list of software able to visualize the system. Find it in the post.  

Best Tools to Visualize your Terraform
This blog post will show you all the tools that might simplify Terraform resources and data source visualization.
MediumStephane Boghossian

#d0cs #tools #devops

‌ Incident Review and Postmortem Best Practices 👷‍♂️

When an outage of a production system happens it is important to understand the reasons why it happened, build up a plan to avoid it in the future and have a playbook if something similar happens. A new post in "The pragmatic Engineer" shows the survey results of how big tech companies perform those practices.

Incident Review and Postmortem Best Practices
One reason incidents are important is that they often reveal the real state of products, teams or organizations, which is often very different from the imaginary picture that engineering leaders have in their heads. Transparent incident reports and a good incident-handling strategy can inject much-n…
The Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

#docs #devops

Architecture Fitness Functions 👷‍♂️

In every system, we can take a lot of trade-offs. What kind of trade-offs depend on the business we do, so the priorities will be different. Once we make the decision, we need to ensure it is followed by the development teams. The naive approach would be to rely on code reviews, but automated tools within the CI/CD pipeline work better. I tried to explain the basic ideas inside the talk, but you better check out the whole screencast in the pdf.

#architecture #tools #vision

Minimum Viable Architecture 🍼

Recently I started thinking about frugality - a property or a quality attribute of a system describing how lean it is. Minimum Viable Architecture which I stumbled upon is a similar concept: how to come up with the architecture which will QAs and is simple in terms of implementation and maintainability. Get an article in InfoQ blog.

A Minimum Viable Product Needs a Minimum Viable Architecture
Creating a Minimum Viable Architecture as part of an MVP helps teams to evaluate the technical viability and to provide a stable foundation for the product that can be adapted as the product evolves.
InfoQKurt Bittner

#architecture #vision

Apache Pulsar Clusters with over 100 Billion Messages Daily 👷‍♂️

I usually include articles about Kafka usage. But Pulsar is also a popular streaming solution. Check out how Tencent is using it with its incredible load.

Client Optimization: How Tencent Maintains Apache Pulsar Clusters with over 100 Billion Messages Daily
StreamNative

#streaming #casestudies

Clock-Bound Wait 🤟

We know the problem of synchronizing clocks for synchronizing reads and writes in distributed systems. Google and AWS have special services to handle the problem, but they are a) cloud-specific and b) use the same pattern. Unmesh Joshi explains the Clock-Bound Wait which is the name of said pattern.

Clock-Bound Wait
Wait to cover the uncertainty in time across cluster nodes before reading and writing values so values can be correctly ordered across cluster nodes.
martinfowler.comUnmesh Joshi

#distributedsystems #patterns

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