Tech News

StackFeed: Cloud Service Updates as a Service

StackFeed: Cloud Service Updates as a Service

In the fast-paced field of cloud services, staying current with service updates is often challenging. The recently announced StackFeed aims to address this issue, especially for software architects managing multi-cloud architectures. Architects select cloud services they’re interested in, and StackFeed generates a customised service update feed consumable using an RSS reader, Slack or Teams. Read…

Real-Time Messaging Architecture at Slack

Real-Time Messaging Architecture at Slack

Slack recently described how it sends millions of messages daily in real-time across the globe. The company provides a comprehensive insight into its architecture, designed to manage real-time messages at scale. It highlights the unique challenges posed by delivering real-time messages across different time zones and regions and how Slack’s engineers designed the infrastructure to…

LinkedIn Improves Development Productivity by 10x by Implementing a Messaging Client-Side SDK

LinkedIn Improves Development Productivity by 10x by Implementing a Messaging Client-Side SDK

LinkedIn recently published how it significantly improved development productivity by implementing a client-side Messenger SDK. Usage of the SDK reduces code maintenance costs across multiple apps by abstracting away thousands of lines of code into shared libraries. In one case, the new SDK saved 40+ developer weeks of effort when building a new LinkedIn experience.

Netflix Built a Scalable Annotation Service Using Cassandra, Elasticsearch and Iceberg

Netflix Built a Scalable Annotation Service Using Cassandra, Elasticsearch and Iceberg

Netflix recently published how it built Marken, a scalable annotation service using Cassandra, ElasticSearch and Iceberg. Marken allows storing and querying annotations, or tags, on arbitrary entities. Users define versioned schemas for their annotations, which include out-of-the-box support for temporal and spatial objects.

Avoid Being an “Ivory Tower” Architect: the Relationship between Architects and Their Organisation

Avoid Being an “Ivory Tower” Architect: the Relationship between Architects and Their Organisation

In a recently published episode of Armchair Architects, the speakers discussed the relationship between software architects and the rest of the organisation. They detail how a successful architect can impact others by switching between going into the trenches and zooming into a tree and then being able to zoom out and estimate if that tree still fits into the forest.

Cloudflare Servers Share IP Addresses for Egress Traffic

Cloudflare Servers Share IP Addresses for Egress Traffic

Cloudflare recently detailed how it manages its servers’ egress traffic using “soft-unicast “. Soft-unicast allows multiple servers to share a single IPv4 address for their egress traffic while redirecting the response packets to the correct physical server. It provides a scalable, cost-efficient solution for Cloudflare to offer various products that require tagged egress IP addresses.

Uber Reduces Logging Costs by 169x Using Compressed Log Processor (CLP)

Uber Reduces Logging Costs by 169x Using Compressed Log Processor (CLP)

Uber recently published how it dramatically reduced its logging costs using Compressed Log Processor (CLP). CLP is a tool capable of losslessly compressing text logs and searching them without decompression. It achieved a 169x compression ratio on Uber’s log data, saving storage, memory, and disk/network bandwidth.

Netflix Builds a Custom High-Throughput Priority Queue Backed by Redis, Kafka and Elasticsearch

Netflix Builds a Custom High-Throughput Priority Queue Backed by Redis, Kafka and Elasticsearch

Netflix recently published how it built Timestone, a custom high-throughput, low-latency priority queueing system. Netflix built the queuing system using open-source components such as Redis, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink and Elasticsearch. Engineers state that they built Timestone since they could not find an off-the-shelf solution that met all of its requirements.

Atlassian Exceeds 99.9999% Of Availability Using Sidecars and Highly Fault-Tolerant Design

Atlassian Exceeds 99.9999% Of Availability Using Sidecars and Highly Fault-Tolerant Design

Atlassian recently published how it exceeded 99.9999% of availability with its Tenant Context Service. Atlassian achieved this high availability by implementing highly-autonomous client sidecars, able to proactively shield themselves from complete AWS region failures. Sidecars query multiple services concurrently to accomplish this goal and ensure that requests are entirely isolated internally.

Slack Implements Circuit Breakers to Improve CI/CD Pipeline Availability

Slack Implements Circuit Breakers to Improve CI/CD Pipeline Availability

Slack recently published how it implemented the Circuit Breaker pattern to improve its CI/CD pipeline availability. Before this project, engineers at Slack saw challenges as peak request volumes in internal tooling caused cascade failures in dependent systems. Since completion, engineers saw increased service availability and fewer bad developer experiences like flakiness from failing services.

The Spotify System Model: Automated Architecture Visualization at Spotify

The Spotify System Model: Automated Architecture Visualization at Spotify

Spotify engineers recently published how they standardized architecture diagrams at the company. They defined a standard system model named the Spotify Software Model and adapted the C4 model to visualize it. This combination created a shared language used across the organization, which helps communication, aids decision-making, and supports Spotify’s software’s evolution.