InfoQ Homepage Distributed Systems Content on InfoQ
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Experience Building Distributed Systems and Microservices — Jeppe Cramon at Micro CPH
We must understand the business domain we are working in, identify the bounded contexts and the business capabilities, and design our services using this knowledge. In a presentation at Micro CPH, Jeppe Cramon talked about his experience working with distributed systems, microservices and the principles and patterns he sees as beneficial for successfully creating microservices based systems.
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Mature Microservices and How to Operate Them: QCon London Q&A
Microservices is an architectural approach to keep systems decoupled for releasing many changes a day, said Sarah Wells in her keynote at QCon London 2019. To build resilient and maintainable systems you need things like load balancing across healthy nodes, backoff and retry, and persistence or fanning out of requests via queues. The best way to know whether your system is resilient is to test it.
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Build a Monolith before Going for Microservices: Jan de Vries at MicroXchg Berlin
Most developers don’t work at global large-scale companies like Netflix. Most developers work in much smaller companies with maybe up to 50 – 80 developers, Jan de Vries noted in his presentation at MicroXchg Berlin, where he argued that a properly built monolith in many cases is superior to a microservices based architecture. With a well-built monolith, it will also be easy to pull services out.
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Reflecting on Top-Down or Bottom-Up System Design: Vaughn Vernon at MicroXchg Berlin
Should software design be driven by a top-down or bottom-up approach? Vaughn Vernon asked the question in his presentation at MicroXchg Berlin, where he discussed different approaches to software design, actor model, reactive domain-driven design and the importance of an emergent architecture.
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Migrating a Retail Monolith to Microservices: Sebastian Gauder at MicroXchg Berlin
In his presentation at MicroXchg in Berlin, Sebastian Gauder described how he and his teams migrated an existing food retail monolith at REWE, a large German company, into several business domains with 270 microservices, while increasing the number of teams from two up to 48. He also discussed the different design goals and rules they setup to make this possible.
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Protocols are Important: Martin Thompson at QCon London
The protocols we use should be studied and practiced more, they are really important in many aspects, Martin Thompson claimed in his presentation at QCon London 2019, where he first looked back at the evolution of mankind and argued that protocols is the most significant human discovery, and then did a critical analysis of the protocols and ideas we use today.
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Observability in Testing with ElasTest
In a distributed application it is difficult to use debugging techniques common in developing non-distributed applications. Bringing production observability to your testing environment helps to find bugs, argued Francisco Gortázar at the European Testing Conference 2019. He presented ElasTest, a tool for developers to test and validate complex distributed systems using observability.
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A Description of RSocket and Its Communication Model: Robert Roeser at QCon London
RSocket is an asynchronous network communication protocol where communication is modelled as multiplexed streams of messages over a single network connection. In a presentation at QCon London 2019, Robert Roeser explained the reasons for creating RSocket and the communication model it uses. In the same presentation, Ondrej Lehecka described two use cases, and Andy Shi ran a demo using RSocket.
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A Critical Look at Event-Driven Systems: Bernd Rücker at QCon London
There is currently a hype in adoption of event-driven systems. Sometimes they are almost seen as the “magic thing” in our strive for decoupled systems, Bernd Rücker noted at the recent QCon London 2019. In his presentation he took a critical look at three common hypotheses around event-driven systems: events decrease coupling, Orchestration needs to be avoided, and Workflow engines are painful.
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Microsoft Announces New Azure Analytics Services ADLS, ADX and More
Microsoft has announced the general availability of two new Azure analytics services - Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS) and Azure Data Explorer (ADX). Furthermore, Microsoft also announced the preview of Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flow.
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Testing Complex Distributed Systems at FT.com: Sarah Wells Shares Lessons Learned
The complexity in complex distributed systems isn’t in the code, it’s between the services or functions. Testing implies balancing finding problems versus delivering value, said Sarah Wells at the European Testing Conference. Testers often have the best understanding of what the system does; they have a good hypothesis about what went wrong, and are able to validate it pretty quickly.
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Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.6.0 Update Streamlines Development Experience
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced an update to their Azure Blockchain Workbench service which improves the development experience of building consortium-based blockchain applications. More specifically, this update includes new features such as application versioning, updated messaging capabilities and streamlined smart contract development.
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Simplifying Blockchain Security Using Hyperledger Ursa
In a recent blog post, the Hyperledger project announced that their latest project, Hyperledger Ursa, has been accepted by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Ursa’s primary objective is to simplify and consolidate cryptographic libraries in a trusted, consumable manner for use in distributed ledger technology projects in an interoperable way.
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The Evolution of Uber’s 100+ Petabyte Big Data Platform
Uber’s engineering team wrote about how their big data platform evolved from traditional ETL jobs with relational databases to one based on Hadoop and Spark. A scalable ingestion model, standard transfer format and a custom library for incremental updates are the key components of the platform.
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Cloudera and Hortonworks Merge with Goal to Increase Competition with Cloud Offerings
Earlier this month, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced an all-stock merger at a combined value of around $5.2 billion. Analysts have argued that this merger is aimed at increased competition that both companies are facing from cloud vendors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. In this article we log reactions from analysts and the industry, and the implications for current customers.