InfoQ Homepage Cloud Architecture Content on InfoQ
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Parting the Clouds: the Rise of Disaggregated Systems by Murat Demirbas at QCon SF 2025
Cloud computing is evolving through disaggregation, addressing inefficiencies of traditional architectures by decoupling compute and storage. This shift enhances scalability, fault isolation, and operational simplicity, driven by advancements in networking. As seen in cloud databases such as Amazon Aurora, embracing these principles enables true economic optimization and innovative design.
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Azure Front Door Outage: How a Single Control-Plane Defect Exposed Architectural Fragility
A recent 9-hour Azure Front Door (AFD) outage was triggered by a faulty control-plane configuration change that bypassed safety checks due to a software defect, leading to a massive blast radius and affecting M365 and Entra ID via Identity Coupling, exposing a critical architectural anti-pattern in centralized edge fabrics.
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Google Cloud KMS Launches Post-Quantum KEM Support to Combat "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" Threat
Google Cloud's Key Management Service now supports post-quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs), addressing future threats from quantum computing. This update empowers organizations to prepare against "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" attacks while ensuring long-term data confidentiality.
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Crossplane Tackles Applications alongside Cloud Infrastructure with v2.0 Release
The Crossplane open-source project has announced the release of version 2.0, an upgrade that moves the project from managing only cloud infrastructure to more comprehensive application and infrastructure orchestration. Some architectural changes have also been made to simplify platform engineering workflows and expand the project's original scope.
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Cloudflare Rearchitects Workers KV Following GCP Outage, Achieves 40x Performance Gain
Cloudflare has recently redesigned Workers KV with a hybrid storage architecture that automatically routes objects between distributed databases and object storage based on size characteristics, while operating dual storage backends. This change improved the p99 read latencies from 200ms to under 5ms for their global key-value store while handling hundreds of billions of key-value pairs.
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When Unchecked Autoscaling Generates a $120K Cloud Spend
In the wake of a staggering $120K bill due to unchecked autoscaling during a DDoS attack, industry experts stress the necessity of robust FinOps strategies. Key recommendations include capping resource limits and utilizing real-time alerts to prevent financial disasters. Balancing cost control with system availability is crucial to safeguard modern cloud environments.
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Amazon SQS Fair Queues: a New Approach to Multi-Tenant Resiliency
AWS's new Fair Queues for Amazon SQS revolutionize message handling in multi-tenant systems by mitigating the "noisy neighbor" issue. This feature ensures low message dwell times for quieter tenants without requiring code changes, enhancing both performance and fairness. Developers can effortlessly implement this capability and maintain consistent service quality across applications.
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Figma's $300,000 Daily AWS Bill Highlights Cloud Dependency Risks
Figma's IPO filing reveals a staggering $300,000 daily spend on AWS, totaling $100 million annually, or 12% of its $821 million revenue. The company's deep reliance on AWS exposes it to significant risks, including potential outages and policy changes. This highlights the critical dilemma for tech firms: balancing the benefits of cloud agility with rising costs and vendor lock-in challenges.
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LinkedIn Announces Northguard and Xinfra: Scaling beyond Kafka for Log Storage and Pub/Sub
LinkedIn today announced Northguard, a scalable log storage system that replaces Kafka, and Xinfra, a virtualized Pub/Sub layer. Northguard delivers sharded data & metadata, log striping, strong consistency, and self-balancing clusters at a larger scale than Kafka, while Xinfra enables seamless migration and unified access across Kafka and Northguard.
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AWS Unveils Independent European Governance and Operations for European Sovereign Cloud
AWS unveils its European Sovereign Cloud, launching in Brandenburg, Germany, by 2025, with strict EU governance and a focus on digital sovereignty. This initiative features an EU-controlled parent company, dedicated Security Operations Center, and customer data residing exclusively in the EU, ensuring compliance and operational autonomy while leveraging AWS's innovative cloud services.
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AWS Promotes Responsible AI in the Well-Architected Generative AI Lens
AWS announced the availability of the new Well-Architected Generative AI Lens, focused on providing best practices for designing and operating generative AI workloads. The lens is aimed at organizations delivering robust and cost-effective generative AI solutions on AWS. The document offers cloud-agnostic best practices, implementation guidance and links to additional resources.
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Resilience Best Practices: How Amazon Builds Well-Behaved Clients and Well-Protected Services
Using the analogy of addressing the lunch rush in restaurants, Michael Haken, senior principal solutions architect at AWS, describes how Amazon builds both well-behaved clients and well-protected services through operational and architectural strategies.
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Terraform Fork OpenTofu Adds Provider Iteration and Exclusions
Version 1.9.0 of OpenTofu - the infrastructure-as-code tool forked a year ago from Hashicorp's Terraform - has been released. This release brings several significant features, including provider iteration capabilities through `for_each`, to enable simplified multi-zone and multi-region deployments.
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HashiCorp Terraform 1.10 adds Ephemeral Values to Improve Secret Management
HashiCorp has released Terraform 1.10, which introduces ephemeral values - a concept designed to protect sensitive information, such as passwords, which is often required to provision infrastructure with Terraform.
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Amazon Marks 10 Years of AWS Lambda by Releasing Initial Internal Document
Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, recently unveiled the internal design narrative that initiated the AWS Lambda project. The release of the PR/FAQ that sparked the development of one of Amazon’s most popular services offers a “peek behind the curtain” and highlights the initial vision for serverless computing at Amazon.