InfoQ Homepage Distributed Systems Content on InfoQ
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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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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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Uber Open Sources JVM Profiler for Tracing Distributed JVMs
Uber open sourced a distributed profiler called JVM Profiler in late June. They built JVM Profiler to solve resource allocation issues they had with Apache Spark. Apache Spark is a popular framework for processing large data streams, of which Uber has many. JVM Profiler was built for Spark, but it's applicable to any JVM-based service or application.
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The Future of Microservices as the IT World Changes: Uwe Friedrichsen at microXchg Berlin
You have finally mastered Microservices, including Docker and Kubernetes, and some other new cool trends. But are you prepared for the future, Uwe Friedrichsen asked in his presentation at microXchg 2018 in Berlin where he explored the future of IT and the consequences for microservices.
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Designing Reactive Systems Using DDD, Event Storming and Actors
Domain-driven design (DDD) is often used for finding boundaries (bounded contexts) around microservices. But everything in domain-driven design (DDD) is not good for microservice, Lutz Huehnken claimed in a presentation at microxchg 2018 in Berlin where he discussed how DDD, Event Storming and the Akka-based Lagom framework can be used to build reactive systems.
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The Maturity of Microservices: MicroXchg Berlin Panel Discussion
In the microservices panel at microXchg 2018 in Berlin, Susanne Kaiser, together with the panel, consisting of Stefan Tilkov, Chris Richardson, Elisabeth Engel and Daniel Bryant, discussed the state of microservices as of today and whether the hype is over — is microservices now a mature technique or is serverless the next step?
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Stefan Tilkov at microXchg Berlin: Microservice Patterns and Antipatterns
In his presentation at microXchg 2018 in Berlin, Stefan Tilkov explored patterns and antipatterns in microservice projects from his perspective, including Evolutionary Architecture, Decoupling Illusion, Distributed Monolith and Entity Service. He especially noted that some of the patterns he considers to be patterns, other people may see as antipatterns, and the other way around.
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QCon London: Asynchronous Event Architectures with or without Actors
Synchronous request-response communication in microservices systems can be really complicated. Fortunately, asynchronous event-based architectures can be used to avoid this, Yaroslav Tkachenko claimed in a presentation at QCon London 2018, where he described his experiences with event-driven architectures and how Actors can be used in systems built on this architecture.
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QCon London: Ensuring Data Consistency in Distributed Systems Using CRDTs
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) is a family of algorithms for ensuring strong eventual consistency in distributed systems without the use of a centralized server that now has been theoretically proven to work, Martin Kleppmann claimed in a presentation at QCon London 2018, where he explored algorithms allowing people to collaborate on shared documents.
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The Future of Microservices and Distributed Systems: QCon London Microservices Panel Discussion
In the microservices panel at QCon London 2018, track host Sam Newman together with Susanne Kaiser, Guy Podjarny, Idit Levine and Mark Burgess, discussed how the service technology as we see it today will change, and how we will build systems in the future. They believe microservices will continue to exist but will evolve into becoming a base for other techniques like serverless architectures.
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Entity Services is an Antipattern
In a microservice based architecture, it is important to keep the different services separated. Entity services is a common pattern now applied to microservices, but Michael Nygard claims that entity services is an anti-pattern that works against separation.
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Event Sourcing in an Unreliable World
Examples of event sourced systems are often from process-oriented domains, like e-commerce, with incoming commands that generate events. But there are domains without processes that are intrinsically unreliable where we are collecting events from external event sources with transports that are unreliable, Lorenzo Nicora explained at the recent Microservices Conference µCon London 2017.
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Observability and the Monitoring of Cloud-Native Applications
Cindy Sridharan summarizes her thoughts on observability and its relevance in monitoring cloud native applications in her recent article. Observability is a philosophy that encompasses monitoring, log aggregation, metrics and distributed tracing to gain deeper, ad-hoc insights into a system.