InfoQ Homepage Infrastructure Content on InfoQ
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/articles/liquid-clustering-lakehouse-layout/en/smallimage/liquid-clustering-lakehouse-layout-thumbnail-1791465984987.jpg)
When Should You Use Liquid Clustering? Benchmarking Lakehouse Layout Strategies
Physical data layout is one of the most consequential decisions in lakehouse engineering. The author compares Liquid Clustering, ZOrdering, and partitioning across four workload types on Delta Lake, uncovering two undocumented failure modes that likely affect production systems today and offering a decision framework for choosing the right layout strategy.
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/articles/modular-edge-computing/en/smallimage/modular-edge-computing-thumbnail-1790163631197.jpg)
Modular Edge Computing at Multi-Tenant SaaS Scale on Cloudflare Workers
At multi-tenant SaaS scale, a monolithic edge worker creates deployment coupling and broad blast radius. The article presents a modular Cloudflare Workers architecture using service bindings, with image optimization as a worked example of per-tenant format negotiation and device-aware sizing. It covers multi-CDN differences, staged releases, configuration, and testing.
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/articles/durable-workflows-postgres/en/smallimage/Implementing-Durable-Workflows-on-Postgres-Without-an-External-Orchestrator-thumb-1789129413946.jpg)
Implementing Durable Workflows on Postgres without an External Orchestrator
Postgres can serve as the durable state store and coordination layer for workflows, eliminating the need for an external orchestrator. SKIP LOCKED enables concurrent work processing, primary-key checkpoints enforce idempotency, and leases support crash recovery. Workflow sleeps and human approvals can also be persisted as database state and survive restarts.
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/articles/chaos-engineering-ecs-payments/en/smallimage/chaos-engineering-ecs-payments-thumbnail-1788254676411.jpg)
Implementing Chaos Engineering in Financial Payment Systems: Lessons from Enterprise ECS Deployments
Standard chaos engineering assumes experiments stop cleanly, blast radius is knowable in advance, and production is fair game. Payment systems violate all three. Salim Adedeji describes ECS-specific failure modes from enterprise deployments: a 60-second DNS TTL that produced 93-second failover, retry logic amplifying database load 2.4x, and AZ rebalancing loops that generic tooling misses.
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/articles/rightsizing-platform-engineering/en/smallimage/rightsizing-platform-engineering-thumbnail-1787296955801.jpg)
Rightsizing Platform Engineering: Building the Platform Your Organization Actually Needs
Shift-left and DevOps have impacted how we flow changes from inception to production, but at the cost of increased cognitive load and duplication of effort across testing, security, and maintenance. This article explores the real-world challenges of rightsizing developer platforms and finding a cultural match for engineering teams who use them to reduce cognitive load and deliver change faster.
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/articles/continuous-authorization-cloud/en/smallimage/continuous-authorization-cloud-thumbnail-1781599988842.jpg)
Designing Continuous Authorization for Sensitive Cloud Systems
Most cloud systems make one authorization decision at login. Everything after runs on trust established at authentication time. For systems handling regulated data, that gap is where breaches happen. This article presents a continuous authorization architecture covering risk-tiered evaluation, behavioral baselines, privacy-preserving audit trails, and a phased and incremental rollout.
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/articles/spark-oom-kubernetes-misconfigurations/en/smallimage/spark-oom-kubernetes-misconfigurations-thumbnail-1780044756757.jpg)
Two Misconfigurations That Caused Spark OOM Failures on Kubernetes
After migrating Spark pipelines to Azure Kubernetes Service, two infrastructure settings interacted destructively: spark.kubernetes.local.dirs.tmpfs=true backed shuffle spill with RAM instead of disk, and a hard podAffinity rule forced all executors onto one node. Together, they caused repeated OOM kills invisible to standard diagnostics.
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/articles/time-series-storage-design/en/smallimage/Time-Series-Storage-Design-Choices-That-Shape-Cost-and-Performance-thumb-1778155792101.jpg)
Time-Series Storage: Design Choices That Shape Cost and Performance
Every time-series database makes a set of storage design decisions: how to lay out rows, when to compress, what to partition on. These decisions determine cost and query performance more than the choice of database itself. This article works through those fundamentals from first principles, using widely available tools like PostgreSQL and Apache Parquet to make each trade-off measurable.
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/articles/micro-batch-streaming-lessons-learned/en/smallimage/micro-batch-streaming-lessons-learned-thumbnail-1777381781538.jpg)
From Batch to Micro-Batch Streaming: Lessons Learned the Hard Way in a Delta Index Pipeline
This article describes how a production delta-index pipeline migrated from scheduled batch to micro-batch Spark Structured Streaming. It covers why record-level streaming was rejected, how partition-based watermarks replaced fragile S3 completion markers, overlap-window correctness, and restart-as-design strategies for better predictability in object-store–based ingestion systems.
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/articles/mcp-java-architectural-strategy-llm-integrations/en/smallimage/mcp-java-architectural-strategy-llm-integrations-thumbnail-1776772947180.jpg)
MCP in the Java World: Bringing Architectural Strategy to LLM Integrations
Discover how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Java SDK is establishing a new architectural discipline for enterprise LLM integrations. By defining explicit contracts and leveraging MCP servers as anti-corruption layers, it ensures governance, loose coupling, and security alignment with the JVM ecosystem and existing operational practices, moving integrations beyond fragility to resilience.
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/articles/sovereign-fault-domains-cloud-resilience/en/smallimage/sovereign-fault-domains-cloud-resilience-thumbnail-1776430533702.jpg)
When a Cloud Region Fails: Rethinking High Availability in a Geopolitically Unstable World
Sovereign fault domains are failure boundaries defined by legal, political, or physical jurisdiction rather than hardware topology. The article maps geopolitical events to known distributed-systems failure modes, argues multi-region should replace multi-AZ as the HA baseline for systems crossing jurisdictions, and outlines design patterns, chaos experiments, and an ALE model to justify the spend.
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/articles/replacing-database-sequences/en/smallimage/replacing-database-sequences-thumbnail-1774603762739.jpg)
Replacing Database Sequences at Scale without Breaking 100+ Services
The article discusses the challenges faced during a migration from a relational database to NoSQL, focusing on the importance of database sequences for unique identifiers. It outlines the development of a new sequence service using DynamoDB and a two-tier caching architecture.