InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Enhancing A/B Testing at DoorDash with Multi-Armed Bandits
While experimentation is essential, traditional A/B testing can be excessively slow and expensive, according to DoorDash engineers Caixia Huang and Alex Weinstein. To address these limitations, they adopted a "multi-armed bandits" (MAB) approach to optimize their experiments.
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DoorDash Applies AI to Safety across Chat and Calls, Cutting Incidents by 50%
DoorDash deploys SafeChat, an AI-driven safety system for moderating chat, images, and voice calls between Dashers and customers. Using a layered text moderation architecture, machine learning models, and human review, SafeChat detects unsafe content in real time, enabling immediate actions and reducing low- and medium-severity safety incidents by roughly 50 percent.
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AWS Launches European Sovereign Cloud amid Questions about U.S. Legal Jurisdiction
AWS has launched its European Sovereign Cloud with a €7.8 billion investment, designed to meet EU regulatory demands and address data privacy concerns amid geopolitical tensions. Despite its operational separation from global regions, questions linger about legal protections against U.S. data access. Competitors like Microsoft and local providers may present stronger sovereignty options.
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Tracking and Controlling Data Flows at Scale in GenAI: Meta’s Privacy-Aware Infrastructure
Meta has revealed how it scales its Privacy-Aware Infrastructure (PAI) to support generative AI development while enforcing privacy across complex data flows. Using large-scale lineage tracking, PrivacyLib instrumentation, and runtime policy controls, the system enables consistent privacy enforcement for AI workloads like Meta AI glasses without introducing manual bottlenecks.
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Google and Retail Leaders Launch Universal Commerce Protocol to Power Next‑Generation AI Shopping
Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard co-developed with Shopify, Target, and others, enabling AI-driven shopping agents to complete tasks end-to-end from product discovery to checkout and post-purchase management. UCP aims to standardize commerce capabilities, support multiple payment providers, and expand globally. Shaping the next generation of agentic commerce.
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Microsoft Releases Azure Functions Support for Model Context Protocol Servers
Microsoft has launched its Model Context Protocol (MCP) for Azure Functions, ensuring secure, standardized workflows for AI agents. With built-in OBO authentication and streamable HTTP transport, it addresses key security concerns. Now supporting multiple languages and self-hosting, MCP empowers developers to deploy with ease while safeguarding sensitive data.
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Java News Roundup: WildFly 39, Open Liberty, Spring Framework, JobRunr, Gradle, Micrometer
This week's Java roundup for January 12th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of WildFly 39; point releases of JobRunr and Gradle; maintenance releases of Spring Framework and Micronaut; milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Micrometer Tracing; and a beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.1.
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Pulumi Adds Native Support for Terraform and HCL
Pulumi now natively supports Terraform and HCL, enabling direct HCL execution and state management within Pulumi Cloud. Currently in private beta with a Q1 2026 release, the update aids migration from legacy tools. A new financial "escape hatch" offers credits for existing HashiCorp contracts, targeting teams affected by recent licensing shifts.
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350PB, Millions of Events, One System: inside Uber’s Cross-Region Data Lake and Disaster Recovery
Uber’s HiveSync is a sharded, cross-region batch replication system keeping Hive/HDFS data consistent across multiple regions. Handling 5M daily Hive events and 8PB of data replication, it uses event-driven jobs, hybrid RPC and DistCp strategies, DAG-based orchestration, and dynamic sharding, enabling disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, and 99.99% cross-region data accuracy.
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AWS Hikes EC2 Capacity Block Rates by 15% in Uniform ML Pricing Adjustment
AWS has raised EC2 Capacity Block prices for ML by 15% across all regions, impacting GPU-based workloads. The uniform price hikes affect top-tier instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs, underscoring supply chain pressures and inflation. With limited alternatives, organizations face higher costs, emphasizing the need for effective workload optimization and cost management strategies.
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How Agoda Unified Multiple Data Pipelines into a Single Source of Truth
Agoda recently described how it consolidated multiple independent data pipelines into a centralized Apache Spark-based platform to eliminate inconsistencies in financial data. The company implemented a multi-layered quality framework that combines automated validations, machine-learning-based anomaly detection, and data contracts, while processing millions of daily booking transactions.
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Solving Fragmented Mobile Analytics: Uber’s Platform-Led Approach
Uber Engineering outlines its platform-led mobile analytics redesign, standardizing event instrumentation across iOS and Android to improve cross-platform consistency, reduce engineering effort, and provide reliable insights for product and data teams.
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AWS CloudWatch Evolves into Unified Observability Platform with Apache Iceberg Support
AWS has expanded Amazon CloudWatch to unify log management across operational and security use cases. By integrating native OCSF normalization and Apache Iceberg-compatible storage via S3 Tables, the update aims to eliminate data silos and enable Zero-ETL analytics across multiple AWS accounts and regions.
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Java News Roundup: Spring gRPC, Quarkus, Gatherers4j, Keycloak, Grails, Java Operator SDK
This week's Java roundup for January 5th, 2026, features news highlighting: point releases of Gatherers4j and Keycloak; and maintenance releases of Spring gRPC, Quarkus, Grails and Java Operator SDK.
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AWS Introduces VPC Encryption Controls to Enforce Encryption in Transit
AWS has recently introduced VPC Encryption Controls, allowing customers to validate whether traffic within and between VPCs is encrypted and to require encryption where supported. The feature provides visibility into unencrypted traffic, supports enforcement using compatible Nitro-based infrastructure, and allows exclusions for resources that cannot encrypt traffic.