InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
-
Microsoft Adds Application Insights Support for Azure Functions
Microsoft recently announced an initial preview of Application Insights support for Azure Functions. As a result of this integration between the two services, developers now get built-in instrumentation for their code and a portal to view trends in their code’s performance. Developers are also able to set monitoring thresholds which can be used to create alerts or a callout to external webhooks.
-
Intel Launch Optane SSD
Intel recently launched their 3D XPoint non-volatile memory (NVM) under the brand name of Optane. The SSD label in some of the branding might imply that it’s a different type of durable storage, but the technology is aimed at applications that would normally use RAM. This marks the beginning of the end of the compromise between in memory and persistent.
-
The Blockchain and the CAP Theorem
Yaron Goland, Principal Architect at Microsoft, has published an article describing how a blockchain client can be made AP or CP based on its implementation. This works by being able to configure how many blocks must come after a transaction until it is accepted. The more blocks which have occurred after the transaction, the more likely it is to have a system wide consensus, making it consistent.
-
Microsoft Releases Azure Functions Proxies Public Preview
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a public preview for Azure Functions Proxies. This feature provides reverse proxy functionality targeted at organizations that expose many Azure Function Apps and want to have a common public endpoint, regardless of where and how many Function Apps have been provisioned.
-
Evolving APIs for Scale with Dropbox
Dropbox builds a dramatically different V2 of their API, built for scale.
-
A Crystal Ball to Prioritise Technical Debt in Monoliths or Microservices: Adam Tornhill's Thoughts
At QCon London, Adam Tornhill presented “A Crystal Ball to Prioritise Technical Debt”, and claimed that although the technical debt metaphor has taken the software world with storm, most organizations find it hard to prioritise and repay their technical debt. Key takeaways from the talk included methods to identify ‘hotspots’ of code complexity and churn.
-
Microsoft Adds Cross-Platform Support for Azure Relay Hybrid Connections
Microsoft recently announced that their Azure Relay Hybrid Connections service has reached General Availability. The Azure Relay Hybrid Connections service, which is WebSocket-based, complements the existing Azure Service Bus Relay offering which is now being referred to as WCF Relays.
-
Does TDD Harm Architecture?
Bob Martin, also known as Uncle Bob and co-author of the Agile Manifesto, has recently published an evaluation on whether TDD harms architecture. Most of the discussion centres around whether following a test driven approach has a negative impact on both the high level design and general maintainability of implementation code.
-
Using Deep Learning Technologies IBM Reaches a New Milestone in Speech Recognition
The research team at IBM recently announced they've reached a new industry record at 5.5%, using the SWITCHBOARD linguistic corpus. This brings us closer to what's considered to be the human error rate, 5.1%. They used deep learning technologies and acoustic models to accomplish this milestone.
-
AWS Organizations Offers Centralized Policy-Based Account Management
After a three month preview since re:Invent 2016, Amazon Web Services has recently moved AWS Organizations to general availability. The new service allows to centrally manage multiple AWS accounts within a hierarchy of organizational units and attach service control policies with fine-grained access permissions. AWS Organizations also supersede the formerly separate consolidated billing feature.
-
Overview of the Reliable Event Delivery System at Spotify
Spotify clients generate up to 1.5 million events per second at peak hours and all are handled by their Event Delivery System, designed to have a predictable latency and to never lose an event, Igor Maravic noted in his presentation at the recent QCon London conference, where he gave a high level overview of the system and some of the key operational aspects.
-
IBM Launches Blockchain as a Service
At the company’s recent InterConnect conference, IBM announced the release of IBM Blockchain as a Service. This service is based upon the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric version 1.0 and runs on IBM’s high security network which is underpinned by LinuxONE. Previously, the Hyperledger Fabric was in an incubator state and has since been promoted to an active state.
-
Challenges Building Facebook Live Streams
Facebook Live started in a hackathon two years ago, and was launched to users eight months later. One of the challenges has been dealing with the unpredictable number of viewers of a single stream, Sachin Kulkarni noted in his presentation at the recent QCon London conference, where he described his team's architecture and design considerations when building Facebook live streams.
-
Vaadin Releases Version 8 of Their Polyglot Framework
Four years since the release of version 7, Vaadin released version 8 of their polyglot framework that features 21 improvements in areas of typesafe APIs and performance.
-
Agile is King, But Continuous Integration is an Elusive Goal
A recent survey led by Dimension Data on the testing trends in modern development teams shows that agile methods are widely adopted, whereas only a few organizations reported the ability to deploy on a hourly-basis, an increasing goal amongst the respondents.