InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Spotify Builds External Index to Enable Low Latency Point Queries on its Data Lake
Spotify introduced external indexing architecture for Apache Parquet data lakes that enables low-latency point queries without replicating datasets into operational databases. The approach maps lookup keys to Parquet files and row locations, allowing targeted reads from cloud object storage while supporting analytics, machine learning, AI applications, and online services from the same datasets.
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MCP Goes Stateless, and Developers Ask Whether That Just Makes it an API Again
The MCP 2026-07-28 specification removes the initialize handshake and session header, and adds required method and tool-name headers so gateways can route agent traffic without parsing JSON. Reaction split between developers calling it a rediscovery of REST and those arguing the standard itself was always the point.
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How Netflix Scaled its Real-Time Service Map
Netflix has described how it redesigned the streaming pipeline behind Service Topology, its real-time service dependencies map, to support production scale. The system uses three stages to separate intermediary resolution from enrichment and persistence, propagates backpressure to Kafka rather than dropping records, and uses server-sent events instead of gRPC for high-volume internal transfers.
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JetBrains Details its First Steps to Bring Rapidly Growing AI Spend under Control
JetBrains has described how it began centralising AI usage after development-related spending increased roughly tenfold in six months. Rather than restricting engineers to a small set of approved tools, the company built a shared access and accounting layer intended to preserve tool choice while giving teams greater visibility and control over consumption.
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Canva Shares S3 Based Architecture for Session Revocation across Hundreds of Millions of Sessions
Canva redesigned session revocation infrastructure to support 100M active sessions while reducing database lookups. The architecture uses Amazon S3 for durable revocation records and distributes compact, in-memory indexes to application gateways. Canva said the design improved deployment speed, reduced database infrastructure requirements, and cut the revocation cache memory footprint by 87.5%.
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Java News Roundup: Shenandoah GC, TeamCity CVE, A2A Java SDK, Camel, Gradle, GlassFish, Groovy
This week's Java roundup for August 3rd, 2026, features news highlighting: JEP 535, Shenandoah GC: Generational Mode by Default, targeted for JDK 28; point releases of A2A Java SDK, Apache Camel and Gradle; a maintenance release of GlassFish; the fifth milestone release of Groovy 8.0; and a follow-up of the JetBrains TeamCity CVE.
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Buildpacks Move the Container Hardening Control Point Away from the Dockerfile
Cloud Native Buildpacks, which graduated within the CNCF in July 2026, move base image choice out of per-service Dockerfiles into a single builder owned by platform engineering, enabling fleet-wide patching. BellSoft's hardened Paketo builder is the latest sign that vendors now treat the builder, not the Dockerfile, as the container security control point.
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Beyond Consensus: the Fragmentation of AI Policy across the Linux Ecosystem
The AI policies across the Linux ecosystem are very heterogeneous, ranging from the GCC’s restrictiveness, the Linux kernel’s pragmatism, to the more open disclosure-based utility model of Kubernetes' landscape. From core infrastructure to high-level orchestration, these distinct approaches highlight a shared commitment: ensuring the human maintainer remains the indispensable guardian of the code.
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Stripe Uses Graph Search and State Machines to Automate Database Remediation
The engineering team at Stripe recently described how they automated database incident recovery by modeling their global infrastructure as a graph. Using graph search algorithms together with state machines, the team computes and executes remediation plans automatically.
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Instacart Builds Blueberry, an AI-Powered Assistant to Help On-Call Engineers Investigate Incidents
Instacart introduced Blueberry, an AI-assisted incident response system that helps on-call engineers investigate production issues faster. It combines AI agents, operational data, and historical incident knowledge to generate grounded root cause hypotheses in Slack. It uses parallel subagents, MCP integrations, and incident history to reduce investigation time while keeping engineers in control.
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Azure API Management Adds Dedicated AI Gateway Tier, Governing Models and MCP Tools
Microsoft released a dedicated AI Gateway tier of Azure API Management in public preview, with a control plane built around models, MCP servers and tools rather than APIs. It fronts Foundry, Bedrock, Vertex AI and OpenAI behind one endpoint, with policy cards instead of XML. Architects welcomed the consolidation while questioning where the governance boundary sits.
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Wiz Discloses CosmosEscape, and Practitioners Debate What Customers Could Have Done
Wiz Research disclosed CosmosEscape, a chain that escaped Azure Cosmos DB's Gremlin sandbox and reached a platform-wide key granting read and write access to every database on the service. Microsoft blocked the entry point within two days but took until July 2026 to remove the key. Practitioners debated shared responsibility and what that rearchitecture actually cost.
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Pods as Workers, Not Agents: Rethinking the Deployment Unit for AI Agents on Kubernetes
Running AI agents on Kubernetes raises a key question: should each agent get its own Pod? The kagent project argues no—agents are bursty, short-lived, can spawn subagents, and may wait for human approval, making one Pod per agent wasteful. Agent-substrate adds a control plane to schedule logical “Actors” onto long-lived worker Pods.
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JioHotstar Explains the Distributed Engineering behind Personalized Ad Requests at Streaming Scale
JioHotstar explains the distributed architecture behind its real-time ad request workflow, covering ad decisioning, waterfall tiering, pacing algorithms, latency optimization, and service coordination required to select and deliver personalized advertisements during streaming playback at scale.
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Azure and Community Guidelines on Choosing between a Skill or a Sub-Agent
In a recent Azure Architecture blog article, Azure lead engineer Kishorekumar Pattabiraman outlines practical criteria for choosing between skills, sub-agents, and other approaches when building AI systems, emphasizing reusability, simplicity, and long-term maintainability.