InfoQ Homepage Architecture Content on InfoQ
-
Raffi Krikorian Provides Guidance for “Re-architecting on the Fly”
At the inaugural O’Reilly Software Architecture conference, Raffi Krikorian discussed strategies and tactics for technical leads and architects who are undertaking a system rewrite. Drawing on his experience as VP of Twitter Engineering, Krikorian discussed a twelve point plan for managing a re-architecting, including defining “done”, instrumenting existing systems, and enforcing code quality.
-
The Architecture of a Scalable and Resilient Google Cloud Solution
Google has recently published a paper providing architectural guidelines for creating a scalable and resilient solution running on their cloud platform. This article digests the respective paper extracting the main ideas and advice. These guidelines can be used with minor changes for deploying web applications on other clouds.
-
Lessons Learned From Scaling Services at Google and eBay
Randy Shoup shared his experiences to the QCon London audience in scaling services at Google and eBay, giving advice on building and operating services. A successful services strategy requires end-to-end service ownership, decentralized decision-making and standardization efforts focused on protocols of communications and supporting infrastructure.
-
Uber Unveils its Realtime Market Platform
Matt Ranney, Chief Systems Architect at Uber, gave an overview of their dispatch system, responsible for matching Uber's drivers and riders. Ranney explained the driving forces that led to a rewrite of this system. He described the architectural principles that underpin it, several of the algorithms implemented and why Uber decided to design and implement their own RPC protocol.
-
A Modern Microservices Architecture
After living with microservices for three years at Gilt we can see advantages in team ownership, boundaries defined by APIs and complex problems broken down. Challenges still exists in tooling, integration environments and monitoring, Yoni Goldberg explained in a presentation at the QCon London conference describing the challenges they encountered moving to a microservices architecture.
-
Microservices Are Conceptually Too Big
Microservices are conceptually too big; they conflate optimizing for organisational and technical factors, but solutions to problems of each type may not fit together very well, Phil Wills, senior architect at The Guardian, explained in a presentation at the QCon London conference promoting thinking about independent services and single responsibility applications, rather than microservices.
-
How Twitter Answers Handles Five Billion Sessions a Day
Twitter's Answers is an analytics service for mobile apps that has come to see five billion sessions per day. Ed Solovey, software engineer at Twitter, has described how their system works to provide "reliable, real-time, and actionable" data based on hundreds of millions of mobile devices sending millions of events every second.
-
Your Code as a Crime Scene
Measuring software complexity is a popular and common activity among the software development community, judging by the number of tools built over the years and the literature around the subject. Drawing from his blend of engineering and psychology backgrounds, Adam Tornhill proposed to its audience at QCon London to treat their code as a crime scene, with the help of version control tools.
-
The Benefits of Microservices
Gene Kim (moderator), Gary Gruver, Andrew Phillips and Randy Shoup have discussed some of the benefits of microservices in a recent online panel.
-
An Architect's World View: A Guide to Values, Principles and Practices
At QCon London 2015, Colin Garlick presented “An Architect’s World View”, which provided a set of values, principles and practices to act as guidance for a software architect. The core values included people, the big picture, teamwork and integrity. Garlick proposed that these values are essentially characteristics that can be prioritised in order to work as a successful software architect.
-
Immutability Changes Everything Including Microservices
As computation and storage are cheap today, keeping immutable copies of lots of data becomes affordable, and by doing this, the coordination challenges can be reduced.
-
Using the "Worse is Better" Concept with Agile and Lean
Less functionality can make a better product according to the “Worse is Better” concept described 25 years ago by Richard P. Gabriel. According to Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann we can learn from the worse is better concept for development and architecture with agile and lean.
-
Application Architecture is Shifting towards Connected Apps
Anne Thomas has summarized in a webinar the shift from large applications to small focused apps relying on services, while Matias Duarte has spoken in an interview about connecting these apps.
-
Relation of Agility and Modularity
This post describes the relation of Agility and Modularity. Why modularity is important and how can we use it is described in OSGi white paper.
-
Gregor Hohpe on Architects in Enterprises
Architecture is looking at things in a bigger context, thinking ahead and making decisions. Using their technical and communication skills architects can play a significant role in this by establishing direct contacts with people at different levels in an organisation, Gregor Hohpe said when sharing his experiences from working for Google, and now as Chief IT Architect at Allianz.