InfoQ Homepage Articles
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Eliminating Long-Lived Credentials in GCP with Workload Identity Federation
Long-lived GCP service account keys are secrets that must be managed forever, are hard to rotate, and are easy to leak. Scaling Workload Identity Federation to 120+ production projects shows why it changes how machine identity is approached entirely: keys are secrets to manage, federated identities are trust relationships configured once, gated by attribute conditions.
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Post-Quantum Cryptography in Spring Boot: Four Patterns You Can Ship This Sprint
There are four patterns that bring PQC into a Spring Boot fleet: encrypting payloads between services, locking down database fields, signing documents that need to hold up for decades, and moving service tokens off RS256. Along the way, we discuss why Harvest Now, Decrypt Later is already happening, and why none of this is production-safe until KMS or Vault is in place.
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Beyond Offset Lag: Computing Time in Queue for Apache Hudi Data Lake Pipelines at Petabyte Scale
In this article, author Srikanth Mamidala discusses the data lake architecture used for analytics, reporting, and machine learning and shows how to manage the consumer lag metrics when using Kafka and Apache Hudi.
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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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Agentic Fitness Functions: Extending Evolutionary Architecture Beyond Deterministic Rules
Deterministic rules safeguard hard metrics, but what about architectural intent? Discover how agentic fitness functions combine AI agents and versioned rubrics to evaluate complex, judgment-heavy concerns—such as boundary fidelity, semantic contract drift, and stale ADR assumptions. Elevate evolutionary architecture governance with continuous, calibrated feedback loops.
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InfoQ Cloud and DevOps Trends Report - 2026
InfoQ editorial staff and friends of InfoQ are discussing the current trends in the domain of Cloud and DevOps as part of the process of creating our annual 2026 trends report.
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Comprehension as an Architectural Characteristic: A System That Is Not Understood Cannot Evolve Safely
As AI commoditizes code output, system comprehension silently decays, creating cognitive debt that threatens safe architectural evolution. This article explores why human understanding must be treated as an essential architectural characteristic, offering actionable strategies, socio-technical metrics, and design checkpoints to preserve intent across modern engineering teams.
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InfoQ Culture and Methods Trends Report - 2026
This report summarizes how the InfoQ Culture and Methods editorial team sees the ongoing and emergent trends in the culture and methods space in 2026.
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Runtime-Agnostic AI Workflows: a Pattern for Production Durability and Fast Eval Iteration
AI workflows have two needs that trade off directly. Running reliably in production requires persisting and distributing every step so it survives crashes, deploys, and restarts. But that same machinery is what makes runs too heavy for the fast, throwaway loop you need to check an LLM's output quality. The properties that buy durability are the ones that kill iteration speed.
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Enabling Evolutionary Architecture through the Preservation of Change Locality
Why do simple features suddenly require cross-team negotiations? In this article, explore how boundary drift quietly destroys change locality and increases cognitive load across teams. Learn practical sociotechnical strategies - redistributing mechanics, exposing essential policy, and rehearsing exception paths - to restore domain boundaries and enable a truly evolutionary software architecture.
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Virtual Threads after JDK 24: What Changed for Production Java
JDK 24 removed the monitor-related carrier-thread pinning that stalled Netflix and similar teams on Java 21. What has replaced it on JDK 25 LTS is downstream-resource saturation: the bottleneck moved and now demands explicit bounding in application code. This article maps the failure modes that surface after virtual-thread adoption and gives a practical sequence backed by a public benchmark.
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Securing MCP in Production: Defense-in-Depth beyond the Gateway
This article presents a defense-in-depth approach for securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) deployments in production. It outlines four architectural control layers: safe execution, management infrastructure, outbound trust, and semantic integrity, arguing that production security requires enforcement beyond the gateway at the earliest trustworthy control points.