Architecture Weekly #151 - 30th October 2023
Sponsor: Do you build complex software systems? See how NServiceBus makes it easier to design, build, and manage software systems that use message queues to achieve loose coupling. Get started for free. Welcome to the new week! Are Verifiable Credentials the future of Identity Management? I'm not yet sure, but it's definitely an intriguing topic to investigate. Especially nowadays, when we'd like to have a privacy-first way to use our real identities in a digital world. In the last webinar, we had a special guest, Mateusz Jendza, who probably spent one of the largest amounts of time applying it and also delivering it to production. We had a good discussion on whether to apply it, when and how. The how was important, as Mateusz did two live demos presenting live different scenarios and use cases. If you are interested in privacy, identity management, or you're working in a regulated and privacy-first industry like finance or healthcare, I strongly encourage you to check it! Click here to watch the recording. I recently had several discussions on the topic of Women in IT, parity and the state of our industry. That made me get back to the article I wrote in Polish 6 years ago. Unfortunately, I concluded that not much has changed. I decided to translate it and extend it with my recent experience. I believe that, as men, we're privileged, and we need to do more. There's nothing wrong, by itself, with being privileged or having a better position. Nothing to be ashamed of. It's just a fact where we are. There will always be someone with more power, more voice, etc. We should just embrace that. The issue, in my opinion, is when privilege is changing into gatekeeping. If you don’t agree with that, fine, but it’s still worth working on it for pragmatic reasons. All of my best-performing teams were those that were the most diverse. Having different perspectives, experiences and points of view enhances our design and our teamwork. There are people in our industry that I tend to ignore in Architecture Weekly editions. I don’t want to give a platform to people who are attention seekers. They send hot takes, fire shots. Some of them hit the target, but most of them missed. I prefer an educated, pragmatic discussion and learning something instead of sending a Russian roulette of ideas. One of those people is David Heinemeier Hansson. He’s quite famous for doing stuff that can be useful for him and presenting them as general solutions for the IT world problems. One of them was his Cloud Exit. Today, I’d like to present you a reasonable, balanced analysis of that exit made by Forest Brazeal: Read it to check why staying on-premise may be a valid solution for you, but only when you analyse it and your products’ and organisation's needs instead of just extrapolating DHH hot take. The other person is Elon Musk. Besides the obvious lack of empathy, which is an issue, you never know whether his decision is a good move, or a whim. Nowadays, probably the latter. He also decided to move As always: think for yourself, question authorities. Continuing the migration story, but the other way around. Amazon, together with Zalando, migrated their storage from Cassandra to DynamoDB. Migration out of Cassandra is quite a common trend. Not just because that’s a bad database. It’s really good, but because it’s costly to operate on a big scale. And big scale is what Cassandra was built for. Zalando wrote that:
And Zalando is not a small, underskilled organisation. I published his materials a few times. They decided to use DynamoDB because of:
Of course, migration to DynamoDB by itself is not a general thing you should do, but analysing the matching with business, and organisation use cases can give you information if that’s something you should be doing or not. Read more to understand how Zalando built its migration strategy. See also the great article explaining the reality of the DynamoDB modelling challenges: It’s not so trivial as it’s glossed. Having two full-time people to operate Cassandra is also the position that is needed quite often: Kafka Operator. It’s, again, a great tool, but not the cheapest to operate on your own. The other downside of using it was that it didn’t have the proper messaging tools like queues, competing consumers, or dead letter queues. Seems that the Kafka team listens and provided Queues for Kafka under discussion: Andrew Shoefield did a nice summary of the long consideration in the Kafka Improvement Proposal (KIP).
It’s not yet clear whether it will be implemented, but I think having such capabilities is necessary to enable more advanced processing scenarios for Kafka. Sounds like Generative AI is slowly getting to either a sanity check or maturity. The hype is getting slower and we’re getting numbers behind it. And those numbers are impressive but not great. Microsoft claims that it has a million paying GitHub Copilot users, but then there are reports that it’s still losing huge amounts of money.
It’s interesting to see if this business model is viable. Maintaining and running Large Language Models costs a lot. Generative AI has many use cases but is also limited in the scope of usage. Those tools will need to be more cost-effective and might not be as global usage as predicted. Still, we already see that they helped in improving infrastructure and tooling that can be used for other scenarios. See, e.g. vector databases and what they can enable:
Look who’s back! Hackers stolen access tokens from Okta’s support account. If that reminds you something, then yes, year and a half ago exactly the same happened and we learned about that from Cloudflare. Not from Okta, they tried to hide it. And from whom we know it this time? Yes, from Cloudflare not from Okta.
I was recommending Auth0 (that was bought by Okta) as my default identity management tool for startup, but having all of that, I will stop doing it… We had a lot of discussion (and laughs) on the McKinsey report recently. It’s easy to dunk, not only because of content (which some parts are fair and correct) but also because of how big consulting companies work. It seems that the topic went even mainstream as John Oliver himself made a dedicated video in his Last Week Tonight show: Must watch! Check also other links! p.s. I invite you to join the paid version of Architecture Weekly. It already contains the exclusive Discord channel for subscribers (and my GitHub sponsors), monthly webinars, etc. It is a vibrant space for knowledge sharing. Don’t wait to be a part of it! p.s.2. Ukraine is still under brutal Russian invasion. A lot of Ukrainian people are hurt, without shelter and need help. You can help in various ways, for instance, directly helping refugees, spreading awareness, and putting pressure on your local government or companies. You can also support Ukraine by donating, e.g. to the Ukraine humanitarian organisation, Ambulances for Ukraine or Red Cross. Architecture
Distributed SystemsDevOpsDatabasesFrontendAIJava.NET
Coding LifeProduct DesignIndustry
SecurityYou're currently a free subscriber to Architecture Weekly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
Older messages
Webinar #14 - Mateusz Jendza: Why Verified Credentials is the Future of Digital Identity!
Friday, October 27, 2023
Watch now (104 mins) | This time, a special guest Mateusz Jendza, with the topic: Why Verified Credentials is the Future of Digital Identity! Verifiable Credentials are an intriguing topic. They are an
Architecture Weekly #150 - 16th October 2023
Monday, October 23, 2023
Wow, it's the 150th edition of Architecture Weekly! Who knew? Definitely not me! Still, let's keep it rolling. This week's topics revolve around deprecating old features and how Facebook
Architecture Weekly #149 - 16th October 2023
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Today, we had a look at how to design proper event-driven APIs and event-sourced models. We didn't only finish that, but also discussed the biggest DDoS attack on all Cloud providers and finished
Architecture Weekly #148 - 9th October 2023
Monday, October 9, 2023
This time we look at case studies showing why a boring tech stack wins, and helps you scale out. Quirks like Oracle hosting Postgres, the whole Slack team slacking on internal training. And many more
Architecture Weekly #147 - 2nd October 2023
Monday, October 2, 2023
Check the latest release, to see resources around fighting with coupling and setting the boundaries right. Speaking about fighting,you'll find also commentary and links about the recent US
You Might Also Like
🤖 Will AI Gadgets Replace Our Smartphones? — 4 Ways to Use Excel in Daily Life
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Also: How to Declutter Your Google Search Results, and More! How-To Geek Logo May 19, 2024 📩 Get expert reviews, the hottest deals, how-to's, breaking news, and more delivered directly to your
Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1446 [Medium]
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Daily Coding Problem Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today. This problem was asked by Google. Given a set of closed intervals, find the smallest set of numbers that covers
RD#456 Data Fetching Patterns in Single-Page Applications
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Five patterns to help Single Page Applications fetch data from remote sources
C#506 .NET 9 LINQ Performance Edition
Sunday, May 19, 2024
The team has been working on improving performance
PD#574 Programming like it’s 1977
Sunday, May 19, 2024
128 bytes of RAM, no operating system, and limited types of sprites
Defeating Mouse Lint 🖱️
Sunday, May 19, 2024
How optical mice scrolled past rubber balls. Here's a version for your browser. Hunting for the end of the long tail • May 19, 2024 Hey all, sorry this is running a little late. Last week's odd
Android Weekly #623 🤖
Sunday, May 19, 2024
View in web browser 623 May 19th, 2024 Articles & Tutorials Sponsored Webinar: Compiler Technology vs Wrapper Solutions The right mobile app protection secures apps and SDKs against threats such as
Does AI spell doom for the open web?
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Plus, a proposal for Melinda French Gates View this email online in your browser By Anthony Ha Sunday, May 19, 2024 Image Credits: Google OpenAI and Google both made big announcements this week —
Sunday Digest | Featuring 'Visualizing the Tax Burden of Every U.S. State' 📊
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Every visualization published this week, in one place. Visual Capitalist Sunday Digest logo May 19, 2024 | View Online | Subscribe | VC+ The Best of This Week's Visuals Presented by Voronoi: The
Setapp's alternative mobile App Store & Subconscious winding down
Sunday, May 19, 2024
AI's major alien concept is transparency, Setapp launches alternative mobile App Store, The Happiness Trinity, and a lot more in this week's issue of Creativerly. Creativerly Setapp's