In a recent blog post, the PayPal engineering team published how it uses premortem analysis as part of its regular software design process. The team adopted a customized version of premortem analysis last year, which highly benefited PayPal engineering. Premortem is a strategy in which a team imagines that a project failed and then works backward to determine what could lead to this failure. (Read more on InfoQ)

Slack recently posted a detailed description of the software architecture of its new role management system. Slack needed to build a system that was more flexible than the one it previously had. It created a custom containerized Go-based permission service that integrates with its existing systems over gRPC. As a result, its customers’ admins now have granular control over what their users can do. (Read more on InfoQ)

Lightbend today announced the launch of Akka Serverless open beta, with general availability later this year. Akka Serverless is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that aims at cloud-native application development. It is built on Lightbend’s Akka Platform technology and delivered via a model similar to existing serverless offerings. (Read more on InfoQ)

Uber recently detailed the architecture of its internally built API gateway. It described how independent layered components handle each request in the gateway, with each layer being responsible for a different facet of the request lifecycle. A combination of YAML and Apache Thrift defines the gateway configuration, and a code-generated artifact in Go makes up the gateway implementation. (Read more on InfoQ)

eBay recently announced that it adopted AsyncAPI for its external asynchronous API contracts. In March 2021, eBay launched its first AsyncAPI-based contracts for its new business event notification capabilities. (Read more on InfoQ)

Airbnb recently described how it built Himeji, a scalable centralized authorization system. Himeji stores permissions data and performs permission checks as a central source of truth. It uses a sharded and replicated in-memory cache to improve performance and lower latencies and has served checks in production for about a year. (Read more on InfoQ)

In a recent post, Google provided a glimpse into the architecture of Colossus. Colossus underpins Google’s scalable storage system, which serves both its Google Cloud offerings and Google’s own globally available services such as YouTube, Google Drive, and Gmail. Five separate components compose Colossus – the client library, curators, metadata database, file servers, and custodians. (Read more on InfoQ)

Spotify recently published an account of their journey towards a unified codebase for their web and desktop clients. Spotify’s team was the owner of a web-player and a separate, full-featured desktop client. Due to having to implement many features twice, they were not shipping at the pace they wanted. Now Spotify created one codebase for both, resulting in an improved development cadence. (Read more on InfoQ)

An overview of how the InfoQ editorial team sees the Software Architecture and Design topic evolving in 2021, with a focus on what architects are designing for today. (Read more on InfoQ, listen to the InfoQ podcast)

Couchbase recently published a detailed explanation of its distributed multi-document ACID transaction implementation. In its blog post, Couchbase lays out how its DB engine supports the Monotonic Atomic View consistency model, which is a strengthened version of the Read Committed consistency model. (Read more on InfoQ)