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)

GitHub engineer Robert Mosolgo yesterday posted a detailed account of how GitHub scaled the GitHub API with a sharded, replicated rate limiter in Redis. GitHub migrated from an older Memcached-based rate limiter to a Redis-based one. According to Mosolgo, the new implementation has improved reliability, fixed issues for clients, and reduced GitHub’s support load. (Read more on InfoQ)

The Linux Foundation announced today that it would host the AsyncAPI Initiative. It will provide a forum where individuals and organizations can advance AsyncAPI and nurture collaboration in a neutral platform that can support the growth that AsyncAPI is experiencing. (Read more on InfoQ)

In a recent blog post, Sky Ao, a staff engineer at Alibaba Cloud, details how Alibaba Cloud uses the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) to support its business growth. As Alibaba’s business rapidly grows while also purchasing other companies, a clear need to support multiple programming languages across varying cloud environments rises. To support this need, Alibaba chose to use Dapr. (Read more on InfoQ)

In a recent blog post, Dropbox revealed Atlas, a platform whose aim is to provide various benefits of a Service Oriented Architecture while minimizing the operational cost of owning a service. Atlas’ goal is to support small, self-contained functionality, saving product teams the overhead of managing a full-blown service, including capacity planning, alert setup, etc. (Read more on InfoQ)

Netflix engineering recently published a blog post detailing how Netflix embraced GraphQL microservices for rapid application development. In this post, Dane Avilla, a senior software engineer at Netflix, describes their key learnings in the process and how GraphQL lends itself well for proof-of-concept development. (Read more on InfoQ)

The Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) team announced today that Dapr v1.0 is now available and is considered production-ready. Dapr is an open-source runtime that allows developers to build resilient, microservices-based applications that run on the cloud and edge. With the v1.0 release, developers can deploy Dapr applications to Kubernetes clusters in production scenarios. (Read more on InfoQ)