This article provides an overview of how the InfoQ editorial team sees the Software Architecture and Design topic evolving in 2023, with a focus on what architects are designing for today. Read more on InfoQ
LinkedIn recently published how it significantly improved development productivity by implementing a client-side Messenger SDK. Usage of the SDK reduces code maintenance costs across multiple apps by abstracting away thousands of lines of code into shared libraries. In one case, the new SDK saved 40+ developer weeks of effort when building a new LinkedIn experience.
Netflix recently published how it built Marken, a scalable annotation service using Cassandra, ElasticSearch and Iceberg. Marken allows storing and querying annotations, or tags, on arbitrary entities. Users define versioned schemas for their annotations, which include out-of-the-box support for temporal and spatial objects.
In a recently published episode of Armchair Architects, the speakers discussed the relationship between software architects and the rest of the organisation. They detail how a successful architect can impact others by switching between going into the trenches and zooming into a tree and then being able to zoom out and estimate if that tree still fits into the forest.
Cloudflare recently detailed how it manages its servers’ egress traffic using “soft-unicast “. Soft-unicast allows multiple servers to share a single IPv4 address for their egress traffic while redirecting the response packets to the correct physical server. It provides a scalable, cost-efficient solution for Cloudflare to offer various products that require tagged egress IP addresses.
Uber recently published how it dramatically reduced its logging costs using Compressed Log Processor (CLP). CLP is a tool capable of losslessly compressing text logs and searching them without decompression. It achieved a 169x compression ratio on Uber’s log data, saving storage, memory, and disk/network bandwidth.
Netflix recently published how it built Timestone, a custom high-throughput, low-latency priority queueing system. Netflix built the queuing system using open-source components such as Redis, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink and Elasticsearch. Engineers state that they built Timestone since they could not find an off-the-shelf solution that met all of its requirements.
Atlassian recently published how it exceeded 99.9999% of availability with its Tenant Context Service. Atlassian achieved this high availability by implementing highly-autonomous client sidecars, able to proactively shield themselves from complete AWS region failures. Sidecars query multiple services concurrently to accomplish this goal and ensure that requests are entirely isolated internally.
Slack recently published how it implemented the Circuit Breaker pattern to improve its CI/CD pipeline availability. Before this project, engineers at Slack saw challenges as peak request volumes in internal tooling caused cascade failures in dependent systems. Since completion, engineers saw increased service availability and fewer bad developer experiences like flakiness from failing services.
Spotify engineers recently published how they standardized architecture diagrams at the company. They defined a standard system model named the Spotify Software Model and adapted the C4 model to visualize it. This combination created a shared language used across the organization, which helps communication, aids decision-making, and supports Spotify’s software’s evolution.
Uber recently introduced Unified Signup and Login (USL), an effort to consolidate signup and login experiences across all Uber apps and services. USL lowers the engineering complexity and maintenance overhead and allows faster rollout of security policies and fixes. Over the last two years, Uber rolled out USL and currently, more than 78% of Uber’s traffic has adopted USL.
Lightbend recently launched Kalix, a new PaaS offering for building cloud-native, business-critical applications using any programming language with no databases. Kalix is a unified application layer that pulls together the necessary pieces for writing software and abstracts their implementation details. Lighbend intends for it to provide developers with an innovative NoOps developer experience.