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  • A Critical Look at Event-Driven Systems: Bernd Rücker at QCon London

    There is currently a hype in adoption of event-driven systems. Sometimes they are almost seen as the “magic thing” in our strive for decoupled systems, Bernd Rücker noted at the recent QCon London 2019. In his presentation he took a critical look at three common hypotheses around event-driven systems: events decrease coupling, Orchestration needs to be avoided, and Workflow engines are painful.

  • Rancher Labs Release Lightweight Kubernetes Distribution "k3s" for Edge, IoT and Telco Platforms

    Rancher Labs has announced a new open source project, k3s, which is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that has been optimised towards running within resource-constrained environments, such as edge or IoT locations, or within telco and manufacturing systems.

  • Recommendations When Starting with Microservices: Ben Sigelman at QCon London

    During the years Ben Sigelman worked at Google, they were creating what we today call a microservices architecture. Some mistakes were made during this adoption, which he believes are being repeated today by the rest of the industry. In his presentation at QCon London 2019, Sigelman described his recommendations to avoid making these mistakes when starting with microservices.

  • Building Services at Scale at Airbnb: QCon London Q&A

    The re-architecture to SOA at Airbnb improved the performance of the services and site reliability. Faster build and deploy times led to increased developer productivity, and improving clarity and boundaries for ownership increased efficiency. Jessica Tai, a software engineer at Airbnb, presented Airbnb’s Great Migration: Building Services at Scale at QCon London 2019.

  • Chaos Engineering Observability: Q&A with Russ Miles

    In a new O’Reilly report, “Chaos Engineering Observability: Bringing Chaos Experiments into System Observability”, the author, Russ Miles, explores why he believes the topics of observability and chaos engineering “go hand in hand”. He argues that as engineers begin to run chaos experiments, they will need to be able to ask many questions about the underlying system being experimented on.

  • The Risk of Climate Change and What Tech Can Do: QCon London Q&A

    Data centres create more emissions than the aviation industry due to energy usage and 24x7 availability, and the growth of the cloud computing and mining of cryptocurrencies is increasing the impact technology has on our climate. Moving existing servers to providers who use renewable sources of electricity could lead to planet-wide climate improvements. A QCon Q&A with Jason Box and Paul Johnston.

  • The Importance of Event-First Thinking

    For global businesses to meet today’s architectural challenges with constant change and extreme scale, we need to go back to the basic principles of system design. The common element in the problems we face is the notion of events driving both actions and reactions, Neil Avery writes in a series of blog posts describing why events are so important and the advantages of an event-first approach .

  • Microsoft Announces Several Updates to Azure Event Grid

    Microsoft has announced multiple updates to Azure Event Grid, which allows for creating event-driven application architectures. The announcement includes features around retry policies, dead lettering capabilities, Azure Storage Queues and Hybrid Connections as a destination for events, and a manual validation handshake.

  • Airbnb's Migration from Monolith to Services

    Jessica Tai spoke at QCon San Francisco 2018 about Airbnb's move from a Ruby on Rails monolith architecture to a service-oriented architecture. The company has expanded from 200 engineers in 2015 to 1,000 and has less downtime due to rollbacks and has improved performance with page load times up to 10x faster.

  • Microsoft Previews Dedicated Environments for Azure Logic Apps

    In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a public preview of Azure Integration Service Environment (ISE) for Logic Apps. ISE provides customers with a fully isolated and dedicated environment for integration services. Isolation is achieved by injecting ISE into an Azure virtual network, which allows for VNet connectivity within Azure and to on-premises data centers .

  • Debugging Microservices Running in Containers: Tooling Review at KubeCon NA

    At KubeCon NA held in Seattle in December 2018, several tools for debugging containerised microservices were presented throughout the conference sessions and the sponsored booths demonstrations. A notable separation appears to be occurring within the market, between "active" and "passive" debugging tools. Two examples within these categories are Rookout and Squash, respectively.

  • Are Frameworks Good or Bad, or Both?

    Preferring frameworks or libraries is somewhat controversial, Frans van Buul, Evangelist at AxonIQ, the company behind Axon Framework, writes in a recent blog post. Many argue in the favour of libraries but Van Buul thinks that a framework can be very valuable when building business applications. He believes this to be especially true for applications based on CQRS, DDD and event sourcing.

  • Using Contract Testing for Applications with Microservices

    When using microservices, integration points between services are a hotbed for bugs. With consumer-driven contract testing, the consumer defines the contract and verifications are made against it within the providers build/test lifecycle. Contract testing fits well into a microservice workflow and kills your integration bugs, argued Maarten Groeneweg at the European Testing Conference 2019.

  • Managing Cloud Spend, Azure Cost Management Reaches General Availability

    In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced Azure Cost Management has reached general availability (GA). Azure Cost Management provides a native cost management solution for enterprise customers which allows organizations to manage and optimize Azure costs across their subscriptions. The core feature set includes cost analysis, budgets, data export, management APIs and alerting.

  • Fitness Functions to Ensure Architectural Goals Are Met

    With fitness-function-driven development, we can write tests that measure a system’s alignment with architectural goals, similar to how we use test-driven development (TDD) to verify that features conform to desired business outcomes, Paula Paul and Rosemary Wang write in a blog post, describing the basic ideas of fitness functions and how architecture qualities can be verified.

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