Architecture Weekly #145 - 18th September 2023
Architecture Weekly #145 - 18th September 2023
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Welcome to the new week!
I’d like to start by thanking you! I’m grateful for being here and motivating to keep it going. The latest news reminded me that I should do that more often. What news?
Architecture Weekly has become the official Substack Bestseller!
I decided to share with you the story of how it started. Read more.
If you don't have time to read, but you like numbers, here are some:
- 144 editions,
- 3644 free subscribers,
- 103 paid subscribers,
- 13 webinars with 21 Hours, 13 Minutes, 42 seconds duration.
Not too bad, right?
Speaking on the webinars, we had another one with Yves Goeleven about his Fantastic 9 Messaging patterns last week.
It’s available here. It’s a must-watch, and to prove that, let me share some comments from the community:
“The amount of knowledge and experience that led to this talk is hard to grasp and we got the result of that cleanly represented in 1.5 hours.”
“Distilled pill of experience, given in a dense form, packaged into extremely valuable visuals 💡”
“It is as you say a goldmine. In the never ending world of patterns and models someone, in this case, Yves have done the hard work and filtered out the patterns and processes which relates to our favorite expressions: Fact, State and Intent. 😊 “
Let’s start with a big bargain for architecture knowledge. Humble Bundle released such for O’Reilly ebooks:
Of course, no affiliation, I’m sharing it because, for me, it was an instant buy. For the price of a single ebook, you get a bundle that includes books by Neal Ford, Gregor Hohpe, Vlad Khononov and other folks linked here in multiple editions.
Speaking of finances, FinOps became a trend some time ago, but it still is; it cannot get into the mainstream of the development processes. We’re getting hot takes showing "Cloud costs a lot, let’s get back to on-premise!”.
Roi Ravhon in the InfoQ Podcast (a creator of the Finout tool) shares his observation that counters that perspective
(…)something that press often discover is that they're not really adapting to the cloud, rather building on-prem infrastructure on AWS. And once doing that, they start to figure out that things are a lot more expensive than they hope than benchmark because they're not properly using cloud technologies as they should have. So it's like the first step or step and then they need to have to adapt and someone higher up gets all annoyed.
That’s also my observation, that people want to just do lift & shift hoping that going to the cloud will magically cut costs. That never happens.
Just like with the war on monoliths vs microservices, I think that the frontline is wrongly set up. We should consider the whole picture starting from the product financial model, people skills and organisation capabilities. Knowing that we can select the deployment model that would cost us less. Also, it’s important not to make lifetime decisions. Maybe going on the cloud with serverless can be a good starting point, and then pivoting parts into containerised or even on-premise infrastructure is a good decision.
Listen/read the whole interview at:
I also wrote on my blog How money in Cloud impacts Architectural decisions?
I think that I told you already that my running joke is that if you try to fix a solution with a cache, you end up with two issues instead. I’m getting into dad jokes here, but not to leave you only with that, let me share a thorough article explaining caching concepts:
Properly done cache can increase the performance of your system by a lot. Yet, remember that the system needs to have acceptable performance without that.
The cache can always invalidate, and usually, it does in the worst-case scenario. For instance, you cannot have an infinitely scaled cache; you need to set up some limits. If you’re in the e-commerce industry, then the time when you get the biggest traffic is the most important for your business (think Black Friday). The likelihood that the cache will overflow the max size is high. Then if your system can’t handle that, you’ll get the chance to write an intriguing post-mortem. Of course, if your business survives that.
We finally got a post-mortem from Microsoft about their Azure breach. I wrote about it 5 weeks ago in the 139th edition. To remind you, Microsoft came under blistering criticism for “grossly irresponsible” security. For instance:
On Wednesday, Yoran took to LinkedIn to castigate Microsoft for failing to fix what the company said on Monday was a “critical” issue that gives hackers unauthorized access to data and apps managed by Azure AD, a Microsoft cloud offering for managing user authentication inside large organizations. Monday’s disclosure said that the firm notified Microsoft of the problem in March and that Microsoft reported 16 weeks later that it had been fixed. Tenable researchers told Microsoft that the fix was incomplete. Microsoft set the date for providing a complete fix to September 28.
I commented that by reading the text, it’s clearly visible that if those accusations are correct, then that doesn’t look great on Microsoft.
And the accusation appeared to be correct…
Microsoft has said that roughly 25 organizations had one or more of their accounts breached in the campaign, which began on May 15 and lasted until June 16. Microsoft wasn’t aware of the mass hack until a customer tipped it off.
(…)the breach have included a US senator and an industry CEO.
Microsoft said that the reason for the breach was the MS engineer account. The thread actor acquired a signing key used to hack dozens of Azure and Exchange accounts belonging to high-profile users.
That’s also something to remember that if you have a privileged user who can have access to multiple production accounts, then your safety is as high as this person's safety.
Also, that’s a terrible mark for Microsoft, seeing how badly and slowly they approached this issue, lagging in releasing the full information and letting the potential threats because of that.
Still, no one died because of that, as with the result of TwitterX’s privacy policy…
As we’re in the privacy area, check also a thorough article going through issues related to GitHub Pilot:
Check also a great initiative around explaining Evolutionary Architecture made by Maciej Jędrzejewski and Kamil Bączek. They prepared a repository that, step by step, explains how you can start from simple strategies and add more when (and if) it’s needed. The big benefit is that it shows the practical code samples (in .NET so far), giving you an actionable approach.
Maciej also explained and introduced this repository in the webinar for our community:
Check also other links!
Oskar
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
The InfoQ Pocast- Roi Ravhon on FinOps, Application Unit Economics, and Cloud Cost Optimization
Steve "Ardalis" Smith - The More You Know The More You Realize You Don't Know
DevOps
Databases
Glauber Costa - SQLite-based databases on the postgres protocol? Yes we can!
Google - SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System
WatermelonDB - Reactive & asynchronous database for powerful React and React Native apps
Testing
AI
InfoQ - AI, ML, and Data Engineering InfoQ Trends Report - September 2023
P. Covington, J. Adams, E. Sargin - Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations
Azure
Java
.NET
Maciej Jędrzejewski, Kamil Bączek - Evolutionary Architecture
Steven Giesel - struct vs readonly struct vs ref struct vs record struct
MiniExcel - Fast, Low-Memory, Easy Excel .NET helper to import/export/template spreadsheet
TypeScript
Coding Life
Oskar Dudycz - Architecture Weekly became the Substack Bestseller!
The Wall Street Journal - Try Hard, but Not That Hard. 85% Is the Magic Number for Productivity
Product Design
Industry
ArsTechnica - Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that?
The Guardian - Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses
Security
ArsTechnica - Microsoft finally explains cause of Azure breach: An engineer’s account was hacked
Microsoft - Results of Major Technical Investigations for Storm-0558 Key Acquisition
authentik - An open-source Identity Provider that emphasizes flexibility and versatility
Kristina Yasuda, Torsten Lodderstedt - OpenID for Verifiable Presentations