Architecture Weekly #84 - 18th July 2022

Welcome to the new week!

I’ll start with a big thank you! On Thursday, I got an email from Substack telling me that I made my first 1000$ on Architecture Weekly! I’m incredibly thrilled for the trust of the paid subscribers and all of you. It’s inspiring me to continue this effort and make it even bigger! Thank you!

Did you see microservices in your work? Are you sure? How micro were they? Were they big or small, or maybe even smaller? Pico? Nano? Size always mattered. We don’t need to check the IT history. Even the history of painting shows that different sizes were in fashion. Now XS size is the king. Even small cars are smart. I wrote some time ago that we’ll be thinking more about how to scale down than scale up. I’m pretty happy that after a period of herd thinking, now we’re getting mature talks and studies based on the real projects, see:

• Neal Ford - Granularity and Communication Tradeoffs in Microservices

• Z. Zhang, M. K. Ramanathan, P. Raj, and A. Parwal, T. Sherwood, M. Chabbi - CRISP: Critical Path Analysis of Large-Scale Microservice Architectures

Speaking about the experience, I wrote an article based on my findings about how to implement distributed processes using Event Sourcing:

• Oskar Dudycz - Event-driven distributed processes by example

Check also the beautiful illustration of how Kafka works. One picture speaks better than a thousand words; that’s what you can see here:

• SoftwareMill - Kafka Visualization

Let’s switch to the topics that don’t look so brightly. The first one is SAFe. When I first saw those diagrams, I thought this was a funny pastiche of the pseudo Agile tooling. I stopped laughing when I realised that this was serious. I see cases where Agile is not enough and that we need to have some plan and upfront thinking. I don’t think that methodologies like PRINCE2, PMI, and IPMA, by definition, were wrong; they have tools from which Agile people could use a little help. Still, I don’t understand how people could seriously think that SAFe is an Agile approach. If they don’t want the Agile process, why call it such? It’s like being vegan but still calling your meals like vegan cheesecake. Check more in:

• Paweł Huryn - Watch Out, Waterfall Ahead! The Truth About SAFe

The other thing that I watch how it’s unfolding is AI. I already wrote it, but it’s something that we, as technical people, should take responsibility for and explain to non-techies that it may be wrong. It’s as biased as people training it. I see a lot of places where it can help us, yet we need to monitor it and ensure that we won’t hear “Computer says no!” without explanation.

• Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan - Leakage and the Reproducibility Crisis in ML-based Science

• Simon Willison - Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

I started with microservices and will end with something micro. Are you a gamer? Do you hate microtransactions? Then soon, you may have it in your car. It’s crazy, but you may have hardware and facilities needed for something. You may own the car but still not able to use them without paying for a subscription.

• The Verge - BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month

This is the world we live in, and this was this week’s Architecture Weekly!

Check also other links!

Cheers
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 Red Cross, the Ukraine humanitarian organisation. You may also consider joining Tech for Ukraine initiative.

Architecture

• Neal Ford - Granularity and Communication Tradeoffs in Microservices

• Z. Zhang, M. K. Ramanathan, P. Raj, and A. Parwal, T. Sherwood, M. Chabbi - CRISP: Critical Path Analysis of Large-Scale Microservice Architectures

• Oskar Dudycz - Event-driven distributed processes by example

• Andrzej Ludwikowski - Event Sourcing - what could possibly go wrong?

Distributed Systems

• SoftwareMill - Kafka Visualization

• Antón Rodríguez - Monitoring Kafka without instrumentation using eBPF

DevOps

• Adrian Smijulj - GitHub Actions - Workflows as Code

Databases

• Daniel Palma - High-performance open-source Data Lakehouse at home

• Replibyte - Seed your development database with real data

AI

• Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan - Leakage and the Reproducibility Crisis in ML-based Science

• Simon Willison - Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

AWS

• AWS Compute Blog - Simplifying serverless best practices with AWS Lambda Powertools for TypeScript

Go

• Egon Elbre - lensm - Go assembly and source viewer

Google Cloud

• InfoWorld - Google Cloud targets high performance workloads with Arm-based VMs and Batch job scheduling

.NET

• Dina Bogdan - Intro to Virtual Actors by Microsoft Orleans

• Microsoft - Announcing Rate Limiting for .NET

• Marc Gravell - Unusual optimisations; ref foreach and ref returns

• Khalid Abuhakmeh - EF Core and Minimal API sample for multi-tenancy example using global filters

Rust

• Dorian Scheidt - Improving “Extract Function” in Rust Analyzer

• Gaëtan Renaudeau - Plottable Era: (I) Primitive

WebAssembly

• Colin Breck - Why Am I Excited About WebAssembly?

Coding Life

• Nicolas Dao - What you need to know to choose an open source license

Management

• Paweł Huryn - Watch Out, Waterfall Ahead! The Truth About SAFe

• CA Technologies - The Impact of Agile. Quantified.

Industry

• TechTarget - What the Broadcom-VMware acquisition means for cloud users

Trivia

• Gunnar Morling - Ten Tips to Make Conference Talks Suck Less

• The Verge - BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month