Software Architecture Newsletter #4
Welcome to the 4th edition of the Software Architecture Newsletter!
2021 began with a bang! We passed the 1200 subscribers, and that’s quite impressive for such a young newsletter! I always try to make it more diverse and interesting, and I would glad to get your feedback.
As usual, if you found something interesting that you think should be included here, or you have something to say about the content of this newsletter – drop me a mail at memi@memilavi.com
So, without further ado – here’s the 4th edition of the Software Architecture Newsletter.
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Architecture
Docker is Dead, Long Live Unikernel – In a somewhat provocative article, James D. Bohrman argues that “Containers will fade into obscurity”, due to their complexity and insecurity (among other reasons).
Their replacement, he argues, will be Unikernel apps, which is a hybrid between containers and a full-blown VM. Unikernel, as its name implies, has its own kernel (in contrast to containers, which shares the same kernel with same-machine containers), and offers superb performance, and great security.
Read it all here.
The Journey from Monolith to Microservices at GitHub – Case studies are great, especially ones that deal with Software Architecture, and especially – ones the tell the story of an organization going to Microservices. And when this organization is GitHub, which, I’ve been told, is quite popular in the industry, then it’s even more interesting.
Read this interview on InfoQ for the full story of GitHub going to Microservices.
Cloud
Solving the challenges of Serverless at scale – Serverless is definitely the best invention since the sliced bread. Well, sort of. But for sure – it is one of the hottest trends in the cloud industry. But – it’s not a silver bullet, and you have to design your serverless architecture so that it can handle load.
This thorough blog post from dashbird.io outlines the challenges with serverless architecture, and the best practices to avoid load-related problems.
Azure Defender for IoT – IoT (or – Internet of Things) is, on one hand, the most important development in recent years regarding smart edge devices (After all – who wouldn’t want a talking refrigerator?), but, on the other hand, a real nightmare for every CISO. The fact that there’s somewhere a device that is not directly controlled by the organization, and be, theoretically at least, easily hacked, left the lights on in many h-tech companies.
Microsoft is well aware of this risk, and has recently announced the Azure Defender for IoT. This cloud service acts as a protection layer of the IoT device, and provides full monitoring and risk analysis, so that if, and when, the device is compromised – it won’t be used for harmful purposes, and will be disabled instead.
Read the full details here.
Large Scale Cloud Migrations – Migrating to the cloud is one of the most difficult tasks for any organization. Sure, you can simply Lift-and-Shift your VMs to the cloud, but then – what’s the point?
On the other hand, a full rewrite using all the bells-and-whistles of the cloud is usually out of question.
So, how should you approach to cloud migration projects?
This article, by Gagan Singh and Trevor Hykes tries to answer this exact question. Does it do that? Take a look and find out
Dev & DevOps
State of Octoverse by GitHub – GitHub released its annual report about the state of software development. Boasting more than 56m developers, and more than 60m new repos just last year, GitHub definitely holds a treasure trove of data about developers, development, and more.
Some nuggets:
– Top languages in GitHub: JavaScript, Python, Java, TypeScript and C#
– Nigeria is the most growing country GitHub-usage wise (with 65.9% YoY growth)
– There are 59% percent chance of getting a security alert in the next year from an active repository
And a lot more…
Download the full report here.
Breaking Serverless on Purpose – In a very interesting presentation that was given in ChaosConf late October, Emrah Samdan described chaos engineering (or: how to test stuff by breaking it) in serverless environments, which, as you probably know, become more and more popular.
See it here.
Discussions
Scaling Serverless – So we already talked about Serverless in this edition, but an interesting discussion broke up in our Facebook Group regarding scaling Serverless. Eyal Perry asked: How can I scale Lambda to more than the given 500 instances / min? There are uses cases that require that kind of scaling, and we should be able to handle them.
Want to chime in? Do it here.
Book
Technology is developing in a neck-breaking pace around us, and it’s easy to forget that there could be ethical and moral consequences for this development.
In Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age , by Brad Smith, former general counselor of Microsoft, he explores some of these challenges, and tells the stories of how he, and Microsoft in general (together with other companies) handled them. Brad is not afraid to show also the failures, and brings his views of the modern digital age in a candid and refreshing way.
Recommended reading.
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So, that was the fourth edition of the Software Architecture Newsletter (temp name).
I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to suggest and comment on it, simply by replying to this mail.
Also, if you created a unique content you think can be included here – drop me a note!
Looking forward for your feedback!
Cheers,
Memi
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