| Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies. This month, we present the highlights from the past year of the newsletter, covering topics such as cloud computing, developer experience and tooling, intentional architecture and emergent design, and staff plus engineering and optimizing teams. News Kubernetes Release Team Proceeded with Deprecation of Dockershim in 1.24 Release In an InfoQ news post in January, Matt Campbell stated that Kubernetes was proceeding with the deprecation and removal of dockershim in the May 1.24 release. Workflows and systems that use the Docker Engine as the container runtime for their Kubernetes cluster will need to migrate before moving to the 1.24 release. The 1.23 release will retain dockershim and will be supported for another year. For readers looking for additional context, last year on the InfoQ podcast Wes Reisz sat down with Phil Estes to learn more about the dockershim deprecation. Liz Rice on Programming the Linux Kernel with eBPF, Cilium, and Service Meshes In a January edition of the InfoQ Podcast, Liz Rice discussed eBPF, a way of making the Linux kernel programmable, with Charles Humble. They talked about why this technology was created, how it works under the hood, and what you can and can't do with it. They also talked about Cilium, an open-source library for observing network connectivity between container and cloud workloads, and the new Cilium-based service mesh currently in beta. Rice also presented "Resiliency Superpowers with eBPF" at QCon Plus in May. Google Java App Engine Standard is Now Open Source Google has released the source code for Google App Engine Java standard environment as open source, including the production runtime, App Engine APIs, and the local SDK. Initially released in 2008, Google App Engine was a PaaS designed to make it easy for developers to deploy and scale their web applications. App Engine currently supports many languages, such as Java, PHP, Python, Node.js, Go, and Ruby. Moldable Development: How Custom Tools Make Systems Explainable Developers spend more than half their time reading code to understand what a given system does, but this activity is rarely discussed and thus hasn't been optimized. Moldable Development is a way of programming through which we construct custom tools for every software development problem, including understanding systems. Glamorous Toolkit is a moldable development environment that can be used to mold custom tools. A related podcast, "Tudor Gîrba on How Moldable Development Offers a Novel Way to Reason about Systems", and a QCon Plus presentation recording, "Moldable Development by Example", are available on InfoQ. How Developer Enablement Brings Benefits to Software Organizations Developer enablement is about tools and approaches that can greatly increase our potential as individuals. QCon London 2022 hosted a track on developer enablement, and Stuart Davidson, director at Skyscanner, stated that enabling developers can greatly impact productivity and happiness, as well as profits and retention. He also argued that developer tools make it easier for engineers to deploy products, enabling them to focus on building a product. Building on this topic, Kelsey Hightower tweeted asking for examples of great developer experience, and the community shared a series of interesting insights in the replies. Shawn Wang (swyx), head of developer experience at Airbyte, also sat down with InfoQ podcast co-host Daniel Bryant in August and discussed "Remote Development Environments and the End of Localhost". How to Optimize for Fast Flow Using Alignment and Autonomy: the Journey of a Large Bureaucracy In a recent InfoQ article, Truls Jørgensen and Audun Fauchald Strand, both principal engineers, explained how NAV (Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration), Norway's largest bureaucracy, has achieved alignment in over 100 autonomous development teams. The authors talk about the history of NAV, and how they started this process with visionary leadership and insourcing. Then, they showed the techniques they use to align teams with technology: two descriptive techniques, the technology radar, and weekly deep dives; and two normative techniques, technical direction, and internal platforms. The Architecture Advice Process with Andrew Harmel-Law To best support continuously delivering autonomous teams, a software architect has to avoid being a blocker by trying to make all architectural decisions. In this InfoQ podcast episode, Thomas Betts talks to Andrew Harmel-Law about how an advice process allows anyone to make an architectural decision, once they've had necessary conversations and properly documented their decision. An additional Q&A with Harmel-Law and Eran Stiller can be found on InfoQ. A Minimum Viable Product Needs a Minimum Viable Architecture In a recent InfoQ article, Pierre Pureur and Kurt Bittner argued that "A Minimum Viable Product Needs a Minimum Viable Architecture". The concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can help teams focus on delivering what they think is most valuable to customers early so that they can quickly and inexpensively gauge the market size for their product before investing significant time and resources. Creating a Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) as part of an MVP helps teams to evaluate the technical viability and to provide a stable foundation for the product that can be adapted as the product evolves. Interested readers can learn more from the complete "Continuous Architecture" series. Business Systems Integration Is About to Get a Whole Lot Easier In this recent InfoQ article, Doug Hudgeon explores a new breed of integration tools from companies such as Merge.dev, Codat.io, and Stedi.com. These integration tools have simplified data models for most common business data objects - suppliers, customers, employees, invoices, etc.- and have connectors that take data from many popular software packages and convert it to a simplified model. As an integrator, this makes your job easier because you don’t need to learn the arcane idiosyncrasies of each system. You can focus on transforming data from one simplified format to another. Five Behaviors of Successful Staff Plus Engineers Staff plus engineers act as technical leaders to provide a bigger impact, explained Blanca Garcia Gil at QCon London 2022. Their ability to get things done goes beyond their individual capacity to grow and mentor others. The tech industry has moved away from thinking that engineers work individually, and instead, collaboration is one of the most important behaviors in a staff-plus role. In her talk, Gil presented five core areas that can benefit anyone in a staff-plus role: - Communication and listening
- Technical strategy
- Networking and influencing
- Technical leadership
- Managing your own career
Charity Majors, founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, talked at QCon San Francisco 2022 about the pendulum of being a senior engineer and manager. She discussed the need for managers in technical teams to have engineering credibility and also the value of deliberately embracing both senior technologist and manager roles in your career, but not both at the same time. Susanne Kaiser on DDD, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies Susanne Kaiser is a software consultant working with teams on microservice adoption. Recently, she's brought together Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies into a conversation about helping teams adopt a fast flow of change. In this InfoQ podcast, Wes Reisz speaks with Susanne about why she feels these three approaches to dealing with software complexity are so complementary. The two then work through some of the patterns she’s seen in her consulting work and discuss how to get started, the most effective sequencing of the patterns, and the effect of overall team size in applying these patterns. Case Study Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report — April 2022 Each year, InfoQ editors discuss what they've been observing across the entire software development landscape, and create several trend reports, each with its own graph of the adoption curve. In the 2022 Architecture and Design InfoQ Trend Report, a number of interesting takeaways related to developer experience emerged: - Software architects are adapting their feedback loops, which can be challenging when dealing with colleagues across many time zones or other remote work constraints. Good architects are learning from distributed work how to design better-distributed systems.
- One positive benefit of the pandemic and the shift to remote and hybrid work is increased asynchronous communication, which can manifest as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
- "Data plus architecture" is the idea that, more frequently, software architecture is adapting to consider data. This holistically includes data quality, data pipelines, and traceability to understand how data influences decisions and AI models.
A podcast containing highlights of related discussions can be found on InfoQ and your favorite podcasting platform: "InfoQ Software Architecture & Design Trends 2022". Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ. Sponsored | | In many systems, scalability becomes the primary driver as the user base grows. Attractive features and high utility breed success, which brings more requests to handle and more data to manage. But organizations reach a tipping point when design decisions that made sense under light loads suddenly become technical debt.
In these complimentary chapters from O’Reilly, you will explore the essential ingredients of designing scalable solutions, including replication, state management, load balancing, and caching.
Learn more about this topic in the eBook "Foundations of Scalable Systems (By O’Reilly)", sponsored by Cockroach Labs. |
|
Upcoming events QCon: For practitioners, by practitioners
QCon London 2023 (March 27-29): In-person or online
Attend in-person for a fully immersive experience to untether yourself from your desk and daily distractions. Enjoy a new learning environment with new people, new ideas, and time to reflect. Plus, you can join one of many social events to unwind after a long day!
Or, join virtually for a flexible online experience. Gain access to most talks on-demand, with the option to join live problem-solving sessions and access to Slack to connect with peers and speakers.
Book before January 9 to secure the early bird price. Register now!
Senior software developers rely on the InfoQ community to keep ahead of the adoption curve. One of the main reasons software architects and engineers tell us they keep coming back to InfoQ is because they trust the information provided and selected by their peers. We’ve been helping software development teams adopt new technologies and practices for over 15 years through InfoQ articles, news items, podcasts, tech talks, trends reports, and QCon software development conferences. We hope you find this newsletter useful. If not, you can unsubscribe using the link below. Forwarded email? Subscribe and get your own copy. | 
