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Your Software Will Fail, It Is How You Recover That Matters: A Conversation with Randy Shoup
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In this February podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with Randy Shoup about building resilient systems. They discussed how software's interaction with itself and the real world produces fragility, and why overlooking this fact is a serious mistake. They also explored where to use workflows, orchestration, and choreography, the role of architecture in building good teams, and the wisdom of letting each team use their own set of tools.
The conversation continued in a second podcast, published in November, “Architecture Should Model the World as it Really is”, where they discussed that software failure is inevitable, but learning from failure, including making the necessary changes to organizational culture, can make your software more resilient.
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Cell Boundaries: Defining the Scope of a Cell in Cell-based Architecture
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In a February Medium article, Benjamin Cane, a builder of payment systems and open-source contributor, explored how to define the scope of cells within cell-based architecture. By creating independent cells that operate without reliance on a central dependency, developers can isolate and reduce the impact and frequency of failures.
Core concepts include focusing on reducing the number of times a request crosses cells, keeping cells small and manageable, and using natural boundaries.
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Google Open-Sources Agent2Agent Protocol for Agentic Collaboration
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Google released the Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, an open-source specification for building AI agents that can connect with other agents that support the protocol. Google has enlisted over fifty technology partners to contribute to A2A's development.
The announcement was made at the Google Cloud Next conference. A2A is billed as a "complement" to Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and defines a client-server relationship between AI agents. Google developed the protocol with help from partners like Salesforce, Atlassian, and LangChain, aiming to create an interoperability standard for any agent, regardless of vendor or framework.
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From Architecture to Deployment: How AI-Powered Toolkits Are Unifying Developer Workflows
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Developer tooling is undergoing a shift as AI moves beyond code completion to unify multiple stages of the software development workflow. Q1 and Q2 announcements like GitHub Copilot Workspace and Claude 3's system-level reasoning showcase how AI is beginning to assist not just with coding, but also with planning, documentation, and testing.
Emerging projects like DevFlow, which integrates documentation generation, test suggestions, and architecture diagramming, offer an early glimpse into how these trends may reshape developer environments in the near future.
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HTAP: The Rise and Fall of Unified Database Systems?
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The article by Zhou Sun, "HTAP is Dead". sparked a summer debate in the data community about the future of hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP). HTAP was designed to integrate historical and online data at scale, enabling more flexible query methods and reducing business complexity.
In the article, Sun, co-founder and CEO at Mooncake Labs, argues that the long-promised vision of unifying transactional and analytical workloads in a single system has failed to materialize. Gartner introduced the term HTAP over a decade ago, calling it "the next big DB architecture" and noting that the goal was to close the gap between operational and analytical systems.
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QCon San Francisco. Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry
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At QCon San Francisco (and also the InfoQ Dev Summit Boston), Michelle Brush, Engineering Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at Google, delivered a keynote that directly addressed software leaders on the broader changes underway in software engineering, systems thinking, and leadership amid complexity.
She opened by acknowledging the uncertainty that many practitioners feel, affirming that this was a shared experience and an expected part of navigating today's technological landscape. Brush argued that the nature of software engineering work is shifting, not disappearing. As AI systems automate parts of software development, engineers will face increasingly complex tasks.
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The European Cloud Dilemma: Innovation Versus Digital Sovereignty
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European tech companies are facing a tricky situation, using popular American cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud, but worrying about keeping control of their data in Europe. With rising geopolitical tensions, more practitioners are asking: Should we be less dependent on American tech giants? It has prompted some European developers and businesses to rethink how they handle their data and build their systems.
Ahead of the InfoQ Dev Summit in Munich, Markus Ostertag, Elena van Engelen-Maslova, Erik Steiger, and Katharine Jarmul discussed the topic in a podcast, "Sovereign Clouds, Hyperscalers and European Alternatives".
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Scaling Systems, Companies, and Careers
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Suhail Patel joined Thomas Betts to discuss growing yourself as your company grows. When he started at Monzo, Patel was one of four engineers on the then-new platform team. There are now over one hundred people. The conversation covers how to thrive when the company and the systems you're building are going through significant growth.
In a related podcast, Shane Hastie spoke to Shannon Mason about optimizing team productivity by understanding the neuroscience behind cognitive load, distinguishing between beneficial "slack time" and detrimental "idle time", and how the pursuit of maximum utilization can lead to burnout and poor decision-making.
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DevGreenOps: How to Design Sustainable Digital Services
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DevGreenOps, also known as DevSusOps, is an extension of the DevOps approach, in which environmental sustainability considerations are integrated into every step of the DevOps cycle, Jochen Joswig said in his OOP Conference talk. Applying transparency, minimalism, efficiency, and awareness helps us to design sustainable digital services.
The promise of DevGreenOps is that it will bring all the benefits of DevOps while also reducing the environmental impact of software, for example, by reducing the energy, water, and other resource usage at every stage of the software's life cycle, Joswig said.
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