The Software Architects' Newsletter
February 2024
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Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! Each month, we bring you essential news and experience on emerging patterns and technologies from industry peers.

This month, we focus on "Evolution of architectures: Monolith, microservices, and moduliths". Technologies, patterns, and practices from this topic span the entire "diffusion of innovation" graphs in our InfoQ Trends Reports 2023 eMag and InfoQ Software Architecture and Design Trends Report. We also discussed the impact of these topics in our "2023 Year in Review Podcast", which range from early adopter themes, like designing for resilience and micro frontends, to early majority topics, such as designing modular monoliths and correctly building distributed systems.

Key challenges remain, including when and how to modularize applications, choice of associated language and platform stack, and designing and building for understandability.

News

Modular Monolith: Is This the Trend in Software Architecture?

January saw increasing discussion around the topic of creating well-structured monolithic applications, or "moduliths". Ruoyu Su and Xiaozhou Li, researchers from the University of Oulu, published an academic paper, "Modular Monolith: Is This the Trend in Software Architecture?" on arXiv, an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints. The paper mentions Google's Service Weaver framework and Spring Modulith.

Additional recent coverage of Spring Modulith can be found in a Voxxed Days presentation by Oliver Drotbohm, staff engineer at VMware (Broadcom), "Spring Modulith – Spring for the Architecturally Curious Developer", and an article from Abhinav Sonkar, Tech Lead at Axual B.V., "Improving Modular Monolith Applications with Spring Modulith".

DoorDash Uses Service Mesh and Cell-Based Architecture to Significantly Reduce Data Transfer Costs

In a recent move, DoorDash has significantly optimized its cloud infrastructure costs. The company faced increased cross-AZ data transfer costs when transitioning to a microservices architecture. To substantially reduce this cost, DoorDash implemented zone-aware routing with its Envoy-based service mesh, taking advantage of its Cell-Based Architecture.

The authors recommend owners of microservices-based systems look into their data transfer cost and consider a service mesh for its traffic management features and potential for greater efficiency.

Uber Improves Resiliency of Microservices with Adaptive Load Shedding

Uber created a new load-shedding library for its microservice platform, serving over 130 million customers and handling aggregated peaks of millions of requests per second (RPSs). The company replaced the solution based on QALM with Cinnamon library, which, in addition to graceful degradation, can dynamically and continuously adjust the capacity of the service and the amount of load shedding.

InfoQ previously reported on Monzo’s solution for targeted traffic shedding.

Pinterest Open-Sources a Production-Ready PubSub Java Client for Kafka, Flink, and MemQ

Pinterest open-sourced its generic PubSub client library (PSC), which has been heavily used in production for a year and a half. The library helped the engineering teams by increasing developer velocity and the scalability and stability of services using it. Over 90% of Java applications have migrated to PSC with minimal changes.

PSC supports automated service discovery, optimized configurations, automated error handling, interceptors, metrics, and optimized configurations. The library provides two primary interfaces: PSC Producer and PSC Consumer, each able to manage one or more backend producers or consumers.

AWS Launches CDK Migrate and CloudFormation IaC Generator for Infrastructure as Code Adoption

AWS announced the general availability (GA) of CDK Migrate, a component of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). This open-source project enables developers to migrate AWS CloudFormation templates, previously deployed CloudFormation stacks, or resources created outside of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) into a CDK application.

Several organizations, including Dunelm Technology and others, have recently reported that they are migrating microservice and serverless-based systems from frameworks such as AWS SAM and the Serverless Framework to AWS CDK.

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Case Study

Cloud-Computing in the Post-Serverless Era: Current Trends and Beyond

In a recent InfoQ article, Bilgin Ibryam discussed that as AWS Lambda approaches its 10th anniversary this year, serverless computing expands beyond just Function as a Service (FaaS).

Today, "serverless" describes cloud services that require no manual provisioning, offer on-demand auto-scaling, and use consumption-based pricing. This shift is part of a broader evolution in cloud computing, with serverless technology continuously transforming.

The full article focuses on the future beyond serverless, exploring how the cloud landscape will evolve beyond current hyperscaler models and its impact on developers and operations teams.

Key topics covered include:

• Serverless computing is evolving beyond its original scope, with functions partially or fully replaced by versatile cloud constructs, heralding a new era in cloud architecture.
• The cloud market is shifting toward hyperspecialized vertical multi-cloud services, offering unique, fine-grained features that cater specifically to developers’ needs.
• Upcoming cloud services are set to be rich in constructs, transforming the way developers handle tasks like routing, filtering, and event-triggering, making them more efficient and user-friendly.
• There’s a significant trend moving from Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to Composition as Code (CaC), where developers use familiar programming languages for more intuitive cloud-service configuration.
• Microservices are being redefined in the cloud landscape, evolving from mere architectural boundaries to organizational boundaries, integrating various cloud constructs under a unified developer language.

The shift-left of application composition using cloud services will increasingly blend with application programming, transforming microservices from an architectural style to an organizational one. A microservice will no longer be just a single deployment unit or process boundary but a composition of functions, containers, and cloud constructs, all implemented and glued together in a single language chosen by the developer.

The full article argues that the future will be hyperspecialized and focused on the developer-first cloud.

This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Bilgin Ibryam, "Cloud-Computing in the Post-Serverless Era: Current Trends and Beyond".

To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "Architecture and Design", "Microservices", and "Modularity" on InfoQ.

Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ.

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