Category Archives: Architecture

Postman Collections Should be A Default Part of Your API Documentation

I’m taking time to showcase any API I come across who have published their OpenAPI definitions to GitHub like New York Times, Box, Stripe, SendGrid, Nexmo, and others have. I’m also taking the time to publish stories showcasing any API provider who similarly publishes Postman Collections as part of their API documentation. Next up on my list is the Triathlon API,… Read More »

Kafka Architecture

Kafka consists of Records, Topics, Consumers, Producers, Brokers, Logs, Partitions, and Clusters. Records can have key (optional), value and timestamp. Kafka Records are immutable. A Kafka Topic is a stream of records (“/orders”, “/user-signups”). You can think of a Topic as a feed name. A topic has a Log which is the topic’s storage on disk. A… Read More »

Push Notifications Tutorial: Getting Started

iOS developers love to imagine users of their awesome app using the app all day, every day. Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that users will sometimes have to close the app and perform other activities. Laundry doesn’t fold itself, you know :] Happily, push notifications allow developers to reach users and perform small tasks even when… Read More »

Distributed Real-time Data Store with Flexible Deduplication

In the world of “big data”, businesses that can quickly discover and act upon insights from their users’ events have a decisive advantage. It is no longer sufficient for analytics systems to solely rely on daily batch processing. This is why our new column store, Nova, continues to use a lambda architecture. In addition to a batch layer, this… Read More »

Patterns for Resilient Architecture

As you may know, a quote that shaped the way I think about architecture is from Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com. He said: “Failures are a given, and everything will eventually fail over time.” Having worked on large-scale systems for more than a decade, if I could summarize in a single animation what I think about managing… Read More »

Kafka explained

Kafka’s growth is exploding, more than 1⁄3 of all Fortune 500 companies use Kafka. These companies includes the top ten travel companies, 7 of top ten banks, 8 of top ten insurance companies, 9 of top ten telecom companies, and much more. LinkedIn, Microsoft and Netflix process four comma messages a day with Kafka (1,000,000,000,000). Kafka is used… Read More »

AWS Cloud Architecture Design Principles

When you develop or migrate application to the cloud, you need to pay attention to additional things compared to the traditional on-prem deployments. Also, you need to make sure that your application is able to fully take advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud. When you run your application on the cloud you will… Read More »

Architecture Review Checklist

When you are in rush trying to reach a certain project milestone, you might forget important architecture aspects that can dramatically influence the solution in late project’s phases. To mitigate this risk, I developed a architecture checklist that I use to validate that all architecture aspects were addressed. The OpenGroup architecture checklist is a good… Read More »

Introduction to OAuth 2

Introduction OAuth 2 is an authorization framework that enables applications to obtain limited access to user accounts on an HTTP service, such as Facebook, GitHub, and DigitalOcean. It works by delegating user authentication to the service that hosts the user account, and authorizing third-party applications to access the user account. OAuth 2 provides authorization flows… Read More »