Florian Herlings.

This was sent out as a newsletter on 16. November 2019.

Self-contained systems, CUE language, better sleep and much more…


Hej friends,

I am happy to report back with this week’s version of the newsletter. As always, I am happy about feedback, but I also want to ask you to share the newsletter with anyone who might be interested in those topics. You can either share a link, or just forward the email to anyone you think would benefit from this. Thank you in advance. :)

Self-Contained Systems

SCS (Self-Contained Systems) is a system design pattern, that does not bring a set of radical ideas to the table. It rather feels like a very natural way to deal with large applications, that feels almost like this should be the default way to build things. The website is quick and easy to read, because SCS is mainly made of 8 simple rules.

It is less hyped than microservices, but it surely is easier to accomplish (given the trouble that almost everybody I talk to has when it comes to microservice interacions).

The Configuration Complexity Curse by Cedric Charly

The group of people who have successfully implemented their own Kubernetes cluster can be separated into two groups: People who tried and failed, and people who didn’t try.

Joking aside, setting up your own auto scaling containerized hosting, is one of the more complex things you can try to achieve these days. I really love the Kubernetes/Docker world, but I still feel like we are in the very early days, and not everything has been figured out yet.

Cedric lists some of the problems, and then goes on to talk about a new language, specifically designed to be used for configuration, called CUE. Very much worth checking out.

How to sleep at night having a cloud service: common Architecture Do’s by Daniel Sada Caraveo

Daniel goes through multiple levels of how to set up your cloud service environment. He touches on topics like infrastructure as code, centralized logging, CI/CD, monitoring, autoscaling, blue/green deployments and much more. A wonderful and relatively quick read, that touches on the most important topics.

Goodbye CTO, Hello Technical Fellow by Holger Reinhardt

A short but insightful article, about Holger Reinhardt, who left the position of a CTO, to later come back as a “Technical Fellow”. I think it is very valuable to really dig deep and try to find out, which part of technical leadership is the right setup for you. I have found out, that even the role of a CTO can have very different connotations and it is super important to be clear about which ones you like and dislike, and try to find people in your teams, who can help with the ones you don’t like.

Holger also mentions the very influential post by Pat Kua, named “Goodbye CTO, Hello Chief Scientist”, which I highly recommend as well!

Let’s Create a Simple Load Balancer With Go by Kasun Vithanage

Why build a load balancer in GO, when there are already plenty of implementations out there? Because you learn a lot! Kasun goes through the process step by step and touches on topics like round robin, mutexes, atomic operations or reverse proxies. A very fun read.


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