Do you have too many microservices? – Five Design Attributes that can Help

This is a guest Post by Jake Lumetta, Founder and CEO, ButterCMS, an API-first CMS. For more content like this, follow @ButterCMS on Twitter and subscribe to our blog.

Are your microservices too small or too tightly coupled? Are you confident in your decision-making about service boundaries? In interviews with dozens of experienced CTOs, they offered design attributes that they consider when creating a set of microservices. This article distills that wisdom into five key principles to help you better design microservices.

The importance of microservice boundaries

The design attributes discussed below matter because reaping the benefits of microservices requires designing thoughtful microservice boundaries.

One of the major challenges when it comes to creating a new system with a microservice architecture. It came about when I mentioned that one of the core benefits of developing new systems with microservices is that the architecture allows developers to build and modify individual components independently — but problems can arise when it comes to minimizing the number of callbacks between each API. The solution according to McFadden, is to apply the appropriate service boundaries.

But in contrast to the sometimes difficult-to-grasp and abstract concept of domain driven design (DDD) —  a framework for Continue reading

How ipdata serves 25M API calls from 10 infinitely scalable global endpoints for $150 a month

This is a guest post by Jonathan Kosgei, founder of ipdata, an IP Geolocation API. 

I woke up on Black Friday last year to a barrage of emails from users reporting 503 errors from the ipdata API.

Our users typically call our API on each page request on their websites to geolocate their users and localize their content. So this particular failure was directly impacting our users’ websites on the biggest sales day of the year. 

I only lost one user that day but I came close to losing many more.

This sequence of events and their inexplicable nature — cpu, mem and i/o were nowhere near capacity. As well as concerns on how well (if at all) we would scale, given our outage, were a big wake up call to rethink our existing infrastructure.

Our Tech stack at the time

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 30th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

 

• 6,000: new viri spotted by AI; 300,000: Uber requests per second; 10TB & 600 years: new next-gen optical disk; 32,000: sites running Coinhive’s JavaScript miner code; $1 billion: Uber loss per quarter; 3.5%: global NAND flash output lost to power outage; 100TB: new SSD; 48TB: RAM on one server; 200 million: Telegram monthly active users; 2,000: days Curiosity Rover on Mars; 225: emerging trends; 4,425: SpaceX satellites approved; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @msuriar: Uber's worst outage ever: - Master log Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Educative, Clover, Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Scalyr, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

• Clover is looking for seasoned software engineers to help us solve the most complicated problem in the world: healthcare. We're using sophisticated data analytics, custom software, and machine learning to coordinate care and build a clearer model of our member's health and risk factors. We are on a mission to help seniors and low-income members live healthier while keeping costs down. This is an opportunity for those who want to be at the intersection of health and technology and thrive in a collaborative environment as well as the freedom of self-direction. If you're interested, please directly apply here!


• Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.


• Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 16th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Hermetic symbolism was an early kind of programming. Symbols explode into layers of other symbols, like a programming language, only the instruction set is the mind.

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

• ~30: AWS services used by iRobot; 450,000: Shopify S3 operations per second; $240: yearly value of your data; ~day: time to load a terabyte from Postgres into BigQuery; 5 million: viewers for top Amazon Prime shows; 130,000: Airbusians move from Microsoft Office to Google Suite; trillion: rows per second processed by MemSQL; 38 million: Apple Music paid members; 4 million: Microsoft git commits for a Windows release; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Stephen Hawking: Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.
  • Roger Penrose: Despite [Stephen Hawking] terrible physical circumstance, he almost always remained positive about life. He Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Clover, Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Scalyr, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

• Clover is looking for seasoned software engineers to help us solve the most complicated problem in the world: healthcare. We're using sophisticated data analytics, custom software, and machine learning to coordinate care and build a clearer model of our member's health and risk factors. We are on a mission to help seniors and low-income members live healthier while keeping costs down. This is an opportunity for those who want to be at the intersection of health and technology and thrive in a collaborative environment as well as the freedom of self-direction. If you're interested, please directly apply here!


• Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.


• Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 9th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 72 bits: Google's new quantum computer; 50,000: sites infected with cryptocurrency mining malware; $40 billion: purchases via talking tubes by 2022; $12,000: value of 1 million YouTube views a month; $15 billion: Netflix 2018 revenue; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @ValaAfshar: Jeff Bezos, CEO @amazon: I very frequently get the question: "what's going to change in he next 10 years?" I almost never get the question: "what's not going to change in the next 10 years?" I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two.
  • @svscarpino: Sharing and consuming fake news is highly concentrated. Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 2nd, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

Algorithms described like IKEA instructions. Can anyone assemble these? (Algorithms and data structures)

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And please consider recommending my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to whole entire world. 

 

• $75 million: Dropbox saved moving out of S3; 159 million: Spotify monthly active users; 80 million: more records added to Have I Been Pwned; 9%: universe expanding faster than predicted; $2,222,279: Warren Buffett won his long bet against hedge fund mangers; 60,000: Mayan houses found in Guatemala using LiDAR; $14.2 billion: PaaS revenue; ~180 million: years until first sun after the big whatever it was; $1,599: cost of stolen Extended Validation (EV) certificate; 8,000X: query speedup using GPU database; 2.4 million: Google requests to be forgotten; 6 minutes: time to IoT device attack on the internet; 103 million: tweets sent about the Olympics; 320,000: increase in Chloe Kim's twitter followers; 150 kg: acorns stored by woodpeckers in a telecom antenna; 0.14ms: Fsync performance on Intel PC-3700; Q: earliest known article on Wikipedia; 800Gbps+: memcached reflection/amplification attacks; Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Clover, Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Scalyr, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

• Clover is looking for seasoned software engineers to help us solve the most complicated problem in the world: healthcare. We're using sophisticated data analytics, custom software, and machine learning to coordinate care and build a clearer model of our member's health and risk factors. We are on a mission to help seniors and low-income members live healthier while keeping costs down. This is an opportunity for those who want to be at the intersection of health and technology and thrive in a collaborative environment as well as the freedom of self-direction. If you're interested, please directly apply here!


• Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.


• Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 23rd, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

What does a bubble look like before it bursts? The image shows a brief period of stability before succumbing to molecular forces that pinch the film together and cause the bubble to burst.  (Mr Li Shen - Imperial College London)

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

 

• 20 million: daily DuckDuckGo searches, 55% growth; 38.3 billion: WeChat messages sent per day; 500 million: database of pwned passwords to check against; 38%: China's consumption of world IC production; 92%: Fortune 500 traffic is from bots; $2: Blue Pill: A 72MHz 32-Bit Computer; 5,000: Martian days of operation for the Opportunity Rover; 30.72 terabytes: Samsung SSD; 185%: Golden State Warriors drive up ticket prices; $1.3 billion: loss that happens when Kylie Jenner tweets about your new UI; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @slava_pestov: A senior programmer is merely a junior Continue reading

How fast can a bird search a tree?

I was wondering if you could help me figure something out: what is the algorithmic complexity of a bird searching a tree for food?

Over the years I've had the pleasure of watching a lot of cute little birds feed in our oak trees. I've noticed they have a search pattern.

A bird will hop from branch to branch looking for insects. They don't hop on a branch and explore every square inch of it, so it's not an exhaustive search. They'll take a couple hops, peck at a branch a few times, and hop to a nearby branch. Birds also search the underside of branches, so the whole surface area of a tree is game. 

I've often marveled in wonder at how efficient this whole process is. They scour huge trees in no time. Then they'll move on to the next tree and repeat the process until they fly away to a completely different area.

My dog when searching for a ball seems to follow a similar Lévy flight sort of pattern. Search a local area by bouncing around for bit and then take a bee-line for a completely different area and repeat the process. 

Often Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 16th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• 63.2%: Americans with one and only one cable provider; $1.5 billion: spend on chip startups last year; $7.5 billion: Uber sales; $4.5 billion: Uber loss; 180 TFLOPS: computation accessible via the TensorFlow programming model from a Google Cloud VM; 10x: computational capabilities of the human brain than previously thought; 10 million: went live on Facebook sharing 47% more Live videos than the previous year; 1.7 million: HQ players during Superbowl; 1/400: power to perform public-key encryption; 8 bit: custom CPU build from scratch; $8,500: daily take from mining Monero with your botnet; 10,000: datasets shared on Kaggle; 41%: NVIDIA revenue growth; 14x: real world 4G LTE vs. 5G Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Scalyr, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

• Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.


• Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation of smart contracts, self-executing cryptographic agreements among counterparties. To do so, we're using a lot of techniques in blockchain technology, as well as those from traditional distributed systems, programming language design and cryptography. We are hiring for a number of roles, from entry-level to expert, including Haskell Backend Engineer, Database Engineer, Product Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Programming Language Engineer and SecOps Engineer. To find out more, just e-mail us your resume. 


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown DynamoDB. Companies often select a database that seems to Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 9th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• 7.2 terabytes: data used during Super Bowl;  $220 million: projected podcast revenue this year; $127 billion: total addressable value of drone-powered solutions in all applicable industries; 100 billion billion billion: living microbial cells underlying all the worlds oceans, 200x biomass of humans; 110 billion: total market for memory; 1,000: drones North Korea may have, possibly with chemical or biological weapons, ready to attack South Korea; $123 billion: US apparel market; 100 million: iOS devices sold in Q4; $3: earnings in 24 hours from conscripting 5,000 Android devices into a mining botnet; 46%: cloud market growth in Q4; 104%: YoY Alibaba cloud growth; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • John Perry Barlow: The Internet is the Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 2nd, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• 2 billion: Siri requests per week; 1 trillion: semiconductor unit shipments, 9.1% compound annual growth rate over a 40 year span; 150 million: IPv4 addresses recirculated over 7 years; $100 Billion:  value lost in cryptocurrency markets in 24 hours; $1: microcontroller; 16 Gb/s: GDDR6 SGRAM; 1/3: IPv4 addresses registered to US entities; eight minutes and thirty-five seconds: breath-hold record; $32.32 billion: Google revenue, up 24%; 1.3 billion: active Apple devices, up 30% in 2 years; 500 petabytes: Backblaze; 6th or 7th: HTTP version of hypertex on the internet; $2.1 billion: Amazon's Q4 2017 operating income, up 69%; 45%: jump in Amazon cloud revenue; 9%: global smartphone market drop; 3 billion: photos uploaded to Google on New Year's eve; Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

• Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.


• Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation of smart contracts, self-executing cryptographic agreements among counterparties. To do so, we're using a lot of techniques in blockchain technology, as well as those from traditional distributed systems, programming language design and cryptography. We are hiring for a number of roles, from entry-level to expert, including Haskell Backend Engineer, Database Engineer, Product Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Programming Language Engineer and SecOps Engineer. To find out more, just e-mail us your resume. 


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• Webinar: January 23, 11am GMT & again at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 26th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• $172 billion: amount Hackers stole in 2017; $100B: Netflix's value; 400G: ethernet; 2005: resurrection of a NASA satellite; 800: kilograms of oil equivalent needed per capita per year;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Edgar D. Mitchell: You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
  • Laura Gilmore: It wasn’t by accident that I ended up Continue reading

How Apple Fumbled the Voice First Future

Xerox fumbled the future when it invented and then ignored the personal computer. With the Macintosh, Apple created the personal computer the Xerox Alto might have been.

Apple is also fumbling the future—the Voice First future. Voice First simply means our primary mode of interacting with computers in the future will be with our voice. When Apple bought Siri it had a solid 5 year lead in voice control. Now Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant have not only caught Siri, but they’ve surpassed her.

The story of how Apple is fumbling the Voice First future is passionately told by Brian Roemmele in a great interview with Rene Ritchie in his Vector podcast Why Siri needs to be a platform.

Brian covers a lot of ground in the interview, but there are a few main themes: Voice First is the Future; Apple Fumbled Voice First; Engineering First Cultures Suck at Product; Apple Needs to Lose the iPhone Tax and Build Siri as a Platform.

In each section I paraphrase quotes Brian made in the interview to explain the theme. I think you'll find it fun and provocative. Brian is an interesting guy.

Voice First is the Future

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 19th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• $268,895,000,000: Apple's cash and investments; 60%: growth in Amazon's ad revenue; ~80%: movie tickets sold in China are sold through mobile apps; £27,000: King Edward's yearly income; 3: new Google undersea cables; 7,500: Google edge caching nodes; 50,000x: microprocessor performance compared to a 1978 mini-computer at 0.25% of the cost; $15bn: spending on hosting services; 0.2 cycles per byte: ridiculously fast base64 encoding and decoding; $165B+: 2018 games software/hardware spending; 328 feet: air purification tower in China; 42 million: proteins molecules in a yeast cell;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Richard Jones: For now, what we can say is that the age of exponential growth of computer power is over. It gave us an extraordinary 40 years, but in our world all exponentials come to an end, and we’re now firmly Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL, Zohocorp

Who's Hiring? 

• Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.


• Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation of smart contracts, self-executing cryptographic agreements among counterparties. To do so, we're using a lot of techniques in blockchain technology, as well as those from traditional distributed systems, programming language design and cryptography. We are hiring for a number of roles, from entry-level to expert, including Haskell Backend Engineer, Database Engineer, Product Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Programming Language Engineer and SecOps Engineer. To find out more, just e-mail us your resume. 


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• Webinar: January 23, 11am GMT & again at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. Continue reading