Software Architecture Newsletter #1

In this edition - ChatGPT 4o in Azure, Kafka architecture, next steps for AI and more.

If you found something interesting that you think should be included here, you're interested in a sponsorship, or you have something to say about the content of this newsletter - drop me a mail at [email protected]

Architecture                                     

Embracing Shift-left to Improve Delivery - Shift-left is a term in the software world indicating we're going to do something earlier in the process (in timelines, left comes before right). By shifting-left something, we're going to do it earlier than usual.
And this holds true also for deployment. True, deploying our solution is almost at the rightmost corner of our timeline, but being aware of it early in the process will make it much easier when time has come to actually deploy it.
In this article, we learn about shifting-left the deployment, and making sure it will be easier and simpler to carry out.

Apache Kafka Architecture 101 - Kafka is probably the most popular data streaming engine in use today, and many cloud services even offer Kafka-compatible fully managed service (such as Event Hubs in Azure).
But how it actually works? What are its components, and how the interact with each other to create such a great platform?
This Hackernoon article will help you figure it out.

Architectural Trade-Offs  - Every software architect knows that software architecture is the art of trade-offs. Yes, we want our systems to be perfect, highly-performant, with 99.999%, but also cost effective. That cannot come together, and, frankly, can be quite frustrating to the architect.
This InfoQ article discusses this tradeoff, and suggest ways to deal with it.

Cloud  

Azure OpenAI Service adds ChatGPT 4o in Preview  - ChatGPT 4o took the AI world by storm. It introduced a much more advanced engine, and its mutlimodal capabilities, spanning text, images and audio, just made it more useful.
And now Microsoft is announcing that ChatGPT 4o is added to the OpenAI Service in Azure, allowing API access to OpenAI services. Using this service you can now query ChatGPT 4o and enjoy its advanced capabilities while taking advantage of the robustness and security of Azure.
Read the full announcement here.

Understanding AWS Karpenter - AWS karpenter is a great autoscaling solution for EKS - Elastic Kubernetes Service, the fully managed Kubernetes service provided by AWS.
Karpenter complements EKS by providing application-aware scaling solution that looks at multiple parameters when deciding on scaling the cluster. Easy to use and robust, it's definitely a service that should be in your tool belt if you're using EKS.
Read more about Karpenter here.

Google Announce Customizable Dashboard for Google Cloud - Dashboards are a great way to aggregate data from your cloud environment and display it on a single pane of glass. Many monitoring solutions build on dashboards for providing great user experience, and all major cloud providers support it.
And now Google is announcing that its public cloud, GCP, supports customizable dashboards. With the new capability you can customize the data displayed in the dashboard and modify it according to your monitoring needs.
Read the full announcement here.
AI   
Sam Altman shared next steps for AI - Sam Altman is probably the most famous person in the AI world, and some consider him as "the face of GenAI". And therefore it's not surprising that his appearance at the Build conference of Microsoft generated a lot of interest.
In this speech Mr. Altman shared his point of view of the future of GenAI in general and specifically OpenAI and provided a rare opportunity to hear, from the source, where the hottest trend in the industry is going.
Read about it here.

Ideas         

The Entrepreneur's Antifragile Arsenal - It's not easy to be an entrepreneur. Most startups fail, some of them quite fast, and you, the entrepreneur, need to be able to rise from the ashes and start again.
One of the interesting methods for achieving this resiliency is the Antifragile Arsenal, which is a set of tools that, when used wisely, can help you not just to survive failures, but to thrive on them.
Read more about it here.

Dev & DevOps     

Static vs Dynamic IP addresses  - We all know what an IP address is, but what is the difference between static and dynamic IP address? It turns out this difference is quite important these days, especially for those of us working with the cloud.
Read about it here.

General Availability of .NET Aspire  - .NET Aspire is a technology stack that streamlines development of .NET cloud native services. It supports various cloud services and configures elements such as monitoring, security and more.
And now. after a few months in preview, .NET Aspire has reached its general availability phase and is ready for prime time.
Read the full announcement here. 

So, that was the 1st edition of the Software Architecture Newsletter.
I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to suggest and comment on it, simply by replying to this mail.
Also, if you created a unique content you think can be included here - drop me a note!

Looking forward for your feedback!

Cheers,
Jero