InfoQ - Architecture & Design

Cloudflare Identifies Query Planning Bottleneck in ClickHouse

Renato Losio — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:55:00 GMT

Cloudflare recently described how a slowdown in its billing pipeline was traced to contention inside the query planning stage of ClickHouse. The team profiled the bottleneck and patched ClickHouse to replace an exclusive lock with a shared lock, drop the per-query copy of the parts list, and improve part filtering.

By Renato Losio

How OpenAI Built a Secure Windows Sandbox for Codex Agents

Leela Kumili — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:37:00 GMT

OpenAI details Codex Windows sandbox architecture, showing how SIDs, ACLs, restricted tokens, and dedicated sandbox accounts enable safe execution of autonomous coding tasks. The design balances isolation with real developer workflows and shows how OS security primitives must be composed for AI agents on local development environments.

By Leela Kumili

30+ Updates per Second per Account: Uber Scales Ledger Processing with Batching

Leela Kumili — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:02:00 GMT

Uber introduced a high-throughput financial ledger processing system designed to handle hot account write contention at scale. Using 250ms batching, Redis coordination, and optimistic atomic updates, the system supports 30+ updates per second per account while preserving consistency and auditability, reducing multi-hour processing pipelines to minutes in its distributed accounting infrastructure.

By Leela Kumili

Presentation: Architecting a Centralized Platform for Data Deletion at Netflix

Vidhya Arvind, Shawn Liu — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:26:00 GMT

The speakers discuss the architectural challenges of executing safe data deletion across distributed datastores. Balancing durability, availability & correctness, they explain how to orchestrate multi-system deletion propagation without impacting live traffic. They share lessons on controlling tombstone accumulation, building continuous audit loops, and gaining trust with a centralized platform.

By Vidhya Arvind, Shawn Liu

Article: Architectural Change Cases: A Practical Tool for Evolutionary Architectures

Pierre Pureur, Kurt Bittner — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Architectural change cases extend architecture decision record (ADR) thinking by evaluating how decisions may evolve over time. Change cases expose hidden assumptions and help teams estimate the reversibility and cost of change.

By Pierre Pureur, Kurt Bittner

AWS Replaces Fat-Tree Data Center Networks with Random Graph Theory, Cutting Routers by 69%

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:25:00 GMT

AWS disclosed that Resilient Network Graphs, a flat network architecture based on quasi-random graph theory, is now the default for most new data center builds. The design replaces fat-tree hierarchies with direct ToR-to-ToR mesh connections using passive optical ShuffleBoxes, cutting routers by 69%, boosting throughput by 33%, and reducing network power consumption by 40%.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Inside Google’s System for Coordinated A/B Testing across its Global Service Fleet

Leela Kumili — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:54:00 GMT

Google has shared details of its fleet wide large scale A/B experimentation system designed to standardize experiment assignment, exposure logging, and configuration propagation across distributed services. The approach enables consistent measurement across products, reduces experiment conflicts, and improves reliability of data driven decision making at scale.

By Leela Kumili

Article: Two Misconfigurations That Caused Spark OOM Failures on Kubernetes

Pranav Bhasker — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

After migrating Spark pipelines to Azure Kubernetes Service, two infrastructure settings interacted destructively: spark.kubernetes.local.dirs.tmpfs=true backed shuffle spill with RAM instead of disk, and a hard podAffinity rule forced all executors onto one node. Together, they caused repeated OOM kills invisible to standard diagnostics.

By Pranav Bhasker

Java News Roundup: OpenJDK JEPs, Hazelcast, Quarkus, Hibernate, Koog, JHipster, Introducing Endive

Michael Redlich — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:30:00 GMT

This week's Java roundup for May 25th, 2026, features news highlighting: lifecycle changes with two of the JEPs that were targeted for JDK 27; the GA release of Koog 1.0; point releases of Hazelcast, Quarkus, Hibernate and JHipster; the eighth milestone release of Spring AI 2.0; and introducing Endive, a JVM-native WebAssembly (Wasm) runtime.

By Michael Redlich

Shopify Reports 15X Faster Graphql Execution with Breadth First Engine

Leela Kumili — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:25:00 GMT

Shopify introduced GraphQL Cardinal, a new execution engine replacing depth-first traversal with breadth-first execution. The redesign improves large-scale GraphQL performance with up to 15x faster field execution, 6x lower GC overhead, and +4s P50 latency gains. It focuses on execution-layer efficiency and batched resolver processing for high-cardinality commerce queries.

By Leela Kumili

Presentation: Theme Systems at Scale: How To Build Highly Customizable Software

Guilherme Carreiro — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:30:00 GMT

Shopify Staff Engineer Guilherme Carreiro discusses building and scaling highly customizable platforms. Using Shopify’s Liquid theme system as a case study, he explains how to balance extreme design flexibility with low-latency performance under massive traffic. He shares insights on implementing secure domain-specific languages, native code extensions, and resilient developer tooling.

By Guilherme Carreiro

Podcast: Requirements Analysis for Architects: A Conversation with Sonya Natanzon

Sonya Natanzon — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Michael Stiefel spoke to Sonya Natanzon, about the intersection of technical and social aspects of software architecture. Understanding the business and how a company operates is more important than the specific technologies used. Effective requirements analysis requires focusing on problems to be solved that describe good and bad outcomes, rather than statements of need or solution statements.

By Sonya Natanzon

A Trailing Slash Bypassed AWS API Gateway Authorization

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:55:00 GMT

A security researcher found that adding a trailing slash to AWS HTTP API paths bypassed Lambda authorizer authentication entirely, enabling unauthenticated wire transfers at a fintech. The root cause is a path normalization mismatch between HTTP API's greedy route matching and its authorization layer. The same vulnerability class appeared in gRPC-Go via CVE-2026-33186.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Google Cloud Suspends Railway's Production Account, Causing Eight-Hour Platform-Wide Outage

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:03:00 GMT

Google Cloud's automated systems suspended Railway's production account without notice, triggering an eight-hour platform-wide outage affecting 3 million users. The cascade took down workloads across all providers including AWS and bare metal because Railway's control plane was hosted on GCP. Railway is demoting GCP to backup-only status.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

How Meta Rebuilt Data Ingestion for Petabyte-Scale Reliability

Renato Losio — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:01:00 GMT

The engineering team at Meta recently outlined how the company migrated a data ingestion platform that transfers several petabytes of MySQL social graph data daily to improve reliability and operational efficiency. The team used techniques like reverse shadowing and continuous checksum monitoring to ensure zero downtime during the transition.

By Renato Losio