InfoQ - Architecture & Design - Articles

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

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

Article: Stragglers, Not Failures: How Adaptive Hedged Requests Reduce p99 Latency by 74 Percent

Prathamesh Bhope — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

In fan-out microservice architectures, slow-but-completing requests accumulate across services and drive p99 latency far higher than per-service metrics suggest. This article presents an adaptive hedging mechanism that uses DDSketch for real-time quantile estimation, windowed rotation to handle distribution drift, and a token-bucket budget to prevent load amplification.

By Prathamesh Bhope