InfoQ - Architecture & Design - News

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

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

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

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

GitHub Slashes Agent Workflow Token Spend up to 62% with Daily Audits and MCP Pruning

Mark Silvester — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:30:00 GMT

GitHub reports cutting token costs in agentic CI workflows by up to 62% by pruning unused MCP tools, swapping some MCP calls for gh CLI, and running daily “auditor” and “optimizer” agents. A token-usage.jsonl artefact and an Effective Tokens metric help track spend across models and spot regressions.

By Mark Silvester

Microsoft Announces Azure Linux 4.0, Its First General-Purpose Server Linux Distribution

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:49:00 GMT

Microsoft announced Azure Linux 4.0 and Azure Container Linux at Open Source Summit. Azure Linux 4.0 is a Fedora-based general-purpose server distribution for Azure VMs, the first time Microsoft has offered a supported Linux beyond container hosting. Azure Container Linux is an immutable container-optimized host built on Flatcar.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

How LinkedIn Identified a Kernel Lock Contention Issue Causing Recurring System Freezes

Sergio De Simone — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:00:00 GMT

When LinkedIn engineers encountered short-lived, recurring outages where the database powering their user feed became unavailable and then recovered without leaving helpful traces, they had to devise a novel approach to uncover the root cause using off-CPU profiling with eBPF.

By Sergio De Simone

Azure Logic Apps Adds Sandboxed Code Interpreters to Agent Workflows

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:45:00 GMT

Microsoft added sandboxed code interpreters to Azure Logic Apps, enabling agents within integration workflows to generate and execute Python, JavaScript, C#, and PowerShell in Hyper-V isolated sessions. Architects get full control over model selection per workflow. The capability positions Logic Apps as an agent platform for integration alongside Foundry and Copilot Studio.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers