InfoQ - Development - 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: The AI Productivity Paradox in Test Automation: Moving Beyond Structural Validation to Perception and Intent

Amanul Chowdhury, Vinay Gummadavelli — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The AI productivity paradox states that AI scales whatever abstraction it is built on. If that abstraction is structurally brittle, it scales structural brittleness. This article shows how, to build a future of reliable, AI-driven test automation, we must stop scaling DOM-centric abstractions and build a new testing paradigm grounded in perception and intent.

By Amanul Chowdhury, Vinay Gummadavelli

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

Article: Architecting Cloud-Native Kafka: from Tiered Storage towards a Diskless Future

Viquar Khan — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This article explores Kafka's transition toward a cloud-native architecture, examining how tiered storage, FinOps telemetry, elastic consumer scaling, virtual clusters, and Share Groups reshape the operational and economic model of event streaming platforms. It also analyzes emerging diskless-storage proposals and their architectural trade-offs.

By Viquar Khan

Article: The Schema Proliferation Problem in Kafka and Flink Pipelines: How to Solve It

Spoorthi Basu — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Schema proliferation builds slowly and gets expensive fast. One schema per event type feels right until there are ten tables, union queries spanning all of them, and a single field rename touching every schema. Discriminator-based schema consolidation collapses that to two tables, turning multi-table unions into a single query, while new variants are additive and don't break existing consumers.

By Spoorthi Basu