AI workloads challenge the cattle model
AI workloads break the “cattle” approach to infrastructure management. Generic abstractions that worked for backend services are too limited, and treating six-figure hardware as disposable, undifferentiated cattle seems unacceptable.
PoC is a framework of perverse incentives
Was it ever possible to build a Proof of Concept that didn’t end up rushed into production as a nest of bugs, instability, and technical debt, regardless of any advance warning from engineering that it will be “just a PoC”? Can we be at ease, now that anyone with a laptop has a PoC machine gun?
AI-generated code will choke delivery pipelines
Everyone is focused on the impact of AI on the production of code. But code isn’t just produced, it has to be consumed: built, packaged, tested, distributed, deployed, operated. Without a realistic plan to scale delivery pipelines, we’re asking for trouble.
Why aren't we all serverless yet?
The median product engineer should reason about applications as composites of high-level, functional Lego blocks where technical low-level details are
Alert on symptoms, not causes
When you are bringing a new system to production you know that you ought to define SLIs, set up instrumentation,
How about we forget the concept of test types?
I have found that the concept of test types (unit, integration, and so on) does more harm than good. People
How organisations cripple engineering teams with good intentions
I believe that engineers are at their best when they complement strong technical expertise with skills from other disciplines such
Migrating an Eureka-based microservice fleet to Kubernetes
I have written about how a lot of the value in the our internal Platform at Adevinta goes in the glue between systems. This post gives a deep dive into some of the technical problems we find as we transition teams into our Kubernetes-based PaaS, and what kind of glue helps us overcome it.
How to build a PaaS for 1500 engineers
This article is based on a presentation I gave as part of AdevintaTalks in Barcelona on November 2019, explaining the strategic principles we used to build an internal platform to support all the online marketplaces in the group (including some of the biggest in Europe and South America).