Weekly Tech Notes #17: Architecture Refresher

🎬 In this talk, Gregor Hohpe describes the role of the architect and the many trade-offs that come with it. An architect should be able to talk to both business and technical people, thus being able to sketch a system to see its real essence, zooming in and out to focus on more or fewer details and seeing shades of grey of different solutions.

📚 This week is all about a refresher on architecture components and terminology. There’s also an interesting article where the author discusses the purpose of architecture in general.

• The Purpose of (Software) Architecture – The author defines three costs a system requires (Build, Change and Ownership) and discusses the architecture path to go down depending on the cost you want to minimize.
• What Is an API Gateway? – Definition and capabilities of an API Gateway.
• What is a content delivery network (CDN)? – What is a CDN and what are the benefits of using one?
• What is an Internet exchange point? – Thanks to the previous article, I learned about Internet Exchange Points (IXP) and how they work.
• Rate Limiting – We already touched on rate limiting in a previous note, but this article goes more in-depth on the topic.
• What’s the Difference Between Throughput and Latency? – Two important metrics to know and to use when designing a system.
• What is Load Balancing? – Another overview of how load balancing works and the possible algorithms available. Remember to check a previous note on this topic.