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Explore articles, books, news, videos, and insights on software architecture, people management, and leadership. Author: @nelia_loginova
Elastic: Back to Open Source?
This week, I came across the surprising news that Elastic has decided to return Elasticsearch and Kibana to open source.
Let me remind you that 3 years ago Elastic changed their license from Apache 2.0 to semi-proprietary Server Side Public License. Teams who actively used ELK stack remember that. In response, AWS forked the latest open Elasticsearch and Kibana versions, creating OpenSearch project.
In a year, OpenSearch had 100 million downloads and gathered 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors over the globe. It even launched its own OpenSearch Conference in 2023. The fork became extremely popular and successful.
Now, Elastic announced AGPLv3 license for Elasticsearch and Kibana products. Maybe it relates to the decrease of the interest in Elasticsearch as a product. There is also a good article on TheNewStack that makes an attempt to explain and understand the reasons of that unexpected decision, which I recommend to read if you're interested in the topic.
The main question is whether teams already using OpenSearch will switch back to Elasticsearch. I don't think so. That's easy to change the license, but it's harder to return community trust.
#news #technologies
Book cover and some illustrations from the book that show the importance and simplicity of the drawing
#booknook #softskills #presentationskills
In one of the previous blog posts we broke down the Saga pattern and I recommended not to use it because of high complexity. However, it's really interesting to explore successful implementations of the pattern. Let’s take a look at how HALO scaled to 11.6 million users using the Saga design pattern.
HALO is a very popular shooting game that was initially introduced in 1999. At that time the game was based on a single SQL database to store the entire game data. Their growth was explosive, and single database became not enough soon.
So they set up a NoSQL database and partitioned it. Data for each player was kept in a dedicated database partition. It resolves scaling limitations, but brought new issues:
- Data writes are not atomic anymore
- Partitions may have non-consistent information
It means that players can have different game data that significantly impacts game experience.
So HALO team decided to set up Saga:
✏️ Each partition is changed within a local transaction only
✏️ Orchestrator manages update within all database partitions
✏️State of each local transaction is stored in durable distributed log that allows:
- Track if a sub-transaction failed
- Find compensating transactions that must be executed
- Track the state of compensating transactions
- Recover from failures
✏️The log is stored outside Orchestrator that makes it stateless
✏️ Orchestrator interacts with the log to identify local transaction or compensating actions to execute
The introduced technical solution enables further HALO usage growth, which still remains a popular game series for Xbox with millions of unique users.
#architecture #systemdesign #usecase
Draw to Win
Did you know that 2/3 of our brain activity is occupied by processing visual information? Most of the information about the world is received from our eyes. Visualization is the most powerful way to communicate. So what? We as a leaders can use it to educate and persuade people, to share our vision and sell our ideas.
But how to do that in practice? That's what the Dan Roam book Draw to Win: a Crash Course on How Lead, Sell, and Innovate with Your Visual Mind is about.
Why drawing is important:
- Drawing is the oldest 'technology' in the world
- 90% of all information is visual
- Visualization attracts attention and improves clarity in communications
- Visual information is memorable
Knowing that, we can significantly enhance our presentation skills. No special knowledge is required to start drawing: we can easily draw lines, arrows, shapes and smiles. That's all you need to start drawing to explain or sell your ideas. The accuracy of result pictures is not important.
The author explains that our brain processes visual information to answer the following questions: who? what? how many? when? where? and why?
Organize your ideas into a visual story that provides that answers and you will need only 6 pictures or slides to explain everything. The book even includes an example of how to explain a salary increase to a manager using this technique, but I won’t spoil it—better to check out the original for the full story 😉!
Additionally the book contains practical tips to get started with drawing and use it to improve creative thinking. One that I really like: if you don't know what to draw, start with the circle, name it, continue adding circles until your idea takes shape.
To sum up, visualization is a powerful tool that can be used to manage, educate, sell, share, collaborate and innovate. I really enjoy the book, it's full of interesting facts and practical advice. There are more books by the same author on this topic, and I’ll definitely add them to my reading list!
#booknook #softskills #presentationskills