Distributed tracing is the ability to follow a request through a software system from beginning to end. While that may sound trivial, a single request can easily spawn multiple child requests to different microservices with modern distributed architectures. These, in turn, trigger further sub-requests, resulting in a complex web of transactions to service a single originating request.

The world of computer games is vast, ranging from single-player agility games and logic puzzles with simple 2D animations to the stunning graphics in 3D rendered massive multiplayer online role-playing games like the Lost Ark. Wanting to design and build your own games is a common motivator for learning to code while building a portfolio of work is an essential step for breaking into the gaming industry.

Development teams build modern applications using microservice architectures. Individual services are built and maintained by separate teams, and then these services are combined using container-based orchestrators to comprise a complete product offering. Microservices are a standard development method because they allow teams to iterate releases, providing ongoing new customer-facing features and bug fixes without needing to redeploy an entire platform or app.

Monitoring IT infrastructure and services has always been an essential IT prerequisite. However, your IT monitoring system and security measures need to upgrade with an exponential increase in the number of remote users post-pandemic. For instance, consider this: At the end of a work day, you are notified that one of your critical services has gone down. But the problem is that five teams support different processes of that service.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a silo as “a part of a company, organization, or system that does not communicate with, understand, or work well with other parts.” Siloing can exist at various organizational levels: siloed departments, siloed teams within a department, and even siloed engineers within a team. In any industry, siloing can cause issues with alignment, communications, and overall delivery, but in fintech, there are additional risks.

When building alerts, engineers aim to create accurate, timely, and actionable alerts. In pursuit of this goal, many engineers will leverage PromQL throughout their careers. PromQL is the query language used by Prometheus and Alert Manager to query metrics and define alerting rules. While PromQL works very well for simple use cases, as infrastructure scales, architectural patterns grow more complex, engineering practices accelerate, and alerting use cases become more multivariate.

In the observability toolchain, all of our efforts go into data storage and analysis, and the usability of our system becomes a second-class citizen. Autocomplete is a crucial usability feature that significantly improves the developer experience. It is ubiquitous amongst engineering tools from IDEs to CLIs. Autocomplete has long been a feature of many observability tools, but they all miss a crucial detail – optimizing for developer productivity.

Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.

Akka’s license change has surprised many of us, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Lightbend recently announced that Akka will be transitioning from an “Open Source” license to a “Source available” license called BSL 1.1. Let’s unpack this to understand what it all means.

Stateful, commonly monolithic, and absolutely fundamental to system design, the quality of your database administration and operation is a key determinant of your overall success. Databases are the cornerstone of modern architecture, requiring constant effort, investigation, and iteration to get the most out of a database. This makes it all the more terrifying when an outage occurs.