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✨LEAP 2024: Elevate your API observability skills
✨LEAP 2024: Elevate your API observability skills
Hi Md Abul,
Budha here! With just one week remaining until the LEAP 2024 API observability conference, I'm delighted to announce the official agenda is now live, including all the sessions you need to redefine what you know about API observability.
Check out the full schedule and sign up for your free spot here:
At the heart of LEAP lies a bold mission: to shake up the API landscape like never before. How? By shining a spotlight on observability which can help platform teams create more efficient API platforms, assist developers in troubleshooting and improving their APIs, and enable product managers to extract more value from their API products.
So, what can you expect on the day? Oh, just a little bit of API observability magic sprinkled here and there, no big deal:
🌟 Keynote address
💡 Expert panel
🛠️ Interactive workshops
📜 API observability certification
👣 Distinct decision-makers and implementers tracksThe important bits:
Thurs
29
FebTime
9am - 4pm
ETVirtual
Zoom
eventThis is THE day to elevate your API observability skills from basic to expert level!
See you at LEAP 2024!
Budha and team
Tyk, 87a Worship Street, London, City of London EC2A 2BE, United Kingdom, +44 (0)20 3409 1911
by "Budhaditya Bhattacharya" <communities@tyk.io> - 04:17 - 23 Feb 2024 -
What technologies are fueling mobility’s future?
On Point
Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
— Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Only McKinsey" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 01:48 - 23 Feb 2024 -
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, healthcare in Latin America, new business building, and more: The Daily Read weekender
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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
Relax and recharge this weekend with some of the week’s highlights on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, new business building for CEOs, healthcare in Latin America, and more.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
chart of the day
Ready to unwind?
—Edited by Joyce Yoo, editor, New York
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by "McKinsey Daily Read" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 10:08 - 22 Feb 2024 -
Tire Pressure Monitoring System - Keep Your Fleet Safe on the Road.
Tire Pressure Monitoring System - Keep Your Fleet Safe on the Road.
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The Unmatched Advantages of Using TPMS
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by "Sunny Thakur" <sunny.thakur@uffizio.com> - 07:00 - 22 Feb 2024 -
How to Design a Good API?
How to Design a Good API?
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We can find web services and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) everywhere, but many are painful to use. Have you ever connected a web service using its API and wondered, "What were they thinking?" We have, and connecting services via API can be confusing. Whether due to bad design, missing docs, constant changes, or bugs, using APIs is often a struggle.
But it doesn't have to be that way. We can create fantastic web APIs that people love using, and we'll enjoy making them too. So, what's the key to designing a good API? This issue shares the secrets, guiding us in creating a clean, well-documented API that is easy to use.
Get ready, and let’s understand how to design an API that people enjoy using.
The Importance of Good API Design
APIs are crucial assets for companies. Customers don't casually use APIs – they invest time and money in integrating, coding, and learning about them. However, relying so heavily on APIs comes with challenges. The cost of discontinuing an API's use can be substantial, showing the critical role APIs play in operations.
Well-designed public APIs have great potential to attract and retain users. However, poor API design can quickly cause problems - like floods of support calls from a dysfunctional API. This can turn a company's greatest digital assets into headaches.
This dual nature of APIs points to the importance of care and precision when designing them. The goal is to craft APIs that provide more benefits than drawbacks.
When we build products, we're usually thinking about regular people without much tech expertise. We create a friendly interface, getting input on what they want. But API development is different - we're making an interface for skilled programmers. They notice even minor issues and can be as critical as we would be.
Our perspective as API designers is a bit distinct from that of users. We focus on what an API should do or offer. Meanwhile, users care about easily getting what they need with the least effort. These differing viewpoints cause problems. The key is shifting our viewpoint to match that of the user. Seems obvious, but few APIs take this user-centric approach.
Characteristics of a Good API
A quality API has several characteristics that contribute to its effectiveness, usability, and long-term success:
Now that we've covered what makes a good API, let's move on to tips for designing one.
Requirements Gathering
The first vital step for designing a quality API is gathering requirements from users. Approach this process with skepticism. Users often suggest specific solutions rather than focus on their underlying needs.
Our job is to have users walk us through core use cases to uncover those fundamental needs, even when hidden at first glance. There may be better design ideas lurking beneath the initial “solutions” suggested.
Additionally, it’s exciting to envision very versatile APIs that address a wide variety of challenges. But we must stay laser-focused on users' actual requirements first.
Start the design process by drafting a high-level functional specification. Speed and flexibility are more important than comprehensive details at this early experimental stage.
Share the draft widely, both with target users and other stakeholders. Listen intently to feedback, as there will likely be valuable insights on how to shape a refined offering.
The key is not making too many assumptions early on. Requirements gathering sets the foundation - take time to get it right before moving on to formal API design.
One API, One Purpose
A key rule for designing excellent APIs is that each should focus squarely on solving one primary problem very well rather than trying to address too many diverse issues.
Creating a general “Swiss army knife” API attempting to cover many use cases often fails. The scope gets too scattered without a crisp, singular purpose tied to specific user needs. Trying to be everything for everyone results in shallow functionality.
Instead, limit the scope of each API we build. Ensure the purpose stays clear and focused. Align all capabilities directly to that goal of fulfilling a distinct user need. Anything peripheral should be removed.
For example, an API focused solely on address validation has a clear purpose. One centered exclusively on credit card transactions defines different but still narrow functionality.
Clarity and Consistency
Let’s explore some effective naming practices and standardized responses that contribute to an API's overall clarity and consistency.
Choosing intuitive names
When designing a good API, clarity starts with the names we choose for endpoints and resources. Adopting and applying naming conventions consistently allows developers to intuitively understand the API, like speaking a common language. For instance, using the RESTful convention for endpoints like "/users" to retrieve user information aligns with industry standards. This helps developers grasp the purpose of endpoints without excessive documentation.
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by "ByteByteGo" <bytebytego@substack.com> - 11:39 - 22 Feb 2024 -
How healthy is your company?
On Point
Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
•
Secret to success. What makes some companies succeed, while others don’t? According to McKinsey research, organizational health is the strongest predictor of value creation and a critical factor in sustained competitive advantage, McKinsey senior partner Arne Gast and colleagues note. In one evaluation of 1,500 companies in 100 countries, companies that had improved their organizational health realized 18% increases in their EBITDA after one year.
— Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Only McKinsey" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 01:20 - 22 Feb 2024 -
The best CEOs succeed at each stage of the CEO journey. Here’s how.
Intersection
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The best new CEOs are quick to treat their transitions into the role as an opportunity for renewal—both for themselves and the organizations they lead, say McKinsey’s Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra, and Kurt Strovink. Which span of time is considered most vital by leading early-tenure CEOs? To take the quiz and to explore other stages of the CEO journey, check out the latest edition of the Five Fifty.
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by "McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 06:45 - 21 Feb 2024 -
What consumers want from wellness offerings
Re:think
FRESH TAKES ON BIG IDEAS
ON THE FUTURE OF WELLNESS
The trends defining the wellness marketAnna Pione
Four years ago, investors and consumer brand executives often asked us to define what wellness meant to consumers, describe the size of the health and wellness market, and answer whether wellness was just another marketing buzzword that would fade away as consumers found themselves intrigued by something new. Then, COVID-19 helped accelerate growth in this space, as all things health and wellness were top of mind for global consumers with unresolved questions about how to keep themselves both mentally and physically healthy.
As the pandemic has moved into its endemic stage, the focus on wellness has remained. Our Future of Wellness research shows not only that the sector could offer significant growth potential to investors, businesses, and employers but also that it has demonstrable staying power.
Eighty-two percent of US consumers consider wellness a top or important priority in their everyday lives, which echoes our findings in China, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Wellness interests consumers not only across geographies (often with more similarities in their preferences than differences) but also across demographic and income groups. The market—which we consider to be made up of categories that address health, sleep, fitness, nutrition, appearance, and mindfulness—has grown to around $1.8 trillion globally, up from $1.5 trillion in 2021. We expect the US market to continue to grow between 5 and 10 percent annually.
Just because the opportunities in wellness are plentiful does not mean the space is easily conquered, however. New entrants and incumbents may underestimate the wellness space and consumer sophistication regarding it. Businesses and investors that understand consumer behavior trends on the horizon will be best positioned to find success in the wellness space.
Consumers’ expectations for products and services have grown, and their ability to sniff out false wellness claims has improved, too. Consumer trust is more important than ever in wellness; our Future of Wellness research indicates that doctors’ recommendations for wellness products and word of mouth influence consumer purchases more frequently than other sources, such as posts from social media influencers.“In the United States alone, we estimate that the wellness market has reached $480 billion, growing at 5 to 10 percent per year.”
Meanwhile, constant product and tech innovation makes it difficult to sustain a strong value proposition and growth over time. Consumers now demand more than the basic levels of personalization, but so far, personalization offerings have remained somewhat one-dimensional. Leaning into new technology, such as generative AI, could help deliver deeper levels of personalized insights on an array of biometric data. That could give companies a leg up in the market.
None of these consumer insights should be discouraging. Rather, it’s an opportunity to create truly valuable consumer offerings. Consumers know what they want, and companies can meet those needs. Plus, consumers are increasingly proactive in monitoring their health and open to new tech tools that help them do so. Our research indicates that consumers are willing to use telemedicine services, biometric devices, and at-home health-testing kits.
Consider sleep, a longtime focus for wellness brands—and an area where consumers say they have the most unmet needs. Perhaps because of the numerous factors that can affect getting a good night’s sleep (including diet, exercise, and caffeine), no one tech giant or emerging brand has been able to own the market. Through our research, we know that consumers are looking for science- and data-backed solutions to their wellness problems, so the company best able to use data to address as many sleep factors as possible will gain a competitive edge.
Other areas, such as women’s health, are woefully underserved, with consequential research and funding gaps that result in a lack of consumer choices. The products and services that are available in the women’s health space often focus on reproductive health. (Our research indicates that women spend more on menopause- and pregnancy-related products than on other reproductive-health products.) That said, the women’s health space can also look beyond reproductive health to include conditions that affect women disproportionately, such as headache disorders, autoimmune diseases, and depression.
Our findings should not inspire executives to overhaul a business at the expense of its core brand identity. Instead, consumer leaders should be asking questions such as, “What is the innovation that we will bring to market next?” and, “How am I going to communicate that to consumers?”
The wellness market may be evolving, but one thing is certain: it’s here for the long haul.Share Anna Pione’s insights
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Anna Pione is a partner in McKinsey’s New York office.
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Delphine Zurkiya on generative AI in healthcare
Generative AI may change the way we interact with doctors, making our visits smarter and more efficient. For starters, making an appointment could get a lot easier.
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by "McKinsey Quarterly" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 02:13 - 21 Feb 2024 -
Author Talks: Andrew McAfee on how a ‘geek’ mindset can transform your business
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by "McKinsey & Company" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 12:24 - 21 Feb 2024 -
Exclusive invitation to Datadog Security Workshops
Hi there,
We are excited to invite you to an exclusive virtual Security workshop happening this March!
Workshop title: ‘Hacking Your Web Applications’: Datadog Security Workshop
Time & Date: Wednesday, 6 March @ 10am CET
In this workshop, you will get the opportunity to think like an attacker by performing various attacks against a web application. You will also see, as a defender, how you can leverage Datadog Application Security Management to identify which users are targeting your applications and which part of your code is impacted. By the end of this workshop, you will understand how to quickly detect and respond to threats by getting visibility into code-level exploits.
Vulnerabilities such as server-side request forgery (SSRF) and SQL injections still make it to the top of the OWASP Top 10. These vulnerabilities could allow a skilled attacker to gain access to unauthorized data and compromise your infrastructure.
Click here to sign up!
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by "The Datadog team" <fieldmarketing-emea@datadoghq.com> - 04:00 - 21 Feb 2024 -
How could cities improve health for all?
On Point
Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
•
Improving lives. Across the globe, people are living longer lives, but not necessarily healthier ones. By focusing on cities, where more than half of the world’s population lives, leaders could significantly improve human health, McKinsey senior partner Dr. Pooja Kumar and coauthors state. Offering interventions in areas such as healthy aging could add about five more years of higher-quality life per person living in urban areas—or up to 25 billion years across cities globally, the McKinsey Health Institute finds.
— Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Only McKinsey" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 01:33 - 21 Feb 2024 -
A Brief History of Airbnb’s Architecture
A Brief History of Airbnb’s Architecture
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Brian Chesky and Joe Gabbia moved to San Francisco in 2007. While they were looking to raise money for their business ideas, they needed to pay their rent.
Incidentally, there was a design conference coming to town at the time which meant lots of designers would be looking for accommodation. They came up with the idea of placing an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast.
In 2008, Nathan Blecharczyk joined Brian and Joe as CTO and Co-founder and they started a venture known as AirBed and Breakfast.
This was the birth of Airbnb.
Fast forward to today and Airbnb is operating in 200+ countries and 4 million hosts have welcomed over 1.5 billion guests across the globe.
As Airbnb grew by leaps and bounds, their software architecture has also evolved to keep pace with the changing times.
In this post, we will look at the evolution of Airbnb’s architecture over the years, the lessons they learned along the way and the tools they developed to support the vision.
The Initial Version
As with most startups, the first version of Airbnb’s web application was a monolithic application. It was built using Ruby-on-Rails and was internally known as the monorail.
Monolith in Airbnb’s view was a single tier unit that was responsible for both client and server-side functionality.
What does this mean in practice?
It means that the model, view and controller layers are combined together in a single repository.
The below diagram shows this approach.
There were several advantages to this monolithic approach:
Monoliths are easy to get started with which was the need of the hour for Airbnb initially
They are good for agile development
Complexity is manageable
The problems started as Airbnb’s engineering team grew rapidly. Airbnb was doubling year over year which meant more and more developers were adding new code as well as changing existing code within the monolithic application.
Over time, the code base started to get more tightly coupled and ownership of data became unclear. For example, it was difficult to determine which tables were owned by which application functionality. Any developer could make changes to any part of the application and it became difficult to track and coordinate the changes.
This situation led to multiple issues such as:
At any given time, hundreds of engineers were working on the monorail and therefore, deployments became slow and cumbersome.
Since Airbnb followed the philosophy of democratic deployments (where each engineer was responsible for testing and deploying their changes to prod), it became a huge mess of conflicting changes.
The engineering productivity went down and there was increased frustration among the developers.
To alleviate these pain points, Airbnb embarked on a migration journey to move from monolithic to a Service-Oriented Architecture or SOA.
SOA at Airbnb
How did Airbnb view Service-Oriented Architecture or SOA?
For them, SOA is a network of loosely coupled services where clients make their requests to some sort of gateway and the gateway routes these requests to multiple services and databases.
Adopting SOA allowed Airbnb to build and deploy services separately. Also, these services can be scaled independently and ownership becomes more clearly defined.
However, building services is one thing. It’s also extremely important to design these services with a disciplined approach.
Airbnb decided on some key principles to design these services with a disciplined approach:
Services should own both the reads and writes to their data. It’s quite similar to the database-per-service pattern where a particular database should be owned by one and only one service, making it easier to maintain data consistency.
Each service should address a specific concern. Airbnb wanted to make sure that the monolith does not decompose into another giant service that turned into another monolith over time. Also, they wanted to avoid the path of traditional granular microservices that are only good at one thing. Instead, Airbnb shifted towards building services focused on a specific business functionality. Think of it as a high-cohesion design.
Services should avoid duplicating functionality. Sharing parts of infrastructure or code was done by means of shared libraries and shared services, making them easier to maintain.
Data mutation should take place via standard events. For example, if the reservation service creates a new row, the availability service should learn about this reservation by means of an event so that it can mark the home’s availability as busy.
Each service must be built as if it was mission-critical. This meant the service should have appropriate alerting mechanisms, built-in observability and best practices for infrastructure.
In Airbnb’s view, these principles are extremely important and they help create a logical path that all engineers can follow in order to build a shared understanding of the service architecture.
Airbnb’s Migration Journey
With the above principles and goals, Airbnb began the migration journey from the monorail to a brand-new service-oriented approach.
It was a long migration process that went through multiple iterations along the way.
Version 1
In this version, every request went through the monorail.
The monorail was basically responsible for the presentation view, business logic and also, the data access.
You can consider it as the initial state of Airbnb’s architecture.
Version 2
The next version was a hybrid where the monorail coexisted with the service-oriented architecture.
The main difference was that the monorail only handled the routing and view layer. Its job was to send incoming API traffic to the network of new services that were responsible for the business logic, data model and access.
What kind of services are we talking about over here?
Airbnb classified their services into four different types as shown in the below diagram.
Here are the details of the various types of services:
Data Service - This is the bottom layer and acts as the entry-point for all read and write operations on the data entities. A data service must not be dependent on any other service because it only accesses the data storage.
Derived Data Service - The derived services stay one layer above the data service. These services can read from the data services and also apply some basic business logic.
Middle Tier - They are used to house large pieces of business logic that doesn’t fit at the data service level or the derived data service level.
Presentation Service - At the very top of the structure are the presentation services. Their job is to aggregate data from all the other services. In addition, the presentation service also applies some frontend specific business logic before returning the data to the client.
With these service definitions, Airbnb started by building the data service layer.
For example, they started with the home data service that acted as the foundational layer of the Airbnb business. The current monorail setup accessed data from the table using the Active Record data access library in Rails.
They intercepted the incoming requests at the Active Record level and instead of routing to the database, they sent these requests to the new homes data service. The homes data service was then responsible for routing to the data store.
The below diagram shows this approach.
After creating the core data services, Airbnb also migrated the core business logic as well to the SOA approach.
For example, migrating services like the pricing derived data service that needed some information about a home from the homes data service as well as other stores such as offline price and trends.
The next step involved migrating presentation services such as the checkout presentation service that depends on pricing information and homes information from the derived data service and the core data service.
All of these changes were part of Version 2 where both the monorail and the new services co-existed within the same request cycle.
Version 3
In this version of the migration journey, the monorail was completely eliminated.
The client makes a request to the API gateway, which acts as a service layer responsible for middleware and routing. The gateway populates the request context and routes the requests to the SOA network where the various services are responsible for the presentation logic and data access logic.
The web client is handled a little differently. There’s a specific service to handle the web requests.
Why is it needed?
This service returns the HTML to the web client by calling the API Gateway and populating the response received in the required format. The API Gateway takes care of all the middleware functions and propagates the request through the SOA network.
The below diagram tries to show this scenario:
Migrating Reads and Writes
By now, you may have realized that going from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented one is not an overnight process.
For Airbnb, a lot of time was spent in the middle phase where both the monorail and the new services had to be supported as first-class citizens.
A request could go through the monorail or through the services. This means that it was a critical requirement to ensure that functionality didn’t break apart for both the routes and the responses were equal.
To support this, Airbnb built comparison frameworks for reads as well as writes.
Reads
The first use of these comparison frameworks was in read operations because reads are idempotent. You can issue multiple read requests and get the same response.
The idea was to issue dual reads and compare the response from read path A that went through the monorail with the response from read path B that went through the new services. The captured responses were then emitted as standard events that were consumed and sent to an offline comparison framework.
The comparison framework was placed behind an admin tool so that the traffic can be controlled without the need for code changes and deployments. Once the responses are adjusted, Airbnb engineers could slowly ramp up traffic through the service path and monitor the comparison for differences.
Once the comparison looks clean, all read requests are moved to the new service.
Writes
For writes, things had to be done differently because one cannot dual write to the same database. Instead, a shadow database was utilized.
Let’s say the monorail is making a call to a presentation service that’s hitting the production database. This is write path A.
Now, a middle-tier service is introduced to offload some validations from the presentation service. Initially, this middle-tier service will write to a shadow database instead of the main production database.
At this point, it becomes easy to issue strongly consistent read requests to both the production and shadow database and compare the results.
Once the comparison is clean, we can move the writes via the new service and to the production database.
Pros and Cons of SOA
As Airbnb went through the migration journey from the monorail to a SOA-based architecture, some pros and cons started to become obvious.
Some pros were as follows:
The system became more reliable and highly available. Even if one service went down, other parts of the service-oriented architecture could still function.
Services were now individually scalable, allowing fine-tuning of the resource allocation depending on the real needs of the system.
Increased business agility due to separating different parts of the product into different services. Each team could iterate in parallel.
However, there were some cons as well:
Engineers can take more time to ship a feature in service-oriented architecture because they need to first acquaint themselves with the various services. Also, any change potentially involves multiple services
Even though services were loosely coupled, certain patterns of logic had to be repeated across different services.
Complicated dependency graph especially when there is a lack of API governance. This could also result in circular dependencies and also make it difficult for engineers to debug errors.
Tools and Techniques to Support SOA
As we saw from the previous section, the migration to SOA unlocked multiple challenges for the Airbnb engineering team.
For example, single requests now fan out to multiple services and increase the chances of failure. Also, separating the data model in multiple databases is good for service-level consistency but it makes transactionality more difficult to enforce.
Service orchestration also became more complex over time. With hundreds of engineers building services, Airbnb needed many more EC2 instances. Ultimately, this warranted a move towards using Kubernetes.
To make it easy for the engineering team to build services, the infrastructure team at Airbnb created a lot of building blocks along the journey.
API Framework
Airbnb created an in-house API framework built using the Thrift language.
This framework is used by all Airbnb services to define clean APIs that can talk to each other.
For example, let’s say Service A wants to talk to Service B. The Service B engineer only has to define the endpoint in simple Thrift language and the framework will auto-generate the endpoint logic to handle common stuff such as schema validations, observability metrics and so on.
Also, it creates a multi-threaded RPC client that Service A can use to talk to Service B. The client handles various functionalities such as retry logic, error propagation and transport.
What’s the advantage of this?
Engineers can focus on handling the core business logic and not spend any time worrying about the details of inter-service communication.
To boost developer productivity, the Airbnb infra team also developed the API Explorer where engineers can browse different services, figure out which endpoints to call and even use an API playground to figure out how to call those endpoints.
Automated Canary Analysis with Spinnaker
Airbnb also leverages Spinnaker which is an open-source continuous delivery platform.
Spinnaker is used for application management and deployment across various cloud platforms. It supports all major platforms such as AWS, Azure, Kubernetes and so on, making it extremely easy to spin up new deployment environments.
You can create pipelines in Spinnaker representing a particular delivery process that starts with the creation of a build artifact and goes all the way to deploying the artifact in an environment.
With Spinnaker, Airbnb was able to easily set up the environments for performing automated canary analysis.
Basically, they deploy both the old and new snapshots to two temporary environments followed by routing a small percentage of traffic to both of them.
Based on the traffic analysis and error rates, an aggregate score is generated for the canary environment that helps decide whether to fail or promote the canary to the next stage in the deployment process.
Powergrid
Airbnb also built an in-house library called Powergrid that makes running tasks in parallel easy.
With Powergrid, they were able to organize the code execution as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).
Each node of this DAG is a function or a task. Using this, the Airbnb engineers can model each service endpoint as a data flow with requests as the input and response as the output.
Since Powergrid supports multithreading and concurrency, it can be used to run tasks in parallel.
The below diagram shows the concept of Powergrid.
For example, consider that the host wants to send a special offer to the guest. However, the process has multiple checks and validations to be performed before this can be done.
With Powergrid, these validations can be performed by the respective services in parallel. After aggregating the responses, the special offer can be sent to the guest.
Simplifying Service Dependencies
Once Airbnb started down the path of SOA, there was no turning back.
However, initially there was a lack of service governance and dependency management that led to a complicated service interaction graph. It’s always a risky situation in a service-oriented approach where the call graph becomes extremely complex.
You end up with reduced speed of development for any new change.
Also, maintenance becomes difficult.
To handle this situation, Airbnb decided to simplify the service dependencies using the concept of Service Blocks.
Basically, you can think of each block as a collection of services related to a particular business functionality.
For example, the Listing Block encapsulates both the data and business logic related to the core listing attributes. Similarly, you can have other blocks such as the User Block and Availability Block.
The Block can then expose a nice and clean facade with consistent read and write endpoints to upstream clients. Under the hood, the facade orchestrates the coordination between data and business logic services as needed. Also, strict checks are implemented to prevent direct calls to any internal services within the block.
This approach greatly reduces the complexity of a service-oriented call graph.
Conclusion
To conclude things, Airbnb had several important lessons during the whole journey of migration from the monorail to SOA.
Here are a few important ones to takeaway:
Invest in common infrastructure early
Prioritize the simplification of service dependencies
Make the necessary cultural changes to enable service-oriented approach
SOA is not a fixed destination but a journey of continuous improvement and refinement.
References:
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by "ByteByteGo" <bytebytego@substack.com> - 11:39 - 20 Feb 2024 -
Join me on Thursday for Level up your Kubernetes Observability with New Relic
Hi MD,
It's Harry Kimpel, Principal Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, here.
We all know that Kubernetes will not go away anytime soon. Prometheus is the de-facto standard when it comes to gathering metrics from various components of a Kubernetes environment, including applications, services and the underlying infrastructure.
I wanted to share something that might interest you – a free online workshop "Level up your Kubernetes Observability with New Relic" on 22nd February at 10 am GMT/ 11 am CET. I'll be diving into the nitty-gritty of crafting a solid understanding of the Prometheus agent for Kubernetes. Picture this: live Kubernetes environment, hands-on with Kubernetes labels and annotations, manipulating data ingest by dropping labels and metrics, and much more.
Topics on the agenda? Think about improving your understanding of the Prometheus agent and how to make configuration changes that affect the metrics sent to New Relic. It's the kind of insider info that can make a real difference in your day-to-day.
You can find the full agenda on the registration page here. While we recommend attending the hands-on workshop live, you can also register to receive the recording.
I hope to see you then,
Harry Kimpel
Principal Developer Relations EngineerNew Relic
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by "Harry Kimpel, New Relic" <emeamarketing@newrelic.com> - 06:11 - 20 Feb 2024 -
Gen AI can “put the travel agent back in the online travel agency”
On Point
Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
•
AI travel agent. How might generative AI change the business of travel? Expedia’s Ariane Gorin has a few thoughts to share. “Smart players are going to benefit from [using gen AI],” says Gorin, who was recently named Expedia’s next CEO. By creating personalized travel experiences, helping people discover new destinations, and responding to people’s queries, gen AI platforms can help companies “put the travel agent back in the online travel agency,” Gorin shared with McKinsey partner Emma Loxton.
— Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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by "Sunny Thakur" <sunny.thakur@uffizio.com> - 07:00 - 19 Feb 2024 -
Feel better: A leader’s guide to the wellness market
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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
The concept of “wellness” may have become a cornerstone of workplace management strategies today: many organizations now consider ensuring employee wellness a hallmark of effective leadership. As far back as the 1940s, wellness began to be defined as something more than the mere absence of disease, and by the 1990s, it had come to mean a holistic, healthy lifestyle encompassing physical, mental, spiritual, and social well-being. But that expansive definition of wellness can be challenging to implement in practice, especially across an organization. This week, we offer a quick-start guide.
What are people looking for when they pursue wellness? They generally look for solutions across six dimensions—health, fitness, nutrition, appearance, mindfulness, and sleep. They also want effective, science-backed answers. Our latest Future of Wellness survey of more than 5,000 consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, and China reveals seven areas that may be ripe for investment in the $1.8 trillion global wellness market in 2024. For example, demand for healthy aging and longevity solutions is increasing as populations across developed economies continue to age. “Bringing products and services to market that anticipate the needs of aging consumers will be particularly important,” note McKinsey senior partner Warren Teichner and colleagues. As people live longer, leaders may need to consider how workplaces can adapt to an older workforce, as well as explore other complex issues such as financing long-term healthcare.
That’s the number of common ways in which people orient themselves toward purpose, according to McKinsey researchers. “Since individual purpose directly affects both health and motivation, forward-looking companies will be focusing on purpose as part of a broader effort to ensure that talent is given the primacy it deserves,” they suggest. For example, an employee who puts a high value on caring—one of the nine types of purpose—may prioritize helping loved ones or responding to the needs of family and friends. Leaders who can support individuals in connecting their purpose to that of their organization may help improve both organizational and employee well-being.
That’s McKinsey senior partner Aaron De Smet and colleagues on improving employee engagement. Perhaps not surprisingly, workers who report high levels of personal well-being tend to be more satisfied with their work and have a positive impact on team morale. (Our short quiz can help you assess satisfaction levels on your team.) “Managers who move their employees up the satisfaction spectrum toward higher engagement are therefore making a strategic choice,” observe the McKinsey experts. Poor employee well-being can cost an organization up to $20 million in lost opportunity and 15 to 20 percent of total payroll in voluntary turnover costs because of burnout.
Data privacy may be a big concern for consumers—but they may not mind sharing their personal data to get customized wellness products and services. That’s just one surprising finding of our survey of 7,500 consumers in six countries. Another is a growing preference for natural products. “We were surprised at the categories where natural is winning out,” says McKinsey partner Anna Pione in a McKinsey on Consumer and Retail podcast. “It does vary a little bit from country to country, but in all of them, we saw that same pattern, where ‘natural’ is winning over ‘effective’ for many categories.” Players entering the wellness segment may need to recognize that the market stands “at the intersection of healthcare, consumer goods, and digital,” notes partner Eric He. “That means you have to fundamentally think through what your winning model archetype is. What’s your differentiated value proposition? Go back to the business fundamentals.”
If you associate wellness with yoga classes, meditation camps, or healthy snack offerings, you may not be wrong. But the health and beauty makeovers of the future may add new dimensions to wellness products and services. In a video, McKinsey experts weigh in on what the wellness industry could look like in 2030. “A lot of the growth is in smaller, niche products,” says senior partner Jessica Moulton. “Keep experimenting with ways to get great at small.” Former partner and McKinsey alum Emma Spagnuolo expects beauty retailers to offer “clinical treatments, like microdermabrasion, that up until now have been done only in a dermatologist’s office or a medical spa,” while senior partner Manish Chopra anticipates a larger role for technology and wearables in the pursuit of mindfulness: “At whatever time in the evening, the wearable device would start saying, ‘Listen, you need to quiet your mind now.’”
Lead by staying well.
– Edited by Rama Ramaswami, senior editor, New York
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by "McKinsey Leading Off" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 04:11 - 19 Feb 2024 -
Business topics that are top of mind for McKinsey leaders in 2024
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New from McKinsey & Company
Leaders had a lot to navigate in 2023, including geopolitical turmoil, the energy transition, generative AI and its implications across industries and functions, and other disruptions. Which themes will dominate the business environment as they face the year ahead? This President’s Day weekend, dive into recent insights from the following McKinsey partners on topics that are top of mind for chief executives, including financing the energy transition, competitiveness in Europe, women’s health, international growth in Asia, new opportunities for generative AI, building trust and resilience, and navigating an interconnected world.
•
Michael Birshan, London
•
Solveigh Hieronimus, Munich
•
Jukka Maksimainen, Helsinki
•
Asutosh Padhi, Chicago
•
Lucy Pérez, Boston
•
Jeongmin Seong, Shanghai
•
Humayun Tai, New York
To see more essential reading on topics that matter, visit McKinsey Themes.
— Edited by Joyce Yoo, editor, New York
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by "McKinsey & Company" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 02:07 - 18 Feb 2024 -
The week in charts
The Week in Charts
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by "McKinsey Week in Charts" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 03:38 - 17 Feb 2024 -
EP99: What is the best way to learn SQL?
EP99: What is the best way to learn SQL?
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreThis week’s system design refresher:
Top 6 Tools to Turn Diagrams into Beautiful Code (Youtube video)
How do you pay from your digital wallet, such as Paypal, Paytm and Venmo, by scanning the QR code?
What is the best way to learn SQL?
What is gRPC?
Meet New Relic AI, the First Generative AI Observability Assistant (Sponsored)
New Relic AI makes it easy for you to get the insights you need without having to make sense of tons of telemetry data. Cut through the noise to get the right answers quickly and easily. New Relic AI leverages OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) so that any engineer can use everyday language and a familiar chat interface to ask questions and get insights, without prior observability experience. Observability is now as simple as asking New Relic AI, “Why is my cart not working?” or “Instrument my AWS.”
Top 6 Tools to Turn Diagrams into Beautiful Code
How do you pay from your digital wallet, such as Paypal, Paytm and Venmo, by scanning the QR code?
To understand the process involved, we need to divide the “scan to pay” process into two sub-processes:
Merchant generates a QR code and displays it on the screen
Consumer scans the QR code and pays
Here are the steps for generating the QR code:
When you want to pay for your shopping, the cashier tallies up all the goods and calculates the total amount due, for example, $123.45. The checkout has an order ID of SN129803. The cashier clicks the “checkout” button.
The cashier’s computer sends the order ID and the amount to PSP.
The PSP saves this information to the database and generates a QR code URL.
PSP’s Payment Gateway service reads the QR code URL.
The payment gateway returns the QR code URL to the merchant’s computer.
The merchant’s computer sends the QR code URL (or image) to the checkout counter.
The checkout counter displays the QR code.
These 7 steps complete in less than a second. Now it’s the consumer’s turn to pay from their digital wallet by scanning the QR code:
The consumer opens their digital wallet app to scan the QR code.
After confirming the amount is correct, the client clicks the “pay” button.
The digital wallet App notifies the PSP that the consumer has paid the given QR code.
The PSP payment gateway marks this QR code as paid and returns a success message to the consumer’s digital wallet App.
The PSP payment gateway notifies the merchant that the consumer has paid the given QR code.
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What is the best way to learn SQL?
In 1986, SQL (Structured Query Language) became a standard. Over the next 40 years, it became the dominant language for relational database management systems. Reading the latest standard (ANSI SQL 2016) can be time-consuming. How can I learn it?
There are 5 components of the SQL language:DDL: data definition language, such as CREATE, ALTER, DROP
DQL: data query language, such as SELECT
DML: data manipulation language, such as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
DCL: data control language, such as GRANT, REVOKE
TCL: transaction control language, such as COMMIT, ROLLBACK
For a backend engineer, you may need to know most of it. As a data analyst, you may need to have a good understanding of DQL. Select the topics that are most relevant to you.
Over to you: What does this SQL statement do in PostgreSQL: “select payload->ids->0 from events”?What is gRPC?
The diagram below shows important aspects of understanding gRPC.
gRPC is a high-performance, open-source universal RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework initially developed by Google. It leverages HTTP/2 for transport, Protocol Buffers as the interface description language, and provides features such as authentication, load balancing, and more. gRPC is designed to enable efficient and robust communication between services in a microservices architecture, making it a popular choice for building distributed systems and APIs.
Key Features of gRPC:
Protocol Buffers: By default, gRPC uses Protocol Buffers (proto files) as its interface definition language (IDL). This makes gRPC messages smaller and faster compared to JSON or XML.
HTTP/2 Based Transport: gRPC uses HTTP/2 for transport, which allows for many improvements over HTTP/1.x.
Multiple Language Support: gRPC supports a wide range of programming languages.
Bi-Directional Streaming: gRPC supports streaming requests and responses, allowing for the development of sophisticated real-time applications with bidirectional communication like chat services.
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by "ByteByteGo" <bytebytego@substack.com> - 11:38 - 17 Feb 2024 -
How to lead with inner agility
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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
Confronting complexity during transformative times
Leaders today are no strangers to disruption: geopolitical conflicts, climate-related challenges, and a dizzying array of new technologies reshaping companies the world over, to name but a few. Beyond the obvious business implications, the sheer cognitive load that results from attempting to navigate these forces can be overwhelming. Faced with this competing complexity, it’s all too easy to rely on old habits to steer oneself through. But the bold leaders among us embrace the uncertainty at hand, learn from it, and use it to develop their teams—and themselves.
To better navigate the complexity, leaders can adopt five practices to help create the kind of agile mindset shift that disruptive times demand: pause to move faster (detach from the challenge to find a solution); embrace your ignorance (listen from a place of not knowing); radically reframe the questions (ask challenging questions to unblock your mental model); set direction, not destination (lead with vision, not just objectives); and test your solutions—and yourself (create safe-to-fail experiments to spark winning ideas).
Complex times require changing our relationship with complexity. To learn how, read Sam Bourton, Johanne Lavoie, and Tiffany Vogel’s 2018 McKinsey Quarterly classic, “Leading with inner agility.”Embrace uncertainty 
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by "McKinsey Classics" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 11:09 - 17 Feb 2024
