/Infrastructure

State Of Notification Infrastructure 2025

- Jeff Everhart tl;dr: In this report, we'll look at how product and engineering teams at companies like Vercel, Webflow and Zapier have built their product notification infrastructure in 2024 and outline predictions for 2025.

featured in #591


Evolving Our Infrastructure Through The Messaging System Model In Dropbox

- Dmitry Kopytkov Deepak Gupta tl;dr: “In this blog, we’ll introduce an open messaging system model, which played a key role in evolving our platform. It helped us build a unified event-driven system capable of orchestrating a wide range of asynchronous tasks and meeting future needs, especially as we focus on AI.”

featured in #584


State Of Notification Infrastructure 2025

- Jeff Everhart tl;dr: In this report, we'll look at how product and engineering teams at companies like Vercel, Webflow and Zapier have built their product notification infrastructure in 2024 and outline predictions for 2025.

featured in #582


Navigating The Scale: How Design Patterns Power LinkedIn’s Infrastructure

- Saira Khanum tl;dr: “We’ve found the Producer-Consumer pattern to be exceptionally effective in reaching these goals. This pattern has been successfully implemented in several of our core infrastructure systems, including the distributed server query system, server console monitoring, and network security monitoring. In this process, we have identified and built general solutions that are repeatable in similar environments, greatly improving engineering efficiency by leveraging proven methodologies.”

featured in #567


Faster Continuous Integration Builds At Canva

tl;dr: In April 2022, the average time for a PR to pass continuous integration and merge into our main branch was around 80 minutes. As shown in the following diagram, we’re now getting our build times down below 30 minutes, as low as 15 minutes. This post shares what we’ve done to improve CI build times in our main code repository, including: (1) Finding the best opportunities (2) Experimentation (3) Deliver fast and incrementally (4) The importance of everyone’s contributions. 

featured in #537


Google Zanzibar For The Rest Of Us

- Greg Sarjeant tl;dr: Google Zanzibar powers authorization for hundreds of Google’s apps so you might think it's a great model for your authorization service. But does Zanzibar's promises of scale, high availability, strong consistency mean that it’s the right solution for the rest of us? Zanzibar's defining characteristic is actually centralization, which is a massive tradeoff that’s not practical for most. The Googles of the world can pull it off, but is there a Zanzibar for the rest of us?

featured in #497


Google Zanzibar For The Rest Of Us

tl;dr: Google Zanzibar powers authorization for hundreds of Google’s apps so you might think it's a great model for your authorization service. But does Zanzibar's promises of scale, high availability, strong consistency mean that it’s the right solution for the rest of us? Zanzibar's defining characteristic is actually centralization, which is a massive tradeoff that’s not practical for most. The Googles of the world can pull it off, but is there a Zanzibar for the rest of us?

featured in #492


Google Zanzibar For The Rest Of Us

tl;dr: Google Zanzibar powers authorization for hundreds of Google’s apps so you might think it's a great model for your authorization service. But does Zanzibar's promises of scale, high availability, strong consistency mean that it’s the right solution for the rest of us? Zanzibar's defining characteristic is actually centralization, which is a massive tradeoff that’s not practical for most. The Googles of the world can pull it off, but is there a Zanzibar for the rest of us?

featured in #490


(Almost) Every Infrastructure Decision I Endorse Or Regret After 4 Years Running Infrastructure At A Startup

tl;dr: “I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.”

featured in #488


Switching Build Systems, Seamlessly

- Patrick Balestra tl;dr: Patrick chronicles Spotify's shift to Bazel. The move was driven by the need for a scalable build system for their growing codebase. The transition, which began in earnest in 2020, involved running two build systems side by side, adapting existing tools, and extensive testing. By 2023, the iOS Spotify app was fully built with Bazel, resulting in significant improvements in build times and developer experience.

featured in #461