In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke with David Blank-Edelman about the relationship between software architecture and site reliability engineering. Site reliability engineering can give architecture vital feedback about how the system actually behaves in production. Architects and designers can then learn from their failures to improve their ability to build systems that can evolve, gracefully degrade, and, at the right time, be taken out of production.

Reliability, just like latency, throughput, and durability, is an emergent property of a system. Hence the search for a root cause for a failure is counter-productive, and is not likely to produce a reliable system.  One often has to look for what went right, as opposed to what went wrong. Software reliability engineers and architects need to embrace a mutual curiosity of how a system really works and fails in the real world.

Read a transcript of this interview: http://bit.ly/4n63xuC

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Transcript

Looking for Root Causes is a False Path: A Conversation with David Blank-Edelman

Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming
 - Circuit breakers in Akka are a backup and retry policy; they protect you by capturing failure data and allow you to roll back 
 - Every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system, it needs to have multiple parts that run on different machines in order to function and be fully resilient - thus is a Microsystem
 - Two different trends have emerged when it comes to hardware and environments: one is the trend toward Multi-core, the is a movement toward virtualized environments and the cloud
 - Saga pattern of managing long running transactions in a distributed system fits very well with messaging style architectures

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

Akka
The Actor Model
When Akka and the Actor Model is the perfect choice
Circuit breakers patterns in distributed systems
Two trends toward Multi-core
Reactive Manifesto
Event Driven vs. Message Driven
Reactive Programming and Streams
Microliths to Microsystems
What do you have to get right before you start trying to deploy a distributed systems?
Working with ML / AI at Lightbend to understand tracing through distributed system
Saga Pattern

More on this:
Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

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InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Jonas Bonér on the Actor Model, Akka, Reactive Programming, Microservices and Distributed Systems

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to drive change and innovation in their team by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. They have received essential information that helped them validate their software development map. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 1,200,000 downloads in the last 3 years.

Looking for Root Causes is a False Path: A Conversation with David Blank-Edelman

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