Designing layered software architecture diagrams with IcePanel — ⚡ Tl;dr When using abstractions to communicate software architectures, it’s important to choose the right terminology and level of detail based on the audience. The C4 model provides common abstractions with a hierarchical structure that allows diagrams to be tailored to the audience’s technical ability. IcePanel supports the C4 model’s hierarchical diagram…

Comparison and features for tools that create UML sequence diagrams with code — 🚀 Let’s kick-off UML (Unified Modelling Language) consists of 14 diagram types for visualizing and communicating software architectures. Of those, sequence diagrams are one of the most commonly used in modern software engineering. The tools listed below allow the quick and easy creation of UML sequence diagrams using declarative languages. …

A comparison of relational databases and the different types of non-relational databases — ⚡ Tl;dr Relational databases, sometimes called SQL databases, store data in tables with rows and are good at maintaining reference integrity and data consistency. NoSQL databases are designed to have flexible schemas, making them great for modern applications where data structures evolve quickly. …

Document, key-value and in-memory databases from the 3 major cloud providers — ⚡ Tl;dr Document databases store and query documents in a key-value JSON-like structure. Some examples: Amazon DocumentDB, Google Cloud Firestore and Azure CosmosDB Key-value databases store a collection of key-value pairs that can store simple or complex object types. Some examples: Amazon DynamoDB, Google Cloud Bigtable and Azure Table Storage

Risk storming is a technique for collaboratively identifying risks for your software architecture — ⚡ Tl;dr Risk storming is a technique for collaborating with your team to identify risks in your software architecture visually. Risk storming is recommended as a collaborative workshop as diverse opinions and perspectives help identify the non-obvious risks. 🚀 Let’s kick-off It’s important to realize that no software architecture, process or team is perfect, and…

Message queues for decoupled distributed architectures and their advantages and disadvantages — ⚡ Tl;dr Message queues can be used for asynchronous communication between services and for processing batched workloads. As applications become decoupled, they often need mechanisms to share state, mutate data and handle events in different areas of the system. 🚀 Let’s kick-off As architectures move toward the cloud and become increasingly distributed, the need for…

Visualize and communicate event definitions, payload schemas and service dependencies — ⚡ Tl;dr EventCatalog is an open-source project created by David Boyne for easily documenting and discovering services and events in an event-driven architecture. EventCatalog includes a simple web interface that can be statically generated for anyone on your team to search, filter and visualize services, events and dependencies.

Create custom RSS feeds with release notes for your cloud stack — ⚡ Tl;dr StackFeed.io saves AWS, GCP and Azure services in your cloud stack and provides a custom-tailored news feed of release notes and important updates. Receive real-time messages for your service updates directly to your Slack or Teams channel with a tailored RSS feed. 🚀 Let’s kick-off We’re excited to tell you about the motivation…

An industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs for event-driven architecture — ⚡ Tl;dr AsyncAPI is a standard for describing the communication between services and applications for asynchronous event-driven architectures (EDA). AsyncAPI specs allow you to easily generate data models, client libraries, server code and documentation in various languages to speed up the development process. 🚀 Let’s kick-off