Software Engineering Daily

Platform as a service can mean different things to different people. The most prominent feature of a PaaS is the ability to abstract away issues that every developer within an organization has to deal with. As an example, developers today don’t need to fear scalability and load balancing issues as much as engineers of the 90’s and early 2000s. We can develop our applications without worrying about the scaling that is going on under the covers.

Sinclair Schuller is the CEO of Apprenda and he joins the show today to discuss what is involved in building a PaaS, particularly one targeted at enterprises. His company was started in 2007, just a few years after AWS got started.

We also talked about the potential Docker Fork, for which Sinclair had useful business and engineering perspectives.

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Google builds cloud services for developers, such as PubSub, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Cloud DataStore. On Software Engineering Daily, we’ve done lots of shows about how these types of services are built. In this episode, we are zooming in on the interaction between the developer using a cloud service and the design and engineering of the client APIs.

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Batch and stream processing systems have been evolving for the past decade. From MapReduce to Apache Storm to Dataflow, the best practices for large volume data processing have become more sophisticated as the industry and open source communities have iterated on them.

Dataflow and Apache Beam are projects that present a unified batch and stream processing system. A previous episode with Frances Perry discussed how they work in detail. In today’s episode, Eric Anderson discusses Cloud Dataflow, a service from Google that lets users manage their data processing pipelines without having to spin up individual servers to run them on.

Cloud Dataflow–like the “serverless” movement we have done several shows on–represents a growing shift towards cloud providers offering services that abstract away the operational challenges of managing compute nodes. If you have suggestions for topics in this area, please do send me an email.

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Slack is a chat application that is rapidly growing in popularity. The focus of Slack is to create a polished, responsive tool for productivity that cuts down on the emailing, context switching, and useless meetings that take place at a typical enterprise.

Keith Adams, the chief architect at Slack, joins the show to explain how those high level principles translate into engineering decisions.

Keith previously worked for 7 years at Facebook, contributing heavily to the tools that make PHP easier to develop with at scale. Slack’s core product is also built with PHP, and Keith discusses the similarities and differences between scaling Facebook and Slack.

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Uber has a software architecture with unique requirements. Uber does not have the firehose of user engagement data that Twitter or Facebook has, but each transaction on Uber is both high value and time-sensitive. Users are paying for transportation that they expect to be available and reasonably close by. When Uber’s system is trying to match a rider with a driver, availability is favored over consistency. It is important that the rider can always get some driver, even if it is not the best driver.

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