GraphQL has become a core piece of infrastructure for many software applications. GraphQL is used to make requests that are structured as GraphQL queries and responded to through a GraphQL server. The GraphQL server processes the query and fetches the response from the necessary databases, APIs, and backend services. Around 2016, when GraphQL was becoming

The JavaScript ecosystem stretches across frontend, backend, and middleware. There are newer tools such as GraphQL, Gatsby, and WebAssembly. There are frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular. There is complex data handling with streams, caches, and TensorFlow.js. JavaScript is unlike any other ecosystem, because a single language can be used to construct every part of

Cloud infrastructure is usually consumed in the form of virtual machines or containers. These VMs or containers are running on a physical host machine that is also running other VMs and containers. This is called multitenancy. Servers across cloud providers such as AWS have a high utilization because there are multiple virtual instances running on

Edge computing is the usage of servers that are geographically close to the client device. The first common use case for edge computing was CDNs: content-delivery networks. A content delivery network placed media files such as images and videos on multiple servers throughout the world. These are big files, and they take lots of bandwidth

Every large company generates large amounts of data. Data engineering is the process of storing, transforming, and leveraging that data. Data infrastructure companies provide tools and platforms for performing data engineering. The last fifteen years has seen a rise in modern data management companies built in a time of decreasing storage costs, an increased volume

Slack is a messaging platform for organizations. Since its creation in 2013, Slack has quickly become a core piece of technology used by a wide variety of technology companies, groups, and small teams.  The messages that are sent on Slack are generated at a very high volume, and are extremely sensitive. These messages must be

NoSQL databases provide an interface for storing and accessing data that allows the user to work with data in an “unstructured” fashion. SQL databases require the data in the database to be “normalized,” meaning that each object in the entire database has an entry (or a null value) for each field. One advantage of NoSQL

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a virtualized server product that provides the user with scalable compute infrastructure. EC2 was created in 2006 as one of the first three AWS services along with S3 and Simple Queueing Service. Since then, EC2 has provided the core server infrastructure for many of the companies that have been

Amazon’s container offerings include ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), and Fargate. Through these different offerings, Amazon provides a variety of ways that a user can manage Kubernetes clusters and standalone container instances. The choice of which containerization system to choose depends on the needs of the user, and the tradeoffs they want

When the Kubernetes project was started, Amazon Web Services was the dominant cloud provider. Most of the code that runs AWS is closed source, which prevents an open ecosystem from developing around AWS. Developers who deploy their application onto AWS are opting into a closed, controlled ecosystem, which has both costs and benefits. The software