Posts

Showing posts with the label software architecture

Uber's Michelangelo vs. Netflix's Metaflow

  Uber's Michelangelo vs. Netflix's Metaflow Michelangelo Pain point Without michelangelo, each team at uber that uses ML (that’s all of them - every interaction with the ride or eats app involves ML) would need to build their own data pipelines, feature stores, training clusters, model storage, etc.  It would take each team copious amounts of time to maintain and improve their systems, and common patterns/best practices would be hard to learn.  In addition, the highest priority use cases (business critical, e.g. rider/driver matching) would themselves need to ensure they have enough compute/storage/engineering resources to operate (outages, scale peaks, etc.), which would results in organizational complexity and constant prioritization battles between managers/directors/etc. Solution Michelangelo provides a single platform that makes the most common and most business critical ML use cases simple and intuitive for builders to use, while still allowing self-serve extensibi...

Architectural Characteristics - Transcending Requirements

Image
Building a system means meeting a set of requirements dictated by the customer.  But the customer isn't always going to translate what they want into engineering terms.  Even if you say please, they might not even know how.  If they ask for an online ordering system, they probably won't specify that it needs to be available 24/7 and auditable for tax purposes.  Yet these aspects could mean the difference between project success and failure.  Those unsaid aspects are called anything from 'nonfunctional requirements' to 'Architectural Characteristics'. In their book 'Fundamentals of Software Architecture', Ford and Richards define Architectural Characteristics to have 3 criteria: Specifies a nondomain design consideration Let's dive into these bullets to better understand them. Aspects of Architectural Characteristics Specifies a nondomain design consideration If you're building an ordering system, then order numbers, customers, items and prices ar...