June 2017

A couple years ago I wrote You Cannot Have Exactly-Once Delivery. It stirred up quite a bit of discussion and was even referenced in a book, which I found rather surprising considering I’m not exactly an academic. Recently, the topic of exactly-once delivery has again become a popular point of discussion, particularly with the release of Kafka 0.11, which introduces support for idempotent producers, transactional writes across multiple partitions, and—wait for it—exactly-once semantics. Naturally, when this hit Hacker News, I received a lot of messages from people asking me, “what gives?” There’s literally a TechCrunch headline titled, Confluent achieves holy grail of “exactly once” delivery on Kafka messaging service (Jay assures me, they don’t write the headlines). The myth has been disproved! ...

I read an interesting article recently called How do you cut a monolith in half? There are a lot of thoughts in the article that resonate with me and some that I disagree with, prompting this response. The overall message of the article is don’t use a message broker to break apart a monolith because it’s like a cross between a load balancer and a database, with the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. The author argues that message brokers are a popular way to pull apart components over a network because they have low setup cost and provide easy service discovery, but they come at a high operational cost. My response to that is the same advice the author puts forward: it depends. ...

This was a talk I gave at an internal R&D conference my last week at Workiva. I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk, so I figured I would share it with a wider audience. Be warned: it’s long. Feel free to read each section separately, though they largely tie together. Why do you work where you work? For many in tech, the answer is probably culture. When you tell a friend about your job, the culture is probably the first thing you describe. It’s culture that can be a company’s biggest asset—and its biggest downfall. But what is it? ...