Divide and conquer has been a core strategy in software engineering. We decompose our systems into smaller modules with focused, simple functionalities and compose them back to provide richer features. In a complex modular system, developers regularly have to dedicate a significant portion of code and effort to such composition. …

For lack of a better term, traffic oversaturation is when the incoming traffic exceeds the capacity of the service. During traffic oversaturation, all the excessive traffic will have to wait in some queues in the service. The latencies quickly grow to the point where no requests get served within the…

The concept of conceivability (being conceivable or not) has been used in many philosophical discussions. It is common to associate some notion of absolute truthiness with conceivability. One example is to tie necessarily true to conceivability - a statement is necessarily true if and only if it’s true in every…

Recently at iHeartRadio we decided to migrate our one monolithic Java backend service into multiple microservices, more specifically we decided to implement these microservices as Akka apps and use Akka cluster to weave them into our microservice cluster. This post is about how we reached this decision. …

iHeart/play-swagger is a Swagger spec generator for REST APIs built with Play Framework. It generates swagger specs from play route files and case class reflections without the need for any code annotation. The main principles we follow when designing this library are: No code pollution (e.g. annotation) DRY (extract as…

Announcing a new iHeartRadio open source project Kanaloa. Kanaloa is a set of work dispatchers implemented using Akka actors. These dispatchers sit in front of your service and dispatch received work to them. They make your service more resilient through the following means: Auto scaling — it dynamically figures out…