Tech Stacks - Overview

Modern software / service life cycle: development, delivery, operation.

Tech Stacks

Infra Building Blocks

3 core parts: compute, storage, network.

• Compute
  • Servers
    • bare-metal
    • VMs
    • containers and orchestration: Kubernetes
  • Serverless
• Storage / Databases
  • Databases to store data and make them readily available for appliations, and indexes to speed up searches and filters.
  • Caching to speed up reads by remembering results of expensive operations
  • Data Warehouse to store historical data for analytics
  • Storage to store files and objects (can also be used to serve static websites)
  • Messaging to communicate between processes and enable async operations. (Message Queues and PubSub)
• Networking
  • Service Discovery, Configs and Secrets
  • CDN
  • Load Balancing
  • Domains / DNS

Development

• Languages: Java vs C++ vs Python vs Go vs Rust vs Kotlin ...
• Frameworks: server, web, mobile, UI/UX
• Coding Styles / Naming Conventions: camelCase? PascalCase? Underscore? Dash?
• IDE / Editor: VS Code, Intellij, Vim. Though it is ok to choose any IDE the developer prefers, but better to have a few "officially supported" options by your technical support team.
• Source control
• Code review
• Internal documentation and knowledge sharing
• Analytics, logging
• Internal experiment / external experiment

Production

• Package / artifact format: a common way to package all the applications, e.g. Docker containers or Java archives.
• Artifact registry
  • 3rd party dependencies
  • built binaries
  • built images
  • Helm charts
• S3C: Secure Software Supply Chain
• CI / CD: Build, Test, Release, Rollout
• Observability:
  • Logging: AWS Kinesis, Fluentd, GCP Cloud Logging
  • Metrics, Monitoring, Alerting, SLOs: to monitor system health and key business metrics, and send out alerts: GCP Cloud Monitoring, Datadog
• Prober, blackbox monitoring
• Resource / Capacity Management and Provisioning: manages a service’s capacity; adjusts resource requirements or number of replicas. CPU / RAM / SSD / DISK.
• Data Integrity, Reliability, and Staleness Prevention
• Oncall, Incidents, Escalations, and Postmortems
• DR: Disaster recovery.
• IAM.
• Billing / Payment.

Processes

• Planning / Issue tracking: Jira, Asana, Kanban
• Security, Compliance, Privacy
• Launch: internal review, then expose the code to end users
• Methodology: waterfall vs agile