# Architecture
> 312 posts about Architecture, summarised, each linking to the original.

## Articles

### [Endian Communication Systems and Information Exchange in Bytes](https://yomu.fyi/post/endian-communication-systems-and-information-exchange-in-bytes.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Nitish Joshi
- Published: Sep 25, 2025

Endianness dictates the order in which multi-byte numbers are stored and transmitted across systems. While big-endian formats store the most significant byte first at the lowest address, little-endian systems place the least significant byte first. Communication across diverse architectures relies on consistent byte ordering to prevent critical interpretation errors in fields such as telecommunications, IoT, automotive, finance, and aerospace. To safely process disparate payloads, modern ingestion pipelines deploy an endian converter to normalize raw binary data into a unified format. These normalized data streams flow through Apache Kafka, undergo real-time processing and enrichment via Atlas Stream Processing, and persist in MongoDB Atlas for downstream analytics and visualization.


### [Build AI Agents Worth Keeping: The Canvas Framework](https://yomu.fyi/post/build-ai-agents-worth-keeping-the-canvas-framework.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Mikiko Bazeley
- Published: Sep 23, 2025

Enterprise AI agent initiatives frequently stall after pilot phases due to technology-first thinking, governance gaps, infrastructure complexity, and poor alignment with business needs. To bridge this divide, development teams are shifting away from data-first pipelines toward a product-first methodology structured as product, agent, data, and model. The Canvas framework provides a phased workflow moving from quick proof-of-concept validation to model orchestration and operational hardening. In Phase 4, developers focus on API management, external provider orchestration, cost optimization, and evaluation pipelines. Phase 5 adds necessary governance, compliance, user experience, and security layers required to transform working agent prototypes into sustainable production deployments.


### [Simplify AI-Driven Data Connectivity With MongoDB and MCP Toolbox](https://yomu.fyi/post/simplify-ai-driven-data-connectivity-with-mongodb-and-mcp-toolbox.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Venkatesh Shanbhag, Yang Li, Kurtis Van Gent
- Published: Sep 22, 2025

Organizations building generative AI applications require simplified, standardized connections to an expanding ecosystem of enterprise databases. MCP Toolbox for Databases, an open-source Model Context Protocol server based on Anthropic's standardized protocol, now supports MongoDB Atlas to streamline connections to generative AI systems. This new integration allows gen AI agents to execute standard CRUD operations alongside advanced transformations and computations using the MongoDB aggregation framework. Through flexible configuration files, developers can configure MongoDB Atlas as both a data source and a sink by defining parameters like connection URIs, target datasets, filters, projections, and toolsets. By linking flexible document data with cross-database query capabilities, enterprises can unify results and automate multi-source AI workflows.


### [Modernizing Core Insurance Systems: Breaking the Batch Bottleneck](https://yomu.fyi/post/modernizing-core-insurance-systems-breaking-the-batch-bottleneck.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Vinod Bagal, Jagpreet Singh
- Published: Sep 18, 2025

Migrating core insurance platforms from legacy relational databases with PL/SQL to Java and MongoDB Atlas frequently degrades batch processing performance. Like-for-like migrations can cause batch jobs to run 25 to 30 times slower due to high network round-trips, inefficient per-record operations, and under-utilized bulk capabilities. To resolve these bottlenecks, an optimization framework was developed that leverages MongoDB native bulkWrite operations, intelligent reference data prefetching, and parallel execution. An architecture combining a Spring Boot controller and a dedicated executor framework partitions workloads across threads or event processors. This framework recovered lost performance, completing previously failing batch jobs within service-level agreements and achieving 10 to 15 times better execution speeds than legacy systems in certain workloads.


### [MongoDB.local NYC 2025: Definiendo la base de datos ideal para la era de la IA](https://yomu.fyi/post/mongodb-local-nyc-2025-definiendo-la-base-de-datos-ideal-para-la-era-d.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO, MongoDB
- Published: Sep 18, 2025

At MongoDB.local NYC 2025, MongoDB introduced new capabilities and product updates tailored for artificial intelligence workloads. MongoDB 8.2 was unveiled alongside public previews of full-text and vector search for both MongoDB Community Edition and Enterprise Server. The company also detailed its integration with Voyage AI embedding and reranking models to deliver precision retrieval across raw data, metadata, and vectors. To address legacy infrastructure migration hurdles, MongoDB launched the Application Modernization Platform, which combines AI-assisted tooling and specialized workflows to accelerate legacy application refactoring two to three times faster. These architectural updates aim to position the JSON document model as the persistent memory and context store required by autonomous, agentic AI workflows.


### [MongoDB.local NYC 2025 : définir la base de données idéale à l'ère de l'IA](https://yomu.fyi/post/mongodb-local-nyc-2025-de-finir-la-base-de-donne-es-ide-ale-a-l-e-re-d.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO, MongoDB
- Published: Sep 18, 2025

At the MongoDB.local NYC 2025 event, MongoDB unveiled several platform updates aimed at modernizing enterprise database architectures and supporting emerging agentic artificial intelligence workloads. The newly released MongoDB 8.2 version provides enhanced performance alongside expanded developer features across the broader document database ecosystem. The company also integrated Voyage AI embedding and reranking models to improve context retrieval precision and efficiency when building production-grade AI systems. Furthermore, dedicated Search and Vector Search capabilities have reached general availability across both MongoDB Community Edition and Enterprise Server environments. To streamline infrastructure transitions, the newly introduced Application Modernization Platform leverages AI-powered tooling and specialized techniques to migrate legacy database systems two to three times faster.


### [MongoDB.local NYC 2025: Definition der idealen Datenbank für das KI-Zeitalter](https://yomu.fyi/post/mongodb-local-nyc-2025-definition-der-idealen-datenbank-fu-r-das-ki-ze.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO, MongoDB
- Published: Sep 18, 2025

MongoDB unveiled several core database updates aimed at supporting artificial intelligence workloads during MongoDB.local NYC 2025. The release of MongoDB 8.2 introduces performance enhancements alongside Voyage AI embedding models and rerankers for AI applications. Furthermore, Search and Vector Search are now available in public preview for both MongoDB Community Edition and MongoDB Enterprise Server. To address the costs and operational friction of legacy systems, MongoDB launched the Application Modernization Platform (AMP), which combines AI-powered tools with specialized talent to accelerate database migrations. These capabilities position the JSON-based document model to supply the persistent state, memory, and retrieval mechanisms required by emerging agentic AI architectures.


### [MongoDB.local NYC 2025: Definire il database ideale per l'era dell'AI](https://yomu.fyi/post/mongodb-local-nyc-2025-definire-il-database-ideale-per-l-era-dell-ai.md)
- Company: [MongoDB](https://yomu.fyi/company/mongodb.md)
- Author: Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO, MongoDB
- Published: Sep 18, 2025

MongoDB announced several product releases and platform updates aimed at supporting artificial intelligence and agentic workflows at MongoDB.local NYC. The release of MongoDB 8.2 arrives alongside integrations with Voyage AI embedding and reranker models designed to enhance data retrieval precision. In addition, MongoDB launched Search and Vector Search in public preview for both Community Edition and Enterprise Server deployments, bringing vector capabilities to self-managed environments. To assist organizations transitioning away from rigid legacy database systems, MongoDB also introduced the Application Modernization Platform, which combines AI-driven tooling and specialized migration expertise. Early benchmarks from the modernization platform demonstrate legacy migrations running two to three times faster while accelerating code rewriting tasks by an order of magnitude.


### [Data mesh at Grab part I: Building trust through certification](https://yomu.fyi/post/data-mesh-at-grab-part-i-building-trust-through-certification.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Chun Rong Phang
- Published: Aug 19, 2025

Rapid business growth across multiple verticals led Grab's centralized data engineering model to become an unscalable bottleneck, resulting in duplicate pipelines, ambiguous ownership, and broken downstream dependencies. To resolve these issues, the organization initiated a data mesh journey called Signals Marketplace that decentralizes data management and treats data as a product. A central data certification system establishes formal data contracts covering schemas, SLAs, freshness, and retention, while assigning clear Business Data Owners and Technical Data Owners. Breaches in contract guarantees automatically generate Data Production Incident tickets to enforce accountability and root-cause fixes. Consequently, 75% of internal queries now target certified assets, redundant tables saw a 400% year-over-year deprecation increase, and the total number of top-used datasets dropped by over 58%.


### [From Intern Project to Production: How I Shipped the Draw Tool for Canva's Present Mode](https://yomu.fyi/post/from-intern-project-to-production-how-i-shipped-the-draw-tool-for-canv.md)
- Company: [Canva](https://yomu.fyi/company/canva.md)
- Author: Edwina Adisusila
- Published: Aug 6, 2025

Canva engineers developed and shipped a real-time drawing tool for presentation mode after user feedback highlighted it as a highly requested feature. Integrating the existing editor-bound draw functionality into presentations required resolving tight package coupling, dual-window scaling mismatches, and performance regressions. To overcome architectural boundaries, core draw logic was extracted into a shared common package using interface abstractions. Coordinate normalization resolved positioning and scaling differences across presenter and audience views, while code-splitting deferred loading the core engine until activation. As a result, presentation load time regression dropped from 7% to 0.24%, and the feature reached over 470,000 monthly active users in production.


### [Grab's service mesh evolution: From Consul to Istio](https://yomu.fyi/post/grab-s-service-mesh-evolution-from-consul-to-istio.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Hilman Kurniawan
- Published: Jul 16, 2025

Grab operated over 1,000 microservices across hybrid infrastructure using Consul alongside a fallback mechanism called Catcher. Single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities in Consul servers and limited support for multi-cluster operations prompted an evaluation of alternative mesh technologies, ultimately leading to the selection of Istio. Grab avoided the standard single-control-plane-per-cluster pattern by deploying multiple external control planes in dedicated Kubernetes clusters arranged in active-active pairs. Migration began in Q4 2024, shifting traffic across AWS and GCP while handling both HTTP and gRPC protocols with gradual traffic-shifting and rollback mechanisms.


### [DispatchGym: Grab’s reinforcement learning research framework](https://yomu.fyi/post/dispatchgym-grab-s-reinforcement-learning-research-framework.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Tan Sien Yi
- Published: Jul 7, 2025

Applying reinforcement learning to dispatch systems is often hindered when the chosen control levers exert weak influence over reward functions. To streamline research, Grab built DispatchGym, a framework that connects reinforcement learning algorithms to a dispatch process simulation via the Gymnasium API. The simulation emphasizes directional accuracy over absolute precision, allowing researchers to evaluate relative metric shifts across supply and demand scenarios. Built in modular Python and accelerated with Numba, the system allows data scientists to test code locally and launch distributed Spark executions with a single command-line call. The framework has been used to evaluate various contextual bandit models and action sampling strategies for tuning dispatch hyperparameters.


### [The complete stream processing journey on FlinkSQL](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-complete-stream-processing-journey-on-flinksql.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Calvin Tran
- Published: Jun 12, 2025

Grab previously relied on Apache Zeppelin notebooks for interactive stream processing exploration, but faced lagging Flink version upgrades, five-minute cluster cold starts, and poor integration with internal platforms. To address these limitations, the team migrated to a shared FlinkSQL gateway architecture structured into compute, integration, and query layers. The new setup uses a Hive Metastore catalog to expose Kafka topics as relational tables, while a custom control plane handles authentication and headless REST APIs over Flink's native interface. For production workflows, a configuration-based portal accepts SQL logic and automatically provisions and deploys Flink pipelines within ten minutes. This transition reduced ad-hoc query response times to under one minute and eliminated the need to maintain version adapter shims.


### [How We Decomposed Tinder’s Monolith](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-decomposed-tinder-s-monolith.md)
- Company: [Tinder](https://yomu.fyi/company/tinder.md)
- Author: Tinder
- Published: May 23, 2025

Tinder faced significant agility and build performance challenges caused by an iOS codebase monolith containing over 1,000 files and 150,000 lines of code. Manual extraction efforts risked creating massive, unmanageable pull requests that would require constant rebasing against the main branch. To systematically decompose the target into Swift sub-modules, the team mapped declarations and references via the Swift compiler into a directed graph. They iteratively extracted leaf nodes with an in-degree of zero across sequential phases and automated common code adjustments, including module dependencies, imports, access control levels, and dependency injection. The automated decomposition completed in under six months with zero P0 incidents, reducing monolith build times by 78% and disallowing future additions to the monolith target.


### [Effortless enterprise authentication at Grab: Dex in action](https://yomu.fyi/post/effortless-enterprise-authentication-at-grab-dex-in-action.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Kah Wei Lee
- Published: May 23, 2025

Grab needed a centralised system to simplify identity management, satisfy audit requirements, and standardise authentication across internal and external tools like Databricks and Datadog. The engineering team selected OpenID Connect as their standard protocol and adopted Dex, an open-source CNCF identity aggregator. Dex acts as an intermediary between applications and multiple identity providers to issue standardised OIDC tokens. To secure service-to-service communication, Grab implemented token exchange with trusted peer relationships rather than relying on privileged service accounts. Dex also provides a kill-switch mechanism that can route authentication traffic to an alternate provider during identity provider outages.


### [Streamlining RiskOps with the SOP agent framework](https://yomu.fyi/post/streamlining-riskops-with-the-sop-agent-framework.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Fujiao Liu
- Published: May 8, 2025

Manual Account Takeover (ATO) investigations in Risk Operations traditionally demand intensive cross-referencing across systems, manual SQL execution, and high-pressure decision-making prone to human error. To resolve these bottlenecks, an SOP-driven LLM agent framework models investigative workflows as natural-language tree structures with explicit function notations like @function\_name. Execution is coordinated between an SOP planner, which traverses the tree using a Depth-First Search strategy, and a Worker Agent that parses JSON-formatted steps to invoke database queries and APIs. Once all steps evaluate their decision criteria, the framework synthesizes the collected data into an actionable summary report. Implementing this architecture automated 87% of ATO cases and dropped average ticket handling time from 22 minutes to 3 minutes.


### [Introducing the SOP-driven LLM agent frameworks](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-the-sop-driven-llm-agent-frameworks.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Fujiao Liu
- Published: Apr 25, 2025

Standard operating procedure (SOP) driven Large Language Model agent frameworks address common generative AI challenges such as hallucinations, non-standard output formats, and branching navigation errors. Workflows are represented as hierarchical trees where nodes encapsulate actions or decision points that can be created using a visual editor and annotated with explicit external function calls. Execution relies on a tripartite architecture consisting of a Depth-First Search planner module with backtracking, an adaptive worker agent that limits API exposure and compresses context, and a multilingual user agent. Supporting tools include a Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline, a plugin system integrating Python and SQL, and a state stack for pausing workflows during human intervention. In production deployments for fraud and account takeover investigations, the framework automated up to 87% of cases while cutting handling times substantially.


### [Evaluating performance impact of removing Redis-cache from a Scylla-backed service](https://yomu.fyi/post/evaluating-performance-impact-of-removing-redis-cache-from-a-scylla-ba.md)
- Company: [Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab.md)
- Author: Md Riyadh
- Published: Apr 11, 2025

Grab operates a high-throughput Rust read service that aggregates counter metrics from Scylla tables across minutely, hourly, and daily granularities. The service initially cached aggregated responses in Redis using keys rounded to 15-minute intervals alongside a five-minute TTL. Because incoming queries predominantly requested recent data, transitions between 15-minute windows caused simultaneous cache misses across active configurations, resulting in severe Scylla traffic spikes, latency surges, and timeouts. To resolve the load imbalance, engineers proposed removing the Redis cache entirely and relying directly on Scylla's native internal caching. The rollout was staged in production by deterministically disabling Redis caching for specific counter configurations using mathematical operations on configuration IDs.


### [Scaling Nextdoor’s Datastores: Part 3](https://yomu.fyi/post/scaling-nextdoor-s-datastores-part-3.md)
- Company: [Nextdoor](https://yomu.fyi/company/nextdoor.md)
- Author: Ronak Shah
- Published: Mar 19, 2025

Look-aside caching with object byte serialization can cause critical compatibility failures when application versions, dependencies, or database schemas change. Serialized cache entries bound to specific runtimes risk deserialization errors during deployments, triggering thundering herd queries against the underlying datastore. To resolve this, Nextdoor replaced runtime-bound serialization like Python pickle with MessagePack to serialize Django model objects. The team achieved forward compatibility by letting MessagePack ignore unrecognized new fields in older application code, while backward compatibility relies on mandatory default values for newly added model attributes. Nextdoor prepends a ten-byte header containing format metadata and version information before writing the serialized payload to cache stores.


### [Scaling Nextdoor’s Datastores: Part 2](https://yomu.fyi/post/scaling-nextdoor-s-datastores-part-2.md)
- Company: [Nextdoor](https://yomu.fyi/company/nextdoor.md)
- Author: Tushar Singla
- Published: Mar 19, 2025

Nextdoor encountered scaling issues after adding read replicas when product engineers were initially tasked with deciding whether to route queries to the primary or replica databases. As business logic grew and gained abstraction layers, engineers struggled to track read-after-write consistency constraints across the call stack. To avoid replication lag race conditions, engineers routinely wrapped logic in database transactions, unintentionally directing all queries to the primary node and eroding read replica benefits over several years. The Core-Services team resolved this by injecting custom tracking logic into their Django ORM layer to monitor table writes during web requests and automate routing. They further optimized the system using a timing-based approach that restored replica read eligibility after the p99.9 replication lag elapsed.


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