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Cloud Architecture
The Seven Rules of Multi-Tenant Systems
I spent ten years of my career working on the architecture of multi-tenant systems. That’s enough time to make and witness a lot of mistakes. I’ve learnt a lot. Now it’s time to distill the benefits of that learning into what I like to call the Seven1 Rules of Multi-Tenant Systems.
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It’s actually sixteen rules divided into seven categories but that doesn’t sound as snappy ↩
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Front End
Spreadsheets
React Virtual Scroll
Paged Infinite Virtual Scrolling
I’m working on a cloud spreadsheet system. It will support spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns. Potentially far more data than will fit into client memory, particularly a web client. Which means I need a front end implementation that can handle that.
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Cloud Architecture
Spreadsheets
Consistency for Event Sourced Systems
I’m a big fan of Event Sourced systems. I have a whole series of posts on implementing a cloud spreadsheet using event sourcing. However, so far, I’ve mostly waved my hands and told you that everything is wonderful.
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Cloud Architecture
Autodesk
Unique Ids
They say that there are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Cache invalidation is far too difficult, so let’s have a go at naming things. Specifically, how do you ensure that the name you use to identify some resource is unique?
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Cloud Architecture
Databases
ACID! - Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
There are lots of things you need to worry about when building a cloud application. Often the hardest problems only appear as you scale up, when multiple clients interact with the same data at the same time.
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Blog
One Year Anniversary
My first “proper” post to this blog was on September 5th 2022 (I don’t count the test post from August 2nd). A week later, I retired from my role at Autodesk. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for a year.
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Databases
Front End
Event Sourced Database Grid View
When we started on this journey, I told you that there was an easy way and a hard way to implement a database backed grid view. I then spent the next six posts in this series taking you through different variations of the hard way.
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Gear
AlphaESS Smile 5 Home Battery Storage System
I’ve wanted to get a home battery storage system for a while. We had solar panels installed back in 2009. On a sunny day I could see that we were generating much more electricity than we needed. The excess power is exported to the grid for a laughably low rate. Then when the sun goes down I can buy the power back from the grid at an extortionately high rate.
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Spreadsheets
AWS
Eventual Consistency for an Event Sourced Spreadsheet
Last time we looked at general approaches to ensuring eventual consistency in the cloud. Now it’s time to apply what we’ve learnt to the case of my Event Sourced Cloud Spreadsheet. Previously, I went into some detail on how to implement an Event Log using DynamoDB. Long story short, there are some operations that involve multiple writes and some that need to trigger side effects.
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Cloud Architecture
Ensuring Eventual Consistency
Remember how we used to build web apps? A database, some app servers and a load balancer. What we’d disparagingly call a Monolith today.