标签：#micro

Eager to find more public AI-related companies that may do as well as Nvidia, Wall Street investors think they've found a winner with Micron.

A checkout saga spans inventory, payment, shipping, and loyalty. Downstream latency shifts every hour. Black Friday is not the day to discover your payment step timeout is baked into application.yml across twelve Spring Boot services. Kiponos.io gives every saga participant the same live orchestration parameters — step timeouts, retry budgets, compensation triggers — via one shared config tree. Each JVM reads locally on every saga step; ops adjusts once in the dashboard; WebSocket deltas propagate without redeploying the fleet. Why sagas break with static config Typical saga coordinator code: if ( step . elapsedMs () > 8000 ) { compensate ( "payment" , sagaId ); } That 8000 usually comes from: Per-service YAML — payment service says 8s, inventory says 12s; nobody agrees during an incident Env vars in Helm — change means rolling twelve deployments Shared DB config table — poll per step adds latency and coupling Saga steps are high-frequency reads inside workflow engines. You need local memory reads and async updates — the same contract as live API rate limits . Architecture: one tree, many participants ┌─────────────────┐ WebSocket deltas ┌──────────────────────┐ │ Kiponos.io UI │ ────────────────────────► │ Inventory service │ │ platform ops │ │ Payment service │ └─────────────────┘ │ Shipping service │ │ (each: in-mem SDK) │ └──────────┬───────────┘ │ .getInt() local ▼ ┌──────────────────────┐ │ saga step executor │ └──────────────────────┘ Every participant connects to profile ['orders']['v2']['prod']['sagas'] . When NOC extends payment.step_timeout_ms , all JVMs see the new value on the next step — no config server poll, no inter-service "what is timeout now?" REST calls. Shared saga config tree sagas/ checkout/ payment/ step_timeout_ms : 8000 max_retries : 2 retry_backoff_ms : 500 compensate_on_timeout : true inventory/ step_timeout_ms : 5000 max_retries : 3 hold_ttl_seconds : 120 shipping/ step_timeout_ms : 12000 fallback_carrier : ups_ground global/ saga_ttl_m

TL;DR I built a personal VPN using AWS Lambda MicroVMs. Your traffic exits from AWS. When you disconnect, the MicroVM terminates — zero cost, nothing running. When you reconnect, a fresh MicroVM launches in about 20 seconds. ./vpn.sh start # All Mac traffic now exits from AWS ./vpn.sh stop # Back to your real IP Here is what I learned across 12 image builds — dead ends, kernel limitations, and what finally worked. The Idea Lambda MicroVMs launched in June 2026 (4 days ago). They are Firecracker VMs with: Full Linux OS — your own binaries, eBPF, iptables, network namespaces Suspend/resume — state preserved on snapshot, resumes in ~1s per GB (or terminate for zero ongoing cost) Hardware-level isolation — every session gets its own sandbox Per-second billing — ~$0.13/hr for a 2GB ARM64 (Graviton) instance 8-hour max lifetime (active + suspended combined) I wanted to run a VPN inside one. Connect when I need privacy. Disconnect and pay nothing for compute. Resume instantly when I reconnect. Took 12 image builds to get there. What I Tried (and Failed) Attempt 1: NAT Gateway Replacement (The Original Idea) This is actually where the project started. I was paying $32/mo for a NAT Gateway and thought: what if a MicroVM running nftables could replace it? Serverless NAT. Pay only when traffic flows. Why it failed: Lambda MicroVMs cannot act as VPC route targets. Their networking is ingress-only (HTTPS + JWT). Other VPC resources cannot route through a MicroVM. The VPC egress connector gives the MicroVM its own internet access. It does not make it a transit device. That killed the NAT idea. But it made me think — if I cannot route VPC traffic through it, what about routing my own laptop's traffic through it? That is how Serverless VPN was born. Attempt 2: VPC Egress Connector I created a VPC, subnets, security groups, and a network connector. One hour wasted. MicroVMs have INTERNET_EGRESS by default. The connector is only needed for reaching private VPC resources (RDS, interna

Nine jurors. Two hours of deliberation. Twenty-six claims at the original federal complaint's peak. Three surviving claims at trial. Zero claims surviving the verdict. One hundred fifty billion dollars of maximum disgorgement exposure if the verdict had gone the other way. One hundred thirty billion dollars of OpenAI Foundation equity stake under the October 28, 2025 recapitalization. Thirty-eight million dollars of total Musk contributions per his sworn trial testimony. Forty-four million per the legal complaint. Eight years from the January 2, 2016 Sutskever-Musk "less open / Yup" email exchange to the August 2024 federal filing date. Three years of statute-of-limitations runway on the breach-of-charitable-trust claim; two years on the unjust-enrichment claim. The verdict in Musk v. Altman came in this morning at the federal courthouse on Clay Street in Oakland, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. The companion piece, The Calendar Technicality , makes the doctrinal argument that the procedural dismissal is the substantive determination California charitable-trust law would have produced on the merits as well. This piece takes the same conclusion through the numbers. The dollar-and-time math closed the merits door before the doctrinal door even came into view. Two hours, in context Federal-court civil-trial deliberations on complex commercial cases typically run between one and five days. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' annual judicial-business reports show median civil-jury deliberation in the multi-day range for cases with three or more issues to resolve and dollar exposure above one billion. The two-hour deliberation in Musk v. Altman is roughly one to two standard deviations below the median for cases of this complexity. The brevity is not a function of jury inattention. The trial ran three weeks. Roughly four hours of testimony came from Altman alone on May 12, with cross-examination opening with Musk's lea

About a quarter of PCs are still running Microsoft's previous operating system.

The company says the increases are being driven by rising memory and console storage prices, with costs more than 2.5x higher than previous levels.

Throughout my career, transitioning between CTO roles and, more recently, focusing purely on distributed systems architecture and high-performance engineering, I've seen many architectural patterns rise and fall. But few have caused as much silent damage to company bottom lines as the premature adoption of microservices. Over the last decade, the industry bought into the idea that, in order to scale, you needed to split your system into dozens (or hundreds) of independent services. The practical result I find in most companies? The creation of the dreaded "Distributed Monolith." The Anatomy of Waste: Networks vs. Memory The hard truth we need to face with maturity is that microservices primarily solve problems of organizational scale (Conway's Law), not necessarily performance. If your engineering team isn't the size of Netflix or Uber, prematurely fragmenting your codebase is shooting yourself in the foot. Technically, what happens when we break down a monolith without the proper domain boundaries? We trade extremely fast and cheap local function calls (resolved in the processor's L1/L2 Cache) for slow and expensive network calls (TCP/IP). We start spending an absurd amount of computational time on constant JSON serialization and deserialization, and the AWS bill explodes with internal traffic costs (egress/ingress) between Availability Zones (AZs). You haven't scaled your application; you've merely added network latency and infrastructure complexity. The Return of the Modular Monolith True seniority in software engineering isn't about mastering the most complex architecture of the moment, but having the wisdom to know when not to use it. That's why the Modular Monolith has consolidated itself as the initial gold standard for new projects and restructurings. In a well-designed Modular Monolith (and languages with strong type systems and strict scope control, like Rust, shine absurdly well here), you maintain the logical separation of domains. Modules are independen

Microsoft just added a cheaper 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop to its lineup. Both models come equipped with 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB, costing $849 for the specced-down Surface Pro and $949 for the Surface Laptop, as spotted earlier by Windows Central. When the 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop launched […]

Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company's profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year.

A critique published in Nature Wednesday calls the basic technology behind Microsoft's "breakthrough" quantum computing chip the Majorana 1 into question. Microsoft unveiled the chip in February 2025 and said it featured a brand-new technology known as a topological qubit. Topological qubits, they said, would be the "building blocks" for their future quantum computer. Microsoft […]

Why API Breaking Changes Still Reach Production Even With CI/CD A few years ago I watched a "tiny" API change take down checkout for about forty minutes. The change was a one-liner. The pull request had two approvals. CI was green across the board. And it still broke production, because the thing that actually mattered was never tested. If you run microservices at any real scale, you have lived some version of this. Let's talk about why it keeps happening even with a mature pipeline, and what the teams who don't keep getting paged do differently. The Problem Here's the change that caused the outage. A payments service had a response that looked like this: { "status" : "ok" , "transaction_id" : "txn_8842" , "amount_cents" : 4200 } Someone renamed amount_cents to amount and switched it to a decimal, because "cents is confusing." Cleaner field, better docs. The producing service's tests were updated to match, everything passed, it shipped. The problem: three downstream services still read amount_cents . One of them was the order service, which now received undefined , multiplied it by a quantity, and wrote NaN into the database. The failures didn't even surface in the payments service. They surfaced two hops away, in a service the original author had never opened. This is the core issue. A breaking change is not defined by the service that makes it. It's defined by the consumers who depend on it. And the producer's CI pipeline has no idea those consumers exist. Why Existing Approaches Fail The natural reaction is "we need more tests." But look at what each layer actually checks. Unit tests verify the code does what the author intended. The author intended to rename the field. The unit tests were updated to expect amount . They passed because they were testing the new, broken behavior. Green unit tests told us nothing. Integration tests verify the service works with its own dependencies — its database, its cache, the APIs it calls. They almost never spin up the services

Introduction This is the second part of sharing my journey to create a microservices-based backend system, in the previous part, I introduced the system and its services. In this part I am going to mention the main things that happened with me from then until now. Transitioning to online DBaaS platforms The first main thing was to transition my databases from my local device to accessible over the internet. I used Neon and MongoDB Atlas . Although performance-wise it is better to deploy the database on the same server that the whole system so all services can access the databases without network overhead , This solution is better from a point, that is avoiding consuming the free VM instance that I got to host my main services, as with DBaaS platforms I will not require storage for databases or additional overhead to handle the DBMS on a free small resources-constrained VM. Observability Observability is one of the main concerns in any system, it gives the ability for the system to expose what happens inside it without any need to guess and manually trace the code to determine where the error may happened. I utilized OpenTelemetry , as I found it is most used and accepted tool to log, trace and collect metrics about the system and the traffic. Also, I loved that it is not related to specific framework, that is .NET by the way, I loved the idea that it is standalone tool. But logging and tracing and metrics collection will not be beneficial if we do not see it actually and can achieve monitoring from those telemetry data, so I used Grafana Cloud to export the telemetry data to some place that is accessible online and a tool that can generate dashboards and visualizing for the metrics ( Prometheus ), and UI that can show all the telemetry data easily. Deployment Until this point, we have a system that is fully functional and have consistent docker configuration for its services via Docker Compose, and it database is already there and available. Now this is the point at

The RAM, storage, and component crunch has come for new laptop prices. Plenty of models have gone up in price after being on the market for months, and so have those that’ve been on shelves for over a year. Plus, many new models are releasing at higher prices than the previous generation. So, it really […]

At this year's Microsoft Build 2026, Microsoft unveiled a broad set of enhancements to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) aimed at making Kubernetes a first-class platform for AI training, inference, and large-scale cloud-native applications. By Craig Risi

Microsoft inked a 20-year power purchase agreement with Chevron, locking in decades of carbon emissions from a new natural gas power plant.

Azure Functions shipped a serverless agents runtime in public preview at Build 2026. Agents are defined in .agent.md markdown files with YAML triggers, MCP server access, 1,400+ connectors, and sandboxed execution. The Functions team confirmed to InfoQ that the runtime adds no cold start overhead and no billing premium beyond standard Flex Consumption. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Everyone is talking about AI Agents. But before you build an AI Agent, there is one concept you absolutely need to understand: Generative AI. Generative AI is the technology that transformed software from systems that simply follow rules into systems that can understand language, generate responses, reason through instructions, and assist users in a natural way. As part of my new course: Develop Your First AI Agent with Microsoft Foundry I published the first lesson where we explore the journey from traditional software to Generative AI and understand why modern AI Agents became possible. 🎥 Watch the video here: Why This Topic Matters Many developers jump directly into AI Agents, prompts, tools, and frameworks. However, without understanding the evolution of AI, it becomes difficult to understand: Why AI Agents exist Why Large Language Models are important Why prompts work Why tools are needed How modern AI systems actually operate In this lesson, we start from first principles and build the foundation required for the rest of the course. What You'll Learn Traditional Software For decades, software followed a simple pattern: Input → Rules → Output Developers explicitly defined every behavior. This worked well until humans started interacting with software using natural language. Why Rule-Based Systems Break Imagine building a dietician chatbot. Users might ask: What should I eat? Suggest a healthy breakfast. What foods contain protein? Can I eat oats daily? All of these questions are similar. Yet they are phrased differently. Supporting thousands of variations quickly becomes impossible with manually written rules. Predictive AI Machine Learning introduced a new approach. Instead of writing rules, we train models using data. Examples include: Spam Detection Fraud Detection Recommendation Systems Predictive AI can make decisions. But it still cannot create content. Prediction vs Creation A predictive model can answer: Fraud probability: 87% But can it explain why? Ca

When organizations scale, a simple monolithic architecture often becomes difficult to maintain, deploy, and scale. This is where microservices come into the picture. However, moving to microservices introduces new challenges: How do we migrate from a monolith safely? How do we handle transactions across multiple services? How do we scale read-heavy applications efficiently? Three popular patterns solve these problems: Strangler Pattern – Monolith to Microservices Migration Saga Pattern – Distributed Transaction Management CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) – Read/Write Scalability 1. Strangler Pattern Why Do We Need It? Most companies cannot shut down a production monolith and rewrite everything from scratch. A complete rewrite is risky because: Development takes a long time. Existing customers are affected. Bugs can impact business operations. Rollback becomes difficult. The Strangler Pattern allows teams to migrate gradually with minimal risk. What Is It? The Strangler Pattern is a migration strategy where new microservices slowly replace parts of a monolithic application until the monolith is no longer needed. The name comes from the strangler fig tree, which gradually grows around another tree and eventually replaces it. How Does It Work? [Insert diagram here showing Client → API Gateway → Monolith + Microservices] Step 1 All requests go to the monolith. Client | v Monolith Step 2 Introduce an API Gateway (or Controller). Client | v API Gateway | v Monolith Step 3 Extract one module into a microservice. Client | v API Gateway |------> Order Service | v Monolith Step 4 Gradually move more modules. Client | v API Gateway |------> Order Service |------> Payment Service |------> Inventory Service | v Monolith Step 5 Eventually remove the monolith completely. Example Consider an e-commerce application. Initially, everything exists inside one application: Monolith ├── Orders ├── Payments ├── Inventory └── Users Over time: Orders become Order Service Payme

Microsoft recently introduced at Build 2026 Microsoft Scout, an always-on agent. Scout belongs to a new category of agents Microsoft called Autopilots: always-on agents that work autonomously on a user’s behalf with their own identity, without needing to be prompted each time. Microsoft Scout integrates with Work IQ and is based on the open-source agent framework OpenClaw. By Bruno Couriol

Every non-trivial business operation touches more than one system. An e-commerce order reserves inventory, charges a payment method, and schedules a shipment — three services, three databases. A bank transfer debits one account and credits another across two ledgers that may not even be in the same data center. A cloud VM provisioning workflow reserves a network port, allocates storage, starts the hypervisor, registers billing, and sends a notification — five services, five independent state stores. The question is: what happens when step four fails after steps one through three have already succeeded? In a monolith backed by a single database, the answer is simple: roll back the transaction. The database engine guarantees atomicity; either everything commits or nothing does. But when your workflow spans multiple services, each owning its own storage, there is no transaction boundary that wraps them all. There is no rollback button. Step one through three have already made durable changes to systems that do not know about each other, and step four's failure has left the system in an inconsistent state. This is not a pathological edge case. It is the default condition in any distributed architecture. And it gets worse: the failure might not be a hard error. The network might time out. The billing service might return a 503. You do not know whether step four applied its effect or not — you only know you did not receive a success response. Now what? This is the problem sagas were designed for. Client Inventory Svc Payment Svc Shipping Svc │ │ │ │ 1 │──reserve(item)──►│ │ │ │◄──── 200 OK ─────│ │ │ │ [reserved ✓] │ │ │ │ │ │ 2 │──────────── charge(card, $99) ────►│ │ │◄───────────────── 200 OK ──────────│ │ │ │ [charged ✓] │ │ │ │ │ 3 │─────────────────────── schedule(order) ─────────────►│ │◄─────────────────────────── 503 ──────────────────── │ │ │ │ [no record ✗] │ │ │ │ ╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ ⚠ Inconsistent state ║ ║ Inventory: it