Mar 27, 2025
Let's Take a Look at... JEP 483: Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking!
Java 24 got released last week, and what a meaty release it is: more than twenty Java Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) have been shipped, including highlights such as compact object headers (JEP 450, I hope to spend some time diving into that one some time soon), a new class-file API (JEP 484), and more flexible constructor bodies (JEP 492, third preview). One other JEP which might fly a bit under the radar is JEP 483 ("Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking"). It promises to reduce the start-up time of Java applications without requiring any modifications to the application itself, what’s not to be liked about that? Let’s take a closer look!
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Mar 18, 2025
The Synchrony Budget
For building a system of distributed services, one concept I think is very valuable to keep in mind is what I call the synchrony budget: as much as possible, a service should minimize the number of synchronous requests which it makes to other services.
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Mar 5, 2025
Let's Take a Look at... KIP-932: Queues for Kafka!
That guy above? Yep, that’s me, whenever someone says "Kafka queue". Because, that’s not what Apache Kafka is. At its core, Kafka is a distributed durable event log. Producers write events to a topic, organized in partitions which are distributed amongst the brokers of a Kafka cluster. Consumers, organized in groups, divide the partitions they process amongst themselves, so that each partition of a topic is read by exactly one consumer in the group.
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Jan 28, 2025
Get Running with Apache Flink on Kubernetes, part 2 of 2
This post originally appeared on the Decodable blog. All rights reserved.
Welcome back to this two-part blog post series about running Apache Flink on Kubernetes, using the Flink Kubernetes operator. In part one, we discussed installation and setup of the operator, different deployment types, how to deploy Flink jobs using custom Kubernetes resources, and how to create container images for your own Flink jobs. In this part, we’ll focus on aspects such as fault tolerance and high availability of your Flink jobs running on Kubernetes, savepoint management, observability, and more. You can find the complete source code for all the examples shown in this series in the Decodable examples repository on GitHub: on GitHub.
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Jan 21, 2025
Get Running with Apache Flink on Kubernetes, part 1 of 2
This post originally appeared on the Decodable blog. All rights reserved.
Kubernetes is a widely used deployment platform for Apache Flink. While Flink has had native support for Kubernetes for quite a while, it is in particular the operator pattern which makes deploying Flink jobs onto Kubernetes clusters a compelling option: you define jobs in a declarative resource, and a control loop running in a component called a Kubernetes operator takes care of provisioning and maintaining (e.g. scaling, updating) all the required resources. Automation is the keyword here, significantly reducing the manual effort required for running Flink jobs in production.
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Dec 3, 2024
Failover Replication Slots with Postgres 17
This post originally appeared on the Decodable blog. All rights reserved.
Postgres read replicas are commonly used not only to distribute query load amongst multiple nodes, but also to ensure high availability (HA) of the database. If the primary node of a Postgres cluster fails, a read replica can be promoted to be the new primary, processing write (and read) requests from thereon.
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Nov 27, 2024
Thoughts On Moving Debezium to the Commonhaus Foundation
If you are following the news around Debezium—an open-source platform for Change Data Capture (CDC) for a variety of databases—you may have seen the announcement that the project is in the process of moving to the Commonhaus Foundation. I think this is excellent news for the Debezium project, its community, and open-source CDC at large. In this post I’d like to share some more context on why I am so excited about this development.
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Nov 16, 2024
Building OpenJDK From Source On macOS
Every now and then, it can come in very handy to build OpenJDK from source yourself, for instance if you want to explore a feature which is under development on a branch for which no builds are published. For some reason I always thought that building OpenJDK is a very complex processing, requiring the installation of arcane tool chains etc. But as it turns out, this actually not true: the project does a great job of documenting what’s needed and only a few steps are necessary to build your very own JDK.
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Oct 31, 2024
Revisiting the Outbox Pattern
This post originally appeared on the Decodable blog. All rights reserved.
Over the last few years, the outbox pattern has become a common solution for implementing data exchange flows between microservices. It allows services to safely and reliably update their own local datastore and at the same time send out notifications to other services via data streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka. But time isn’t standing still: people ask about disadvantages of the pattern (is the database becoming a bottleneck?), alternative solutions such as "listen-to-yourself" have been proposed, Kafka is about to get support for participating in 2-phase commit (2PC) transactions, and more. It’s time to take another look at the outbox pattern, what it is and how to implement it, whether it’s still relevant in 2024, and which alternatives exist!
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Oct 18, 2024
CDC Is a Feature Not a Product
During and after my time as the lead of Debezium, a widely used open-source platform for Change Data Capture (CDC) for a variety of database, I got repeatedly asked whether I’d be interested in creating a company around CDC. VCs, including wellknown household names, did and do reach out to me, pitching this idea.
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