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Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#81

Post by FelipeCortez »

klenwell wrote: post #54
alhirzel wrote: post #14

You can get a good view on some architectures from AOSA, thought it may not be as focused on web as you're looking for: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html A good example is Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems by Kate Matsudaira: http://aosabook.org/en/distsys.html

On topic of architecture of open source applications, Wikimedia shares this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

It's pretty cool how their Grafana is open https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000002/api-backend-summar...

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#82

Post by neoeno »

I was developing some architecture training recently and had this very same question. It’s not easy to find realistic architectures.

The best I found was the German contact tracing app — Corona Warn App. It was done by a group of consultancies in collaboration with the German govt, and went from inception to launch in around fifty days — largely if not totally open source.

Here’s the repo that has all the architecture in: https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation

It’s got full git history so you can see it evolve over time, along with the implementations (also on Github).

There’s a pretty fascinating short talk by one of the people who led the project on youtube too — more about the process side though: https://youtu.be/5y1sHSkPWRg?t=1770

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#83

Post by kitd »

gitfan86 wrote: post #55
JonChesterfield wrote: post #40

A popular choice in the real world is known as 'the big ball of mud', e.g. as described at http://www.laputan.org/mud/ .

It isn't really a choice, it is just what happens due to incentives and changing needs and leaders and politics and technologies inside the company. People assume that software architecture is like building architecture, in some ways it is, but NO ONE has ever showed up to a construction site that was half way done and said "Hey guys the steel framing we ordered has been delayed so please continue building the rest o…

A better description is that of garden landscaping.

You have a reasonable idea of what you want to achieve, and it looks good on paper, but until you have actually walked through it, touched and felt it, you don't know whether it really does what you wanted.

And of course, it changes as it matures, and what was great at first can become overgrown and resource-hungry.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#85

Post by hamasho »

swyx wrote: post #34
hamasho wrote: post #22

> Other than some very high-profile companies (like Netflix, github) ... it's hard for me to find easily digestible (20-60 mins) examples So I think this doesn't meet your requirements, but I like Tech Dummies Narendra L's YouTube videos [0]. He introduces big tech companies' systems in 30-60min videos and it's not difficult to understand. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkQkbY7JNJuBoTemzQfjy...

so like.. not to be too cynical but how does he know his representation is correct or at least not misleading? a lot of youtuber content is just made up.

Yeah... It's dangerous to accept random YouTubers' content as fact mindlessly.

I'm not sure all he says are correct, but at least he uses the target companies' engineer blogs, external articles, and some open-sourced part of systems (and list them in the video's detail section). His main targets are often big techs like Twitter, Uber, and Netflix, so I guess such documents are often available.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#86

Post by explaingarlic »

It's good to note that it depends largely on the company you're looking at.

I work for a very large organization (~£6bil in revenue, £700mil in profit last year) and we suffer from the "mud" problem - nothing about our technology stack is particularly special, it's just a hodgepodge of many different technologies that struggle to work together. That's not entirely fair - I work within a very unique solution inside of this firm, but I'm in a very unique position and I'm sad to say that it took a silly amount of hard work just to be able to not work on legacy applications.

That being said, the companies you mention (Netflix, Github) work completely differently - they were designed with tech in mind! They probably are much more lean in a technological sense, and don't suffer from enterprise architectural issues that large legacy firms do.

I suspect that this inability to move has singlehandedly killed more than one company, though I haven't studied the market to the point that I could really name any. The real kudos has to be given to large companies that existed before the internet and were able to move away from their slow-to-adapt, horribly inefficient legacy systems.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#87

Post by evanelias »

jedberg wrote: post #47
cfors wrote: post #16

High Scalability has some good articles around this. http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/

Keep in mind that the author of that blog doesn't actually talk to anyone at the company they are writing about, they just collect articles around the internet and public statements and piece it together from that. For example one of the most popular article on that site (which is part of their book now) is the article on Netflix. A lot of that was cribbed directly from my talks, but they never reached out to me to e…

Other times, they would directly talk to a single employee, but get skewed or misleading information based entirely just on that one employee's POV.

Their post about Tumblr's architecture [1] focused a lot about JVM-based services, HBase, etc which in reality was only ever used for a tiny subset of the backend. The huge section on "Cell Design for Dashboard Inbox" was especially ridiculous: the systems described there were literally a mix of complete vaporware and failed/canceled projects that never even got close to production.

As an early Tumblr engineer, I was really upset to read this nonsense. I spent several months of my life working very long hours to successfully scale the existing (PHP/MySQL) dashboard activity feed architecture in 2011-2012. It continued to be used as-is for many years after this interview, with lower latency and much lower cost than the proposed hbase/scala cell replacement.

And of course, engineering candidates being interviewed would always ask about this hbase cell architecture thing that they read about in High Scalability...

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur...

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#88

Post by Asooka »

Try and search for SDKs of some large software. Usually those would be programs for creating content - audio, 3d modelling, 2d drawing, etc. Every major vendor has a plugin architecture that quite obviously leaks implementation details. So stuff like Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk 3dsMax, FL Studio. All these have public SDKs that you can download, explore and write plugins for. You can probably think of some more programs that support third party plugins.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I see many examples of real companies' software architecture?

#90

Post by foxbee »

I know it's not a 20-60 min example, but I find reading open source repos very informing:. I'm the cofounder of Budibase, and I like to jump on a call with new contributors and take them through the high-level arch and repo: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
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