We believe latency and caching are crucial subjects we need to talk about. Loading times are a critical component in the user's experience for all apps and websites: new pages and screens should load in less than a second for end-users to have a smooth experience.

Whether you're transitioning away from a monolith or building a green-field app, opting for a microservice architecture brings many benefits as well as certain challenges. These challenges include namely managing the network and maintaining observability in the microservice architecture. Enter the service mesh, a valuable component of modern cloud-native applications that handles inter-service communication and offers a solution to network management and microservice architecture visibility.

Virtualization is a core component of cloud computing and the key technology to optimize usage of hardware's resources. While it has been around for decades, new innovations continue to improve its efficiency and performance for modern workloads. In this blog post, we provide a brief overview of virtualization and its history as well as explain how Firecracker and lightweight virtualization are fueling modern deployments.

While a vital component of any app's stack is the database, managing a database is challenging and hard work. Not only do you need to set up, maintain, scale, and patch databases, but also you need to create strong backup policies, ensure sharding and replications. Long story short, managing a database is time-consuming and requires a dedicated and skilled team, which is why a major trend for managing databases is DBaaS, or Database as a Service.

In an event-driven architecture, event routers are the components that connect event consumers to event producers. Not all implementations of event routers are the same, nor do any of them offer an all-purpose solution, so deciding which one to use depends on your use case and project's needs. Understanding their capabilities and limitations provides key insights that empower you to confidently decide which one to use and prepare you to navigate its shortcomings.

Whether you're breaking up a monolith or building a green-field application, you may consider using a microservice architecture. Like all app architectures, this model brings opportunities and challenges that a developer must be aware of in order to make the most of this app design. One such challenge is ensuring communication between your microservices.

Synchronous and asynchronous, also known as sync and async, are two types of programming models. At an abstract level, programming models define how software is designed and executed. The basic programming models are synchronous, but asynchronous models are critical for performance reasons and to more efficiently use computing resources. Programming languages usually have built-in primitives to deal with asynchronous programming.

Whether you're building a new application or adding new features to an existing application, it is worthwhile to reflect on the structure and design of what you're building. Not only does app architecture make the difference between a good app and an excellent app, but it can also either contribute to technical debt or mitigate it.

As we discussed in Firecracker MicroVMs: Lightweight Virtualization for Containers and Serverless Workloads, Firecracker is a lightweight virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses Linux kernel-based virtual machines (KVM) to provision and manage lightweight virtual machines (VMs), also known as microVMs. Without further ado, here is a list of the top ten reasons why we love Firecracker.

When creating new cloud-native applications, developers need to choose the development and deployment methods that best serves their application's needs and purpose. At the same time, organizations are always looking to optimize their cloud budgets and efficiency. Two popular deployment strategies are Function as a Service (FaaS) and Container as a Service (CaaS). Perhaps you've heard about them!