#database-engineer

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

We know our man GRRM is fond of Beauty and the Beast, but i wonder if he was influenced for Sandor as well by Phantom of the Opera (another Batb story!). There's a Phantom adaptation which has the Phantom be named "Sandor", and he's not born disfigured, his face is burnt in a fire...And his dead wife has red hair. The film's from 1983 made for tv, obscure. maybe it's a coincidence but..

I checked GRRM's writings and interviews -- using zionius's So Spake Martin Extended search engine, which has everything -- and I'm afraid I can't find any time GRRM has ever even mentioned the Phantom of the Opera. I know sansan Phans have brought up the connection before, but the fact that, yes, POTO is also a beauty and the beast story may just be the simple reason for those shared tropes, sorry. And GRRM has said that Sandor being a real name was unintentional.

Thank you for that info about the 1983 TV movie, though. GRRM did start working in Hollywood in the 80s -- although not until 1985, he had just published The Armageddon Rag in '83 -- but it is possible he saw the movie when it was nationally broadcast on CBS. However, if he did, he's never mentioned it. Perhaps someone sometime could ask him about any perceived POTO connections...

[dkettchen]

absolutely unintelligeable meme I made during bootcamp lecture this morning

[insert-game]

i hate gen AI so much i wish crab raves upon it

[hobgobbin]

"Ai art isn't actually bad it's capitalism that's bad and an economic model that's based on working the most possible so you think ai is just taking away your money"

This isn't abt artists mad abt losing a few commissions on the internet this is about large numbers of artists getting their art stolen so people can make something out of THEIR stuff, that they worked for years to create, without permision. AND corporations using free software to steal instead of paying artists properly. You would think with the amount of artists that are like 'hey this is bad and harming me', as well as the whole ass Hollywood-wide strike that happened with AI usage being one of the key talking points you would understand that it's bad and should at the very least have rules put around it.

But actually artists should stop focusing on something they can try to curtail before it gets too wildly out of control and instead focus on uhhhhh dismantling the economy if they're so mad their stuff is being stolen

[jcmarchi]

A Few Ways That Cloudways Makes Running This Site a Little Easier

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-few-ways-that-cloudways-makes-running-this-site-a-little-easier/

A Few Ways That Cloudways Makes Running This Site a Little Easier

It’s probably no surprise to you that CSS-Tricks is (proudly) hosted on Cloudways, DigitalOcean’s managed hosting arm. Given both CSS-Tricks and Cloudways are part of DigitalOcean, it was just a matter of time before we’d come together this way. And here we are!

We were previously hosted on Flywheel which was a fairly boutique WordPress hosting provider until WP Engine purchased it years back. And, to be very honest and up-front, Flywheel served us extremely well. There reached a point when it became pretty clear that CSS-Tricks was simply too big for Flywheel to scale along. That might’ve led us to try out WP Engine in the absence of Cloudways… but it’s probably good that never came to fruition considering recent events.

Anyway, moving hosts always means at least a smidge of contest-switching. Different server names with different configurations with different user accounts with different controls.

We’re a pretty low-maintenance operation around here, so being on a fully managed host is a benefit because I see very little of the day-to-day nuance that happens on our server. The Cloudways team took care of all the heavy lifting of migrating us and making sure we were set up with everything we needed, from SFTP accounts and database access to a staging environment and deployment points.

Our development flow used to go something like this:

Fire up Local (Flywheel’s local development app)

Futz around with local development

Push to main

Let a CI/CD pipeline publish the changes

I know, ridiculously simple. But it was also riddled with errors because we didn’t always want to publish changes on push. There was a real human margin of error in there, especially when handling WordPress updates. We could have (and should have) had some sort of staging environment rather than blindly trusting what was working locally. But again, we’re kinduva a ragtag team despite the big corporate backing.

The flow now looks like this:

Fire up Local (we still use it!)

Futz around with local development

Push to main

Publish to staging

Publish to production

This is something we could have set up in Flywheel but was trivial with Cloudways. I gave up some automation for quality assurance’s sake. Switching environments in Cloudways is a single click and I like a little manual friction to feel like I have some control in the process. That might not scale well for large teams on an enterprise project, but that’s not really what Cloudways is all about — that’s why we have DigitalOcean!

See that baseline-status-widget branch in the dropdown? That’s a little feature I’m playing with (and will post about later). I like that GitHub is integrated directly into the Cloudways UI so I can experiment with it in whatever environment I want, even before merging it with either the staging or master branches. It makes testing a whole lot easier and way less error-prone than triggering auto-deployments in every which way.

Here’s another nicety: I get a good snapshot of the differences between my environments through Cloudways monitoring. For example, I was attempting to update our copy of the Gravity Forms plugin just this morning. It worked locally but triggered a fatal in staging. I went in and tried to sniff out what was up with the staging environment, so I headed to the Vulnerability Scanner and saw that staging was running an older version of WordPress compared to what was running locally and in production. (We don’t version control WordPress core, so that was an easy miss.)

I hypothesized that the newer version of Gravity Forms had a conflict with the older version of WordPress, and this made it ridiculously easy to test my assertion. Turns out that was correct and I was confident that pushing to production was safe and sound — which it was.

That little incident inspired me to share a little about what I’ve liked about Cloudways so far. You’ll notice that we don’t push our products too hard around here. Anytime you experience something delightful — whatever it is — is a good time to blog about it and this was clearly one of those times.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Cloudways is ideal for any size or type of WordPress site. It’s one of the few hosts that will let you BOYO cloud, so to speak, where you can hold your work on a cloud server (like a DigitalOcean droplet, for instance) and let Cloudways manage the hosting, giving you all the freedom to scale when needed on top of the benefits of having a managed host. So, if you need a fully managed, autoscaling hosting solution for WordPress like we do here at CSS-Tricks, Cloudways has you covered.

[okayto]

I'm having to use Google Scholar for an assignment and my gosh it is such a PAIN to try and narrow down results or refine searches.

Don't get me wrong it's a good tool (I normally use it to see if I can find full text for something not in a library database, or for just a cursory search for a topic I'm not diving into), but it seems so annoying to refine results. I've known some people who used it as their primary research tool for grad school instead of ever opening a library database and I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.

[scvnthorpe]

That time I restored a Database view

Recently at work we've been migrating an old database system to a new platform to save money - this kind of shit is what makes your business processes faster, cheaper and more correct - and this has entailed sifting through a lot of tables, views, and views made of tables and views!

As it happens the finance guy who does all the payroll and expenses is a great guy to work with and basically the one person who knows all the relevant business rules, but also basically treats databases like they're excel workbooks. As such you have a bunch of bits stitched to each other and we're just figuring out how to first move everything and then ease into a well-oiled relational model with no duplication and all together on a single database.

While we in the dev team were figuring out how to do this for finance we were recently testing out a modified version of a view built on top of the old version and accidentally deleted the old version and not the modified testing version.

Mistakes are bound to happen, but we needed to figure out how to either restore it or at least figure out how to work without it because finance people love their data views and reports. There are probably clever things you can do with any DBMS to find shit you just dropped and restore it from backup, but I then realised that I'd been tasked with generating all the scripts for the database objects. There had to be a script laying around!

Sure enough I went to dig up the build script for the dropped view, and I ran it.

I queried it, and everything was back in place.

Shit goes wrong sometimes, but having the right failsafes can really make a difference.

Script your shit, use backups, use version control!

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

Do I have to join a Bangles fan group on Facebook or something in order to find out who the hell played piano on their cover of "Going Down to Liverpool"?

[arshikasingh]

Why Use Java Interface?

An interface in Java is a blueprint of a class. It has static constants and abstract methods. There are three reasons due to which interface is used.

[raytaku]

So on my quest to build this web encyclopedia thing I've found out that not only personal use wikis are a thing, but business wikis are a thing too. Like. Wikis that the staff use for work stuff

Idk I thought that was neat

[exactlyironheart]

Inverted index is a way to accelerate keyword searches in logs. The idea is to tokenize texts into terms and map the terms to row IDs so the database system can locate the target keyword based on the row ID.

[datavalleyai]

important data engineering tips for beginners

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

FYI, if you have a library card (and if you don't, get one ASAP!) check your library's website for databases and other resources that are available FOR FREE for library members. For example, you can browse the New York Public Library's databases (many of which are available from anywhere with a NYPL library card number and PIN) here:

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[certify360]

GCP Cloud Database Engineer Practice Exam

Would you be willing to pass the GCP Cloud Database Engineer practice exam with confidence? Visit Certify360.ai, your trusted source for professional certification prep. We offer up-to-date practice exams, expert-curated questions, and real exam simulations tailored to Google Cloud certifications. Strengthen your knowledge, identify your weak areas, and get exam-ready with Certify360.ai – where cloud professionals go to succeed.

[arshikasingh]

Why Choose Java?

There are several features of Java due to which Java is popular for software development.

Simple Object-Oriented Portable Platform independent Secured Robust Architecture neutral Interpreted High Performance Multithreaded Distributed Dynamic

[acquaintsofttech]

Trends to Follow for Staunch Scalability In Microservices Architecture

Scalability in microservices architecture isn’t just a trend—it’s a lifeline for modern software systems operating in unpredictable, high-demand environments. From streaming platforms handling millions of concurrent users to fintech apps responding to real-time transactions, scaling right means surviving and thriving.

As a software product engineering service provider, we’ve witnessed how startups and enterprises unlock growth with a scalable system architecture from day 1. It ensures performance under pressure, seamless deployment, and resilience against system-wide failures.

And as 2025 brings faster digital transformation, knowing how to scale smartly isn’t just beneficial—it’s vital.

At Acquaint Softtech, we don’t just write code—we craft scalable systems!

Our team of expert engineers, DevOps specialists, and architectural consultants work with you to build the kind of microservices infrastructure that adapts, survives, and accelerates growth.

Let Talk!

Why Scalability in Microservices Architecture Is a Game-Changer

Picture this: your product’s user base doubles overnight. Traffic spikes. Transactions shoot up. What happens?

If you're relying on a traditional monolithic architecture, the entire system is under stress. But with microservices, you’re only scaling what needs to be scaled! 

That’s the real power of understanding database scalability in microservices architecture. You’re not just improving technical performance, you’re gaining business agility!

Here’s what that looks like for you in practice:

Targeted Scaling: If your search service is flooded with requests, scale that single microservice without touching the rest!

Fail-Safe Systems: A failure in your payment gateway won’t crash the whole platform—it’s isolated.

Faster Deployments: Teams can work on individual services independently and release updates without bottlenecks.

📊 Statistics to Know:

According to a 2024 Statista report, 87% of companies embracing microservices list scalability as the #1 reason for adoption—even ahead of speed or modularity. Clearly, modern tech teams know that growth means being ready. 

Scalability in microservices architecture ensures you’re ready—not just for today’s demand but for tomorrow’s expansion. 

But here’s the catch: achieving that kind of flexibility doesn’t happen by chance! 

You need the right systems, tools, and practices in place to make scalability effortless. That’s where staying updated with current trends becomes your competitive edge!

Core Principles that Drive Scalability in Microservices Architecture

Understanding the core fundamentals helps in leveraging the best practices for scalable system architecture. So, before you jump into trends, it's essential to understand the principles that enable true scalability. 

Without these foundations, even the most hyped system scalability tools and patterns won’t get you far in digital business!

1. Service Independence

It's essential for each microservice to operate in isolation. Decoupling allows you to scale, deploy, and debug individual services without impacting the whole system.

2. Elastic Infrastructure

Your system must incorporate efficient flexibility with demand. Auto-scaling and container orchestration (like Kubernetes) are vital to support traffic surges without overprovisioning.

3. Smart Data Handling

Scaling isn’t just compute—it’s efficient and smart data processing. Partitioning, replication, and eventual consistency ensure your data layer doesn’t become the bottleneck.

4. Observability First

Monitoring, logging, and tracing must be built in within every system to be highly scalable. Without visibility, scaling becomes reactive instead of strategic.

5. Built-in Resilience

Your services must fail gracefully, if its is destined to. Circuit breakers, retries, and redundancy aren’t extras—they’re essentials at scale.

These principles aren’t optional—they’re the baseline for every modern system architecture. Now you’re ready to explore the trends transforming how teams scale microservices in 2025!

Top Trends for Scalability in Microservices Architecture in 2025

As microservices continue to evolve, the focus on scalability has shifted from simply adding more instances to adopting intelligent, predictive, and autonomous scaling strategies. In 2025, the game is no longer about being cloud-native—it’s about scaling smartly!

Here are the trends that are redefining how you should approach scalability in microservices architecture.

🔹 1. Event-Driven Architecture—The New Default

Synchronous APIs once ruled microservices communication. Today, they’re a bottleneck. Event-driven systems using Kafka, NATS, or RabbitMQ are now essential for high-performance scaling.

With asynchronous communication:

Services don’t wait on each other, reducing latency.

You unlock horizontal scalability without database contention.

Failures become less contagious due to loose coupling.

By 2025, over 65% of cloud-native applications are expected to use event-driven approaches to handle extreme user loads efficiently. If you want to decouple scaling from system-wide dependencies, this is no longer optional—it’s foundational.

🔹 2. Service Mesh for Observability, Security, & Traffic Control

Managing service-to-service communication becomes complex during system scaling. That’s where service mesh solutions like Istio, Linkerd, and Consul step in. 

They enable:

Fine-grained traffic control (A/B testing, canary releases)

Built-in security through mTLS

Zero-instrumentation observability

A service mesh is more than just a networking tool. It acts like the operating system of your microservices, ensuring visibility, governance, and security as you scale your system. According to CNCF's 2024 report, Istio adoption increased by 80% year-over-year among enterprises with 50+ microservices in production.

🔹 3. Kubernetes Goes Fully Autonomous with KEDA & VPA

Though Kubernetes is the gold standard for orchestrating containers, managing its scaling configurations manually can be a tedious job. That’s where KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) and VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaler) are stepping in.

These tools monitor event sources (queues, databases, API calls) and adjust your workloads in real time, ensuring that compute and memory resources always align with demand. The concept of the best software for automated scalability management say that automation isn't just helpful—it’s becoming essential for lean DevOps teams.

🔹 4. Edge Computing Starts to Influence Microservices Design

As latency-sensitive applications (like real-time analytics, AR/VR, or video processing) become more common, we’re seeing a shift toward edge-deployable microservices!

Scaling at the edge reduces the load on central clusters and enables ultra-fast user experiences by processing closer to the source. By the end of 2025, nearly 40% of enterprise applications are expected to deploy at least part of their stack on edge nodes. 

🔹 5. AI-Powered Scaling Decisions

AI-driven autoscaling based on the traditional metrics ensures a more predictive approach. Digital platforms are now learning from historical traffic metrics, usage patterns, error rates, and system load to:

Predict spikes before they happen

Allocate resources preemptively

Reduce both downtime and cost

Think: Machine learning meets Kubernetes HPA—helping your system scale before users feel the lag. Great!

Modern Database Solutions for High-Traffic Microservices

Data is the bloodstream of your system/application. Every user interaction, transaction, or API response relies on consistent, fast, and reliable access to data. In a microservices environment, things get exponentially more complex as you scale, as each service may need its separate database or shared access to a data source.

This is why your choice of database—and how you architect it—is a non-negotiable pillar in the system scaling strategy. You're not just selecting a tool; you're committing to a system that must support distributed workloads, global availability, real-time access, and failure recovery!

Modern database systems must support:

Elastic growth without manual intervention

Multi-region deployment to reduce latency and serve global traffic

High availability and automatic failover

Consistency trade-offs depending on workload (CAP theorem realities)

Support for eventual consistency, sharding, and replication in distributed environments

Now, let’s explore some of the top database solutions for handling high traffic—

MongoDB

Schema-less, horizontally scalable, and ideal for rapid development with flexible data models.

Built-in sharding and replication make it a go-to for user-centric platforms.

Cassandra

Distributed by design, Cassandra is engineered for write-heavy applications.

Its peer-to-peer architecture ensures zero downtime and linear scalability.

Redis (In-Memory Cache/DB)

Blazing-fast key-value store used for caching, session management, and real-time analytics.

Integrates well with primary databases to reduce latency.

CockroachDB 

A distributed SQL database that survives node failures with no manual intervention. 

Great for applications needing strong consistency and horizontal scale.

YugabyteDB 

Compatible with PostgreSQL, it offers global distribution, automatic failover, and multi-region writes—ideal for SaaS products operating across continents.

PostgreSQL + Citus

Citus transforms PostgreSQL into a horizontally scalable, distributed database—helpful for handling large analytical workloads with SQL familiarity.

Amazon Aurora

A managed, high-throughput version of MySQL and PostgreSQL with auto-scaling capabilities. 

Perfect for cloud-native microservices with relational needs.

Google Cloud Spanner

Combines SQL semantics with global horizontal scaling.

Offers strong consistency and uptime guarantees—ideal for mission-critical financial systems.

Vitess

Used by YouTube, Vitess runs MySQL underneath but enables sharding and horizontal scalability at a massive scale—well-suited for read-heavy architectures.

Bottomline

Scaling a modern digital product requires more than just technical upgrades—it demands architectural maturity. Scalability in microservices architecture is built on clear principles of—

service independence, 

data resilience, 

automated infrastructure, and 

real-time observability.

Microservices empower teams to scale components independently, deploy faster, and maintain stability under pressure. The result—Faster time to market, better fault isolation, and infrastructure that adjusts dynamically with demand.

What truly validates this approach are the countless case studies on successful product scaling from tech companies that prioritized scalability as a core design goal. From global SaaS platforms to mobile-first startups, the trend is clear—organizations that invest early in scalable microservices foundations consistently outperform those who patch their systems later.

Scalability in microservices architecture starts with the right foundation—not reactive fixes. Consult the software experts at Acquaint Softtech to assess and align your system for scale. Contact us now to start building with long-term resilience in mind.

Get in Touch

FAQs

1. What is scalability in microservices architecture?

Scalability in microservices architecture refers to the ability of individual services within a system to scale independently based on workload. This allows you to optimize resource usage, reduce downtime, and ensure responsiveness during high-traffic conditions. It enables your application to adapt dynamically to user demand without overburdening the entire system.

2. Why are databases critical in scalable architectures?

A scalable system is only as strong as its data layer. If your services scale but your database can't handle distributed loads, your entire application can face performance bottlenecks. Scalable databases offer features like replication, sharding, caching, and automated failover to maintain performance under pressure.

3. What are the best practices for automated scalability?

Automated scalability involves using tools like Kubernetes HPA, KEDA, and VPA to auto-adjust resources based on real-time metrics. Best practices also include decoupling services, setting scaling thresholds, and implementing observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana. We just disclosed them all in the blog above!

4. Are there real-world case studies on successful product scaling?

Yes, many leading companies have adopted microservices and achieved remarkable scalability. For instance, Netflix, Amazon, and Uber are known for leveraging microservices to scale specific features independently. At Acquaint Softtech, we’ve also delivered tailored solutions backed by case studies on successful product scaling for startups and enterprises alike. Get in touch with our software expert to know more!