Arc Notes Weekly #83: Seagull
This week, Dropbox cuts server costs by 25% with Robinhood, Spotify scales content annotations using automation, and Vercel boosts performance through microfrontends.
This week, delve into how Dropbox slashed server costs by 25% with their in-house load balancing service, Robinhood, and discover Spotify’s innovative method of generating millions of content annotations using a blend of human expertise and automation. Plus, explore how Vercel’s move to microfrontends revolutionized their site’s architecture, speeding up build times and enhancing developer velocity.
Enjoy this week’s roundup!
— Mahdi Yusuf (@myusuf3) or LinkedIn
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Articles
How We Generated Millions of Content Annotations
Spotify reveals how they scaled their machine learning efforts by generating millions of high-quality content annotations using a mix of human expertise and automation. This efficient platform sped up model training and development, making it easier to handle large-scale content, like songs and podcasts.Robinhood, our in-house load balancing service
Dropbox’s in-house load balancing service, Robinhood, has evolved to improve server load distribution and cut hardware costs by 25%. Leveraging PID controllers, it ensures better reliability across global data centers, especially crucial for AI workloads. The post delves into its architecture, how it handles load balancing, and lessons learned from its implementation.The Observability CAP Theorem
The article explores the trade-offs in observability systems, comparing them to the classic CAP theorem in distributed systems. It argues that while you can optimize for some properties like fast queries, data retention, or cost-efficiency, you can’t achieve all at once, particularly in large-scale applications. Carter highlights how different teams and organizations prioritize these aspects based on their needs and budgets.Streamline Workflow Automation with Budibase: Loved by 200,000 Teams
Budibase saves architects and engineers 100s of hours building apps and automating internal workflows. It's open source, connects to any data source, offers free SSO, and is loved by over 200,000 teams worldwide.
Transform your workflows for free with Budibase
How Vercel Adopted Microfrontends
Vercel shares how shifting to microfrontends transformed their site’s architecture, cutting build times and boosting developer velocity. By breaking their app into vertical microfrontends, Vercel improved performance, simplified dependencies, and made development faster and more efficient.Projects
phidata
Explore how the open-source framework Phidata enables you to build AI agents with memory, knowledge, and reasoning capabilities, featuring an intuitive agent UI. Whether it’s creating search or finance agents, working in teams, or experimenting with reasoning, the possibilities are wide and accessible for developers.drasi
Drasi is an open-source platform designed for real-time data processing, allowing you to detect changes and take immediate action with minimal overhead. It tracks system logs and feeds, processes them with continuous queries, and triggers automated responses based on the results, offering a streamlined way to react to critical events.
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
Explore how a political decision to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands threatens the .io domain, affecting online businesses and tech infrastructure in unexpected ways.Thanks for checking out this week’s newsletter. From exploring load balancing at Dropbox to how Spotify scales content annotations, and a deep dive into microfrontends at Vercel—there’s plenty to spark ideas.