Month: February 2025

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Posted on mongodb google news. Visit mongodb google news

WILMINGTON, Del., Feb. 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — EnterpriseDB (“EDB”), the leading Postgres data and AI company, today announced the results of a new benchmark study from McKnight Consulting Group. The study confirms that EDB Postgres AI delivers superior performance over Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, and MySQL across transactional, analytical, and AI workloads—offering unmatched speed, cost efficiency, and scalability while giving enterprises full control over their sovereign data.

Enterprises need their IT budgets to go further for AI, but 55% is tied up in sustaining existing business operations, including maintaining legacy systems, instead of building a modern, sovereign data platform (Deloitte). Legacy technology also blocks AI adoption, making modernization essential for agility, cost efficiency, and innovation.

EDB Postgres AI provides the solution enterprises need to stay ahead—simplifying and modernizing their data infrastructure, eliminating legacy constraints, reducing TCO, and scaling AI in a secure, sovereign environment. The 2024 McKnight Consulting Group benchmark confirms that EDB Postgres AI delivers the superior performance and efficiency to power this transformation.

“Agility with open source is becoming a top priority for our customers as they look to reduce OPEX, free up resources for innovation, and move towards an AI and data-centric future. Our partnership with EDB enables enterprises to confidently work with open-source solutions like EDB Postgres AI, unlocking greater flexibility, scalability, and control over their data infrastructure,” said Ashish Mohindroo, GM s& SVP, Nutanix Database Service.

“This benchmark highlights the critical role of database performance in AI-driven workloads. EDB Postgres AI outperformed MongoDB in JSON processing—delivering significantly better speed and efficiency in a test that mirrors RAG AI use cases,” said William McKnight, President, McKnight Consulting Group. “For enterprises, database choice isn’t just a technical decision—it’s a strategic imperative for maximizing performance, optimizing costs, and ensuring future scalability.”

Benchmark Study Highlights

The 2024 McKnight Consulting Group benchmark compared EDB Postgres AI with Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, and MySQL in self-hosted environments. The results show a clear advantage for EDB Postgres AI across performance and total cost of ownership (TCO):

• 150x faster than MongoDB in processing JSON data
• 4x faster than MySQL in handling insert operations
• Outperformed Oracle by 17% and SQL Server by 30% in processing New Orders Per Minute (NOPM)
• 7x better price performance than Oracle and 6x better than SQL Server (measured in cost per transaction)

Neither MongoDB nor MySQL could finish a row-by-row insert of JSON data in the allotted 8 hours. EDB Postgres AI’s average time elapsed for row-by-row insert of JSON data was 150x faster than MongoDB, making it suitable for NoSQL and AI workloads.

This TPC-C test illustrates how EDB Postgres AI consistently outperforms Oracle and SQL Server for transactional workloads, showcasing its suitability for demanding enterprise environments.

“Modernizing application and data infrastructure is no longer optional—it’s essential in a world where data density, complexity, and agility define success. Through our work on complex Oracle migrations, we’ve seen firsthand how critical it is to demonstrate measurable ROI at every stage of the process,” said Satya Bolli, Chairman & Managing Director, Prolifics. “The McKnight research validates what we experience on the ground every day. Partnering with EDB enables us to deliver a seamless, high-value migration path that not only maximizes efficiency but also positions businesses for AI-driven innovation.”

Performance, Data Sovereignty, and AI-Readiness in One Platform

Unlike legacy and proprietary databases that struggle with scalability and cost inefficiencies, EDB Postgres AI is built for enterprise demands of high performance, sovereignty, and AI-readiness. EDB Postgres AI supports complex workloads while giving organizations greater control over their most strategic asset—their data infrastructure and AI.

“We decided to embrace an open source software strategy, because we see it as far more transparent, reliable, and secure. We know we can review the software at any time, which gives us greater confidence in the functionality and its configurability. Postgres gives us greater security than with any closed source database, as well as far greater flexibility to switch vendors and avoid expensive, traditional, perpetual licensing,” said EDB customer Christian Blaesing, Head of IT, telegra.

Many enterprises are also moving away from proprietary NoSQL databases like MongoDB, seeking better query performance, SQL compatibility, and reduced operational complexity.

“We were seeing how much we were paying Oracle, and it was just incredibly high. It seemed to be going up 10% to 15% per year. Moreover, we had a bunch of Oracle engineers who were just sick of dealing with Oracle,” said John Lovato, Database Architect, USDA Forest Service.

“The era of overpriced, proprietary databases is over. This benchmark confirms there’s a better way,” said Nancy Hensley, Chief Product Officer, EDB. “EDB Postgres AI delivers breakthrough performance over Oracle, SQL Server, and MongoDB—delivering a single, sovereign platform for data and AI without the constraints or costs of legacy vendors.”

Benchmark Report Now Available

For more information on the benchmark study and EDB Postgres AI, visit https://www.enterprisedb.com/resources/benchmarks/mcknight

About EDB

EDB provides a data and AI platform that enables organizations to harness the full power of Postgres for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads across any cloud, anywhere. EDB empowers enterprises to control risk, manage costs and scale efficiently for a data and AI led world. Serving more than 1,500 customers globally and as the leading contributor to the vibrant and fast-growing PostgreSQL community, EDB supports major government organizations, financial services, media and information technology companies. EDB’s data-driven solutions enable customers to modernize legacy systems and break data silos while leveraging enterprise-grade open source technologies. EDB delivers the confidence of up to 99.999% high availability with mission critical capabilities built in such as security, compliance controls, and observability. For more information, visit www.enterprisedb.com.

Media Contact:
Scott Lechner
Offleash PR for EDB
edb@offleashpr.com

EnterpriseDB and EDB are registered trademarks of EnterpriseDB Corporation. Postgres and PostgreSQL are registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada and used with their permission. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/31a4e23f-db67-44e8-ad25-bc58e603680e

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ce516693-cfa6-400b-826a-1df94531fb96

Article originally posted on mongodb google news. Visit mongodb google news

Posted on mongodb google news. Visit mongodb google news

#UAE #dataplatforms – MongoDB plans to more than double its Middle East, Türkiye and Africa (META) workforce in 2025 as Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s appetite for artificial intelligence and ongoing digital transformation, drives more demand for data platforms and services. The New York tech firm is a global leader in cloud database management, providing developers with tools to build AI-powered applications. MongoDB’s regional expansion follows five years of strong growth, and has a focus on hiring across sales, solutions architecture, channel partnerships, and customer success. According to LinkedIn, the company has more than 50 employees working in its META region, while more than 23,000 developers in the UAE list MongoDB as a skill in their LinkedIn profiles.

SO WHAT? – MongoDB’s expansion in META over the past five years, maps the region’s rapid adoption of AI and investment from business, government and academia in the development of AI models and solutions. In comparison with other leading global database vendors, MongoDB is a relative newcomer to the Middle East and the key markets of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but timing is everything and the vendor’s expansion plans are proof positive that it is matching market needs and delivering effectively.

Here’s some more information about MongoDB in the region:

• MongoDB plans to more than double its headcount across the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa (META) in 2025, with hiring focused on sales, solutions architecture, and customer success. According to LinkedIn the company currently has more than 50 employees in the region.

• MongoDB works with major retailers, financial institutions, and public sector organisations to support AI-powered applications. The tech firm has been operating in the Middle East since 2019.

• There are open-source and commercial versions of MongoDB’s unified database platform, which has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times by end-users and developers globally.

• Over 23,000 developers in the UAE have listed MongoDB as a skill on LinkedIn, reflecting a 20% year-on-year increase.

• The company has recently signed a partnership with Moro Hub, the data centre subsidiary of Digital DEWA, to accelerate digital transformation and AI adoption.

• MongoDB’s technology supports applications such as facial recognition for airport security, cargo tracking at major ports, and traffic monitoring for government entities.

• The database leader organised its first regional Customer Day Summit at Dubai’s Museum of the Future this week, hosting over 250 customers from the government, aviation, and retail sectors.

• MongoDB was recognised as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.

ZOOM OUT – Market growth in AI and digital transformation presents an enormous opportunity for technology vendors, in particular those focusing on emerging technologies. According to IDC spending on AI in Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) is soaring at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37%, with investments set to increase from $4.5 billion last year to $7.2 billion in 2026. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have led in AI-related investments, spending on solutions, platforms and R&D in context of ambitious digital transformation initiatives. IDC predicts that digital transformation investment overall in META will reach $74 billion in 2026 and account for 43.2% of all ICT investments.

Article originally posted on mongodb google news. Visit mongodb google news

Posted on mongodb google news. Visit mongodb google news

CIBC Asset Management Inc boosted its stake in MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDB – Free Report) by 239.6% in the 4th quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 49,973 shares of the company’s stock after purchasing an additional 35,256 shares during the quarter. CIBC Asset Management Inc owned approximately 0.07% of MongoDB worth $11,634,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Several other large investors have also added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Hilltop National Bank boosted its position in shares of MongoDB by 47.2% during the 4th quarter. Hilltop National Bank now owns 131 shares of the company’s stock valued at $30,000 after acquiring an additional 42 shares during the last quarter. Brooklyn Investment Group bought a new stake in shares of MongoDB during the 3rd quarter valued at about $36,000. Continuum Advisory LLC boosted its position in shares of MongoDB by 621.1% during the 3rd quarter. Continuum Advisory LLC now owns 137 shares of the company’s stock valued at $40,000 after acquiring an additional 118 shares during the last quarter. Wilmington Savings Fund Society FSB bought a new stake in shares of MongoDB during the 3rd quarter valued at about $44,000. Finally, Versant Capital Management Inc boosted its position in shares of MongoDB by 1,100.0% during the 4th quarter. Versant Capital Management Inc now owns 180 shares of the company’s stock valued at $42,000 after acquiring an additional 165 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 89.29% of the company’s stock.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other MongoDB news, Director Dwight A. Merriman sold 1,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction on Monday, February 10th. The stock was sold at an average price of $281.62, for a total value of $281,620.00. Following the sale, the director now directly owns 1,112,006 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $313,163,129.72. The trade was a 0.09 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this link. Also, insider Cedric Pech sold 287 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction on Thursday, January 2nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $234.09, for a total value of $67,183.83. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now directly owns 24,390 shares in the company, valued at $5,709,455.10. This trade represents a 1.16 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last three months, insiders have sold 43,094 shares of company stock valued at $11,705,293. 3.60% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

MongoDB Stock Performance

Shares of NASDAQ MDB traded down $3.52 during mid-day trading on Wednesday, hitting $295.00. 1,056,658 shares of the stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 1,502,277. MongoDB, Inc. has a 52 week low of $212.74 and a 52 week high of $459.78. The company has a market cap of $21.97 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -107.66 and a beta of 1.28. The stock has a fifty day moving average price of $261.45 and a 200-day moving average price of $272.51.

MongoDB (NASDAQ:MDB – Get Free Report) last released its quarterly earnings results on Monday, December 9th. The company reported $1.16 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.68 by $0.48. MongoDB had a negative return on equity of 12.22% and a negative net margin of 10.46%. The company had revenue of $529.40 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $497.39 million. During the same period in the previous year, the company posted $0.96 earnings per share. The firm’s revenue was up 22.3% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, sell-side analysts predict that MongoDB, Inc. will post -1.78 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

MDB has been the subject of a number of research analyst reports. Monness Crespi & Hardt downgraded MongoDB from a “neutral” rating to a “sell” rating and set a $220.00 price target for the company. in a research report on Monday, December 16th. Morgan Stanley lifted their price target on MongoDB from $340.00 to $350.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a research report on Tuesday, December 10th. KeyCorp raised their price objective on MongoDB from $330.00 to $375.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a report on Thursday, December 5th. Loop Capital raised their price objective on MongoDB from $315.00 to $400.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a report on Monday, December 2nd. Finally, Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage on MongoDB in a report on Friday, January 17th. They set an “overweight” rating and a $344.00 price objective on the stock. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, four have given a hold rating, twenty-three have assigned a buy rating and two have issued a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, MongoDB currently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $361.00.

View Our Latest Stock Analysis on MDB

MongoDB Profile

(Free Report)

MongoDB, Inc, together with its subsidiaries, provides general purpose database platform worldwide. The company provides MongoDB Atlas, a hosted multi-cloud database-as-a-service solution; MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a commercial database server for enterprise customers to run in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment; and Community Server, a free-to-download version of its database, which includes the functionality that developers need to get started with MongoDB.

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Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Google Cloud has announced that its Spanner Graph is now generally available (GA). It includes new capabilities such as Graph Notebook, GraphRAG with LangChain integration, Graph schema in Spanner Studio, and Graph query improvements by supporting path data type and functions.

Spanner Graph builds on Cloud Spanner, Google’s fully-managed, scalable, and highly available database. Hence, users can benefit from the same high availability, global consistency, and horizontal scalability.

Last August, the company introduced the database as a unified one that seamlessly integrates graph, relational, search, and AI capabilities with virtually unlimited scalability. The initial release offered an intuitive Graph Query Language (GQL) interface for pattern matching, full graph and SQL model interoperability, built-in search capabilities, and deep integration with Vertex AI for accelerated insights.

The new capabilities with the GA release are:

• A Spanner Graph Notebook that enables users to visually query and explore Spanner Graph data using GQL syntax within notebook environments like Google Colab and Jupyter Notebook, offering tools for graph schema visualization, tabular result inspection, various layout options, and easy integration.
• The integration of GraphRAG with LangChain and Neo4j, which enhances AI applications by combining knowledge graphs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation to facilitate efficient querying and natural language interactions with graph-based data.
• The Graph Schema in Spanner Studio that enables users to design, visualize, manage, and update graph schemas in Google Cloud Spanner using SQL/PGQ, offering best practices for efficient graph design and maintenance.
• Support for the path data type and functions, enabling users to analyze sequences of nodes and relationships, as demonstrated by the ability to check for acyclic paths in a graph query.
• Integration with leading graph visualization partners like GraphXR allows users to utilize advanced visualization technology and analytics to understand complex data better.

(Source: Google blog post)

Spanner Graph is designed to handle large-scale graph data workloads, making it ideal for applications that require real-time analysis of complex relationships. This includes use cases such as fraud detection, recommendation engines, and financial investments.

Kinevez, the company that has its visual GraphXR tool integrated with Spanner Graph, tweeted:

With improved search and built-in AI features, Spanner Graph can transform how businesses leverage connected data—whether in financial investing, fraud detection, or customer 360.

In addition, Abdul Rahim Roni commented on a LinkedIn post by Google:

This is an exciting leap forward, Google Cloud. Integrating graph, relational, and generative AI capabilities under Spanner Graph truly redefines database management. Incredible work in pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Lastly, more details are available on the documentation pages.

Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Transcript

Pogosova: Imagine you have built this simple serverless architecture in the cloud. You pick the pieces you want to use. You connected them together, and everything just works like magic, because that’s what serverless is. So much so that you decide to go to production with it. Of course, all of a sudden, hell breaks loose, and everything just starts to fail in all possible shapes and forms. There’s nothing that you have done wrong, at least that’s what you think, except for maybe not reading all the extensive documentation about all the services and all the libraries that you are using. Who does that nowadays anyway? What’s the next logical step? Maybe you just swear off using the architecture or services in question, never and again, because they just don’t work. Do they? What’s wrong with the cloud anyway? Why doesn’t it work? Maybe we just should go on-prem and build good old monoliths.

Purely statistically speaking, we might consider that the problem is not necessarily the cloud or the cloud provider, maybe not even the services or the architecture that you have built. What is it then? As Murphy’s Law says, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I personally prefer the more extended version of it that says, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.

Background

My name is Anahit. I’m a Lead Cloud Software Engineer at a company called Solita. I’m also an AWS Data Hero. There was this funny thing that I noticed after becoming an AWS Hero, for some reason, people just started to come to me with this smirk on their faces, saying, so tell us now, what’s wrong with the cloud? Why doesn’t it just work? I’m finally here to answer that question. Maybe not exactly that question, but I want us to look together at something that we as humans usually don’t feel too comfortable looking at, failures.

I hope that this talk helps you to become a little bit more aware and curious, maybe to spot patterns that others don’t necessarily see. Also, to have the tools to ask questions and make conscious, critical, and informed decisions, rather than believing in magic, taking control into your own hands. Finally, become a little bit paranoid, but in a good way, because, to borrow words of Martin Kleppmann, “In distributed systems, suspicion, pessimism, and paranoia pay off”.

A Failing Serverless Architecture

Before we go any deeper into talking about distributed systems and all the failures, let’s briefly get back to our story with serverless architecture that was failing. It actually had a prequel to it. Once upon a time, you were a developer that started developing software that was supposed to run on a single machine, probably somewhere in an on-prem data center. Everything you need to care about at that point were your so-called functional requirements, so that your code works and it does exactly what it’s supposed to, and it has as little bugs as possible. That was your definition of reliability. Of course, there could have been some occasional hardware failures, but you didn’t really care much about them, because things were mostly deterministic. Everything either worked or it didn’t.

Next thing you know, you find yourself from the cloud and maybe building software that you’re supposed to run on virtual machines in the cloud. All of a sudden, you start developing software that requires you to think about the so-called non-functional requirements, so certain levels of availability, scalability. Also, reliability and resilience get a whole new meaning. You still have all your functional requirements. You still need to make sure that your code works and has as little bugs as possible. The complexity just went up a notch, and you need to worry about so much more now. Also, failures start to be somewhat more pronounced and somewhat less deterministic. Welcome to the dark side, a wonderful world of distributed systems where with great power comes great responsibility.

Things don’t stop there, and before you know it, you jump over to the serverless world, where things just seem so easy again. You just pick the services. You connect them together. Pure magic. Of course, cloud providers take care of these most important ilities for you, things like reliability, availability, scalability, and you’re once again back to caring about your own code and the fact that it works and has as little bugs as humanly possible. You are not looking for any machines around. Moreover, the word serverless suggests that there are no machines that you need to be looking around. Things are just easy and nice and wonderful. Though, we know that that’s not exactly how the story goes, because anything that can go wrong will go wrong. What is it that can go wrong exactly?

Distributed Systems, Cloud, and Serverless

To set the stage, let’s talk a little bit about serverless, cloud, distributed systems in really simplified terms. Distributed systems, just a bunch of machines connected with a network. While it provides a lot of new and exciting ways to build solutions and solve problems, it also comes with a lot of new and exciting ways for things to go wrong, because resources we are using are not limited to a single machine anymore. They are distributed across multiple servers, server racks, data centers, maybe even geolocations. Failure can happen in many different machines now, instead of just one. Those failures can, of course, happen on many different levels. It can be software failures or hardware failures, so things like operating system, hard drive, network adapters, anything can fail. All of those failures can happen completely independently of each other and in the most non-deterministic way possible.

The worst thing here is that all of those machines are talking to each other over a network. Network is known for one thing in particular, whenever there is any communication happening over the network, it will eventually fail. Any cloud is built on top of such distributed systems, that’s where their superpowers come from. The cloud provider takes care of the most difficult part of managing the underlying distributed infrastructure, abstracting it away from us and giving us access to this really huge pool of shared resources that we can use, like compute, storage, network. They do that at a really massive scale that no individual user could ever achieve. Especially at the big scale, if something has a tiny little chance of happening, it most certainly will.

Serverless and fully managed services are just a step up in this abstraction ladder. They make the underlying infrastructure seem almost invisible, almost magical, so much so that we sometimes forget that it’s there. By using those serverless services, we didn’t just magically teleport to a different reality. We are still living in the very same messy physical world, still using the very same underlying infrastructure with all its complexity. Of course, this higher level of abstraction does make a lot of things easier, just like a higher-level programming language would. It also comes with certain danger.

Being seemingly simple to use, it might also give you this false sense of security, which might make spotting potential failures that much harder, because they are also abstracted away from you. The reality is, failures didn’t really go anywhere. They are still there, embedded in the very same distributed system that you are using, waiting to show up. As Leslie Lamport said in 1987, “A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”. We could rephrase this for serverless architectures. A serverless architecture is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know or cared existed can render your entire architecture unusable. Of course, failures with serverless are a bit different than failures with distributed systems. You don’t see them as blue screens or failures of the hardware, they manifest in a bit different way.

Distributed Architectures

Let’s take one last step in this abstraction ladder. We started with distributed system, then we had the cloud, then we had serverless. Now we are building distributed applications on top of serverless and distributed systems. In essence, what we do is we just split the problem at hand into smaller pieces. We pick resources or services for each piece. We connect them together with things like messages or HTTP requests or events, and just like that, we build ourselves a distributed application. All of those things are using network in some shape or form. You might have noticed that, in essence, we are mirroring the underlying distributed architecture that we are having.

Of course, distributed applications also give you this great power of building applications in a completely different way, but just like the underlying distributed architecture, they come with certain complexity and certain tradeoffs. Architectures that you are going to build are likely going to be complex. Every piece can fail at any given moment in the most non-deterministic way possible. Whenever there is any communication happening over network, it will eventually fail. Our special case of this kind of distributed architectures are the so-called data architecture, data applications. With data applications, we deal with collecting, storing, processing large amounts of data. The data can be anything, log data, maybe you have website clickstreams, or IoT data. Whatever data you have, as long as the volumes are large.

On one hand, that large volume makes spotting potential issues somewhat easier, because if something has a tiny chance of happening at a bigger scale, it will. Also, with data applications, maybe failures are not as obvious as with client facing applications. If there was a failure while processing the incoming data, nobody is going to resend you that data. Once the data is gone, it’s gone. We’ll see an example of such a data architecture.

How do we make our distributed architectures more resilient in the face of all those impending failures? While we are mirroring the underlying distributed system, let’s take a look at how cloud providers are dealing with all those failures. They do have quite some experience with that. Of course, there’s a lot of complex algorithms and mechanisms at play. Surprisingly, two of the most effective tools for making distributed architectures or distributed systems more resilient are also surprisingly simple, or at least seemingly simple, they are timeouts and retries.

Those are the things that we absolutely need to be aware of when we are building our distributed applications. I call them superpowers, because just like superpowers, they can be extremely powerful, but we need to be very mindful and careful about how we use them, not to do more harm. You might have noticed that so far, I haven’t mentioned any cloud providers, any services, nothing, because all of those things are pretty much universal to any of them. Now it’s finally time to move on from our fictional story, and also time for me to confess that it probably wasn’t as fictional as I wanted you to believe. In fact, it’s something that happened to me to some degree. I was working with a customer where we’re building this simple serverless, distributed architecture for near real-time data streaming at a pretty big scale.

On a quiet day, we would have over half a terabyte of data coming in. We wanted to collect and process and store that data. For that, we had our producer application that received the data. We connected it to a Kinesis Data Stream. On the other end, we connected an AWS Lambda to it, and just like that, we built ourselves a magical data processing pipeline. Things were just wonderful. We were very happy, until one day we realized we were actually losing data in many different places, and we had no idea it was happening. Thank you, higher level of abstraction. What exactly was going on there? Let’s look at it step by step. There were several places where that was happening.

Kinesis Data Streams

First, what is Kinesis Data Streams? It’s a fully managed, massively scalable service in AWS for streaming data. After you write the data to the stream, it appears in the stream within milliseconds, and it’s stored in that stream for at least 24 hours, or up to a year if you configure it to be so. During that entire time, you can process and reprocess, read that data in any way that you want, as many times as you want, but you cannot delete the data from the stream. Once it gets to the stream, it stays there for at least 24 hours. Kinesis is an extremely powerful tool. It’s mostly used for data applications, but also for event driven architectures. The power comes from the fact that you don’t need to manage any servers or any clusters.

Also, it scales pretty much massively. To achieve that massive scalability, Kinesis uses the concept of a shard. In this particular context, shard just means an ordered queue within the stream, and stream being composed of multiple such queues. Each shard will come with capacity limitation of how much data you can write to it, so 1 megabyte or 1000 records of incoming data per second. The amount of shards you can have in a stream are pretty much unlimited. You can have as many shards as you want to stream as much data as you need. When you write the data to the stream, it will end up in one of the shards in your stream.

Speaking about writing the data, there’s actually two ways in which you can write the data to the stream. In essence, you have to choose between two API calls. You either write individual records or you can batch up to 500 records in a single API call. Batching is usually a more effective and less resource intensive way to make API calls, especially in data intensive applications where the amount of individual calls can get really high, really quickly. Once again, when something sounds too good, there’s usually some things we need to consider, and we’ll get back to that.

How Failures Manifest

We have established by now that the failures will happen. There’s no way around that. How do those failures manifest with this higher level of abstraction, with serverless services, with services like Kinesis, for example. It’s actually pretty straightforward, because when we interact with services, let’s say, from our code, we are using API calls, and naturally, any of those API calls can fail. The good news is that if you are using AWS SDK to make those API calls from your code, it handles most of those failures for you. After all, AWS does know that the failures will happen, so they have built into the SDK one of those essential tools for better resilience, or a superpower as we know it, the retries. The trouble with the retries is that now we have a potential of turning a small intermittent problem, let’s say a network glitch, into a really massive one, because retries can have really unexpected blast radius.

They can spread this ripple effect of cascading failures through your entire system and ultimately bring the entire system down, because retries are ultimately selfish, just like when you’re hitting the refresh button in a browser. We all know we shouldn’t do it, but we do it anyway. Retrying implies that our request is more important, more valuable than anybody else’s. We are ready to spend more resources, we are ready to add load, to add potential cost on the downstream system, just to make sure that our request goes through no matter what.

The reality is that retries are not always effective, neither are they safe. First and foremost, which failures do we even retry? Let’s say the failure is caused by the downstream system, such as database or API being under a really heavy load. Then if you are retrying, you are probably making the matter worse. Or let’s say the request failed because it took too much time and it timed out. Then retrying will take more time than you are actually prepared to wait. Let’s say you have your own SLA requirements. Then that basically means that retrying is just selfishly using the resources that you don’t really need. It’s just like pressing the refresh button and just closing the browser. What if the underlying system also have their own retries implemented? Let’s say they also have a distributed application. They have different components. Each of them has retries on a certain level.

In that case, our retries will just be multiplied, and they will just amplify all the potential bad things that can happen. This is the place where this ripple effect of cascading failures can happen really easily, especially if we start retrying without giving the underlying system a chance to recover. Let’s say, what if the operation that you’re actually retrying has side effects? Let’s say you’re updating a database. Then retries can actually have unexpected results. The bottom line is, you need to be extremely careful about how we use this superpower. We don’t want to bring down the system that we are trying to fix.

Luckily, in case of AWS SDK, retries already come with these built-in safety measures. If a request to a service such as Kinesis fails, AWS SDK will only handle the so-called retryable errors, so things like service unavailable, other 500 errors, or timeouts. For those retryable errors, it will retry them on your behalf, behind the scenes, but it will stop after a certain amount of attempts. Between those retry attempts, it will use the so-called exponential backoff, which means that delays between retry attempts will be increasing exponentially. These things might seem very simple, but they are actually crucial details that can either make it or break it. They can turn retries from being a very powerful tool for better resilience into the main cause of a system outage, because we only want to be retrying if it actually helps the situation, so only retryable failures.

When we do retry, we do want to stop if it doesn’t help the situation anymore, to avoid that ripple effect of cascading failures as much as possible. Also, we want to spread the retry attempt as uniformly as possible, instead of just sending this burst of retries to a system that is already under a heavy load, to give the system a chance to recover. With AWS SDK, you are given these safety measures, but you are also given the possibility to configure some of those retry parameters. Here’s an example how you would do this with JavaScript SDK. Every language will have their own ways to configure them and their own default values, but all of them will give you a possibility to configure some of those values.

The same way, they will give you the possibility to configure the second superpower that we have, the timeout related values. If timeouts don’t sound like too much of a superpower to you, I have news for you. Timeouts are pretty much a given in distributed systems, and we absolutely need to be aware of them.

Once again, in simplified terms, let’s talk about timeouts. When we are interacting with services, no matter, are they serverless or not, we are using API calls. Usually, those API calls are abstracted away as SDK method calls, and those look exactly the same as any local method invocation. Let’s not let that fool us, because we know already, network is still there, it’s just abstracted away from us. Any request sent over a network like an API call to Kinesis, for example, can fail in many different stages.

Moreover, it’s almost impossible to tell if the request actually failed or it didn’t, because that failure can happen on many levels. Maybe sending the request actually failed, or maybe the processing of the request failed, or maybe your request is waiting in the queue because the downstream system is overwhelmed. Or, maybe the request was processed, but you just never got the response back, and you just don’t know about. There are plenty of options, but end result is always the same. You are stuck waiting for something that might never happen. This can happen to any service. It can happen to Kinesis as well. Not to wait forever, AWS has built into the SDK this other tool for better resilience, this other superpower, timeouts. The ability to configure those timeouts for the API calls is our superpower that we can use.

Again, just like with retries, we need to be extremely careful how we use it, because picking the right timeout value is not an easy task at all. Just like any decision in your architecture, it will come with certain tradeoffs. Let’s say you pick a too long timeout, then it’s likely going to be ineffective, and it can consume resources, increase latencies. Too short timeout might mean that you will be retrying too early and not giving the original request a chance to finish, and this will inevitably mean that you will add load to the underlying system. This, as we know, will cause these cascading failures, and eventually can bring the entire system down.

On top of all that, the appropriate timeout value will be different depending on the service you are using or operation that you are performing. For the longest time, I’ve been scaring people saying that for all the services and all the requests, AWS SDK, JavaScript SDK has this default timeout that it uses, and it’s two minutes. Just to think about it, we are probably dealing with some low latency systems with services like Kinesis, in this case, or DynamoDB. Usually, we are really aware of every millisecond that we spent. Here we are just stuck for two minutes waiting for SDK to decide that, yes, there was a timeout.

Since then, things have changed, things have evolved. JavaScript SDK saw a change of version from 2 to 3, and also default timeout values have changed, so now the default timeout value is infinite. Basically, this means that if you don’t configure those timeouts, you are just stuck there. Who knows what happened? Bottom line here is that, very powerful but very dangerous.

Finally, we get to the first reason for losing data in our story, so having too long timeouts can actually exhaust resources of your producer application and not make it possible for it to consume new incoming requests. That’s exactly what we saw in our architecture. It was still in the two-minute timeout era. Still, even then, without configuring timeouts, we got our producer to be stuck waiting for something that will never happen because of likely a small, intermittent problem. We got this entire system outage instead of masking and recovering from individual failures, because that’s what a resilient system should do. Instead, we just gave up and started losing data.

This obviously doesn’t sound too great, but if you think the solution is to have short timeouts, I have bad news for you as well, because in my experience, too short timeouts can be even more dangerous, especially if they are combined with retries. Because again, retrying requests too early, not giving the original request a chance to complete means that you are adding the load on the underlying system and pushing it over the edge. You start to see all of the fun things. It’s not as obvious when you see it. You just start to see failures. You start to see latencies. You start to see cost going up. We will get this ripple effect of cascading failures in the end, and again, ultimately bring the entire system down.

Again, if our goal is to build a resilient system, we should mask and recover from individual failures. We should make sure that our system works as a whole, even if there were some individual failures. Here is where wrongly configured timeouts and retries can really become a match made in hell. Once again, even though retries and timeouts can be extremely powerful, we need to be very mindful how we use it. We should never ever go with defaults. Defaults are really dangerous. Next time you see your own code or your own architecture, please go check all the libraries and all the places that you make any calls over the network, let’s say SDK, or maybe you have external APIs that you are calling.

Please make sure that you know what the default timeouts are, because they usually are default timeouts. Make sure that you are comfortable with that value. It’s not too small, it’s not too big. That you have control over that value. Especially if those timeouts are combined with the retries.

So far, I’ve been talking about these failures that are inevitable in distributed systems, but there’s actually one more type of failure, and those failures are caused by the cloud providers on purpose. Those are failures related to service limits and throttling. This can be extremely confusing, especially in the serverless world, because we are promised scalability. Somehow, we are very easily assuming infinite scalability. Of course, if something sounds too good to be true, there’s probably a catch. Sooner or later, we better face the reality.

Reality is, of course, the cloud is not infinite, and moreover, we are sharing the underlying resources with everybody else. We don’t have the entire cloud at our disposal. Sharing all those resources comes with tradeoffs. Of course, on one hand, we do have this huge amount of resources that we can share that we wouldn’t have otherwise, but on the other hand, it also allows individual users, on purpose or by accident, to monopolize certain resources. While resources are not infinite, it will inevitably cause degradation of service to all the other users. Service limits are there to ensure that that doesn’t happen, and throttling is just a tool to enforce those service limits. For example, in case of Kinesis, we had the shard level limit of how much data we can write to a shard, and once we reach that limit, all our requests will be throttled. They will fail.

We get to the next reason of losing data in our story. I said at some point that if you’re using AWS SDK, you’re lucky, but it handles most of the failures for you. The catch here is that in case of batch operations, like we have putRecords here, instead of just handling the failure of an entire request, we should also handle the so-called partial failures. The thing here is that those batch operations, they are not atomic. They are not either all record succeeded or all record failed. It might happen so that part of your batch goes through successfully while the other part fails, and you still get a success response back. It’s your responsibility to detect those partial failures and to handle them.

Moreover, every single record in a batch can fail, every single one of them, and you will still get a success response back. It’s very important to handle those partial failures. The main reason for the partial failures in this case is actually throttling, or occasionally it’s exceeding service limits, so having spikes in traffic. Luckily, we already know that there is this fantastic tool that can help us when we are dealing with transient errors, and in case of occasional spikes in traffic, we are dealing with something temporary that will probably pass. This wonderful tool is, of course, retries. When implementing the retries, there are three key things that we need to keep in mind. Let’s go through them one more time. We only want to retry the retryable failures. We want to set upper limits for our retries, not to retry forever, and stop retrying when it doesn’t help. We want to spread the retry attempts as uniformly as possible, and have a proper backoff.

For that, an exponential backoff and jitter is an extremely powerful tool. I actually lied a little bit. SDK uses exponential backoff and jitter. Jitter basically just means adding some randomization to your delay. Unsurprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, by just this small little change to how you handle the delays or the backoffs between your retry attempt, you can actually dramatically improve your chances of getting your request through. It actually reduces the amount of retry attempts that you need and increases the chance of the overall request to succeed pretty drastically. Very small and simple tool, but also extremely powerful.

I always say that if you remember anything from my talks, let it be partial failures of batch operations, timeouts, and retries with exponential backoff and jitter. Because those things will save you tons of headache in many situations when you are dealing with distributed applications. They are not related to any particular service. They are just things that you absolutely need to be aware of. To borrow words of Gregor Hohpe, “Retries have brought more distributed systems down than all the other causes together”. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t retry, but we know by now we need to be very mindful and very careful. We don’t want to kill the system that we are trying to fix.

Lambda

Speaking of which, there were even more failures coming in our story. Let’s see now what else can happen if we let the error handling slide and not really do anything, and just go with the defaults. This time, we are speaking about the other end of our architecture, where we had a lambda function reading from our Kinesis stream. Lambda itself is actually a prime representative of distributed applications, because it’s composed of many different components that work together behind the scenes to make it one powerful service. One of those components that I personally love and adore is the event source mapping. It’s probably unfamiliar to you, even if you are using lambda, because it’s very well abstracted underneath the lambda abstraction layer.

It’s a very important component when you’re dealing with different event sources, in this case, Kinesis, for example. Because when you’re reading data with your lambda from a Kinesis Data Stream, you’re, in fact, attaching an event source mapping to that stream, and it pulls records from the stream, and it batches them, and it invokes your lambda function code for you. It will pick those records from all the shards in the stream in parallel. You can have up to 10 lambdas reading from each shard in your stream.

That’s, once again, something that the event source mapping provides you, and it’s just a feature called parallelization factor. You can set it to have up to 10 lambdas reading from each shard instead of just one. Here is where we see the true power of concurrent processing kicking in, because now we can actually parallelize that record processing, we can speed things up if we need to. We have 10 lambdas reading from each shard instead of just one lambda.

Of course, there’s always a catch behind every fantastic thing that you hear, and in this case, it’s extremely easy to hit one of service limits. Every service has a limit, even lambda. One of those limits are very important. I always bring it up. It’s the lambda concurrency limit. This one basically just means that you can have a limited number of concurrent lambda invocations in the same account in the same region. The number of lambda instances running in your account, in your region, at the same time, is always limited to a number. Usually that number is 1000, it’s a soft limit. Nowadays, I’ve heard that you only get 100 lambdas. I haven’t seen that. I’ve just heard rumors. It’s a soft limit. You can increase it by creating a ticket to the support. There still is going to be a limit.

Once you reach that limit, all the new lambda invocations in that account in that region, will be throttled. They will fail. Let’s say you have your Kinesis stream with 100 shards, and let’s say you set parallelization factor to 10, because you want to speed things up, because why not? Now all of a sudden you have 1000 lambdas, so 100 times 10, reading from your stream, and things are probably going to be ok. Then there is another very important lambda somewhere in your account, somewhere in your region, that does something completely irrelevant from your stream, but that lambda starts to fail.

The reason is, you have consumed the entire lambda concurrency limit with your stream consumer. This is the limit that can have a really big blast radius, and it can spread this familiar ripple effect of cascading failures well outside of your own architecture. You can actually have failures in systems that have nothing to do with your architecture. That’s why I always bring it up, and that’s why it’s a very important limit to be aware of and to monitor all the time.

Now let’s get back to actually reading data from our stream. What happens if there’s a failure? If there is a failure, again, there’s a good news-bad news situation. The good news is that the event source mapping that I’ve been talking about actually comes with a lot of extensive error handling capabilities. To use them, you actually need to know that they are there. If you don’t know that the entire event source mapping exists, the chances are high you don’t know. The bad news is that if you don’t know, you are likely just to go with the defaults. We should know by now that defaults can be really dangerous. What happens by default if there is a failure in processing a batch of records? Let’s say there was a bad record with some corrupt data, and your lambda couldn’t process it. You didn’t implement proper error handling, because nothing bad can ever happen. Your entire lambda now fails as a result of it. What happens next?

By default, even though no amount of retries can help in this situation, we just have some bad data there. By default, lambda will be retrying that one batch of records over and again until it either succeeds, which it never will, or until the data in the batch expires. In case of Kinesis, data stays in the stream for at least 24 hours. This effectively means an entire day of useless lambda invocations that will be retrying that batch of records. They don’t come for free. You’re going to pay for them. All those useless lambda invocations have a lot of fun side effects, and one of them is that you are likely reprocessing the same data over and again. Because you see from the perspective of the event source mapping, either your entire batch succeeded or your entire batch failed.

Whenever lambda encounters a record that fails, it fails the entire batch. In this example, record 1, 2, and 3 went successfully, record 4 failed, but your entire batch will be retried. Records 1, 2, and 3 will be reprocessed over and again. Here we come to idempotency, which Leo was telling us about, extremely important. Bad things don’t really stop there, because while all this madness, at least it looks like madness to us, is happening, no other records are being picked from that shard. Other shards in your stream, they go on with their lives, and data is being processed, and everything is good, but that one shard is stuck. It’s waiting for that one bad batch of record to be processed. That’s why it’s often referred to as a poison pill record, because there was just one bad record, but a lot of bad things happen.

One of those bad things, especially in data applications, data loses its value pretty quickly, so the chances are really high that 24 hour long or old data is pretty much useless to you. We lose data on many different levels when we don’t process it right away. Speaking of losing data, so let’s say finally, in 24 hours, the data finally expires. Your entire batch finally leaves the stream. Lambda can stop retrying. Of course, part of that batch wasn’t processed, but ok, that’s life. What will you do? At least your lambda can catch up and start picking new records from that shard. Bad things happen. It’s ok.

The problem here is that your shard is potentially filled with records that were written around the same time as the already expired one, so this means that it will also expire around the same time as the already expired ones. This might lead to a situation where your lambda will not even have a chance to process all those records. The records will just keep expiring and being deleted from the shard without you having a chance to process them. I bring up this overflowing sink analogy because you just don’t have enough time to drain that sink, water just keeps flowing. We started with just one bad record, and we ended up losing a lot of valid and valuable data. Again, something opposite from what a resilient system should be like.

Yes, this is exactly what we were seeing in our story. Just because of some random bad records, we would see that we would lose a lot of data. We would have a lot of reprocessing. We will have a lot of duplicates. We will have a lot of delays. We would consume a lot of resources, pay a lot of money for something that will never happen. All of those things happened because we just didn’t know better and just went with the good old defaults when it comes to handling failures. We know by now that that’s exactly the opposite from what we should do. I need to bring up the quote by Gregor because it’s just so great.

Luckily, there are many easy ways in which we can be more mindful and smarter about retries when it comes to lambda, because, as I said, event source mapping comes with extensive set of error handling capabilities. We know by now that probably the most important things that we should set are timeout values and limits for the retries. We can do both of them with event source mapping, but both of them are set to minus one by default, so no limits. That’s exactly what we were seeing. It’s not like AWS wants to be bad and evil to us. Actually, it makes sense, because Kinesis promises us order of records. I said that a shard is an ordered queue, so records that come in the shard, they should be ordered, which means that lambda needs to process them in order. If there is a failure, it can’t just jump over and maybe process the failures in the background, because we will mess up the entire order.

This is done with the best intentions, but the end result is still not pretty. We need to configure those failures. There are also a lot of other very useful things that you can do to improve error handling with event source mapping. We can use all of those options in any combination that we want. Just most important things, please, do not go with the defaults. If you are interested at all, I have written these two huge user manuals, I call them blog posts, about Kinesis and lambda, and how they work together and separately. There’s a lot of details about lambda and event source mapping there as well. Please go ahead and read them if you feel so inclined.

Epilogue

We have seen that we can actually cause more trouble while trying to fix problems. This is especially true if we don’t make conscious, critical informed decisions about error handling. Things like retries and timeouts can be very useful and very powerful, but we need to make conscious decisions about them. We need to take control, rather than just letting the matter slide. Because if we let the matter slide, things can backfire, and instead of making our architecture more resilient, we can actually achieve the exact opposite.

Next time you are building a distributed architecture, I encourage you to be brave, to face the messy reality of the real world, to take control into your own hands, rather than believing in magic. Because there’s no magic, and that’s a good thing. It means that we have control. Let’s use that control. Distributed systems and architectures can be extremely powerful, but they are also complex, which doesn’t make them neither inherently good nor bad. The cloud, and serverless especially, abstracts away a lot of that complexity from us. That doesn’t mean that complexity doesn’t exist anymore.

Again, not inherently good nor bad. We really don’t need to know, or we can’t even know every single detail about every single service that we are using. It’s borderline impossible. There are these fundamental things that are inherent to distributed systems and the cloud in general, so things like service limits, timeouts, partial failures, retries, backoffs. All of those things are really fundamental if we are building distributed applications. We absolutely need to understand them. Otherwise, we are just moving in the dark with our eyes closed and hoping that everything will be fine.

Finally, on a more philosophical note, distributed systems and architectures are hard, but they can also teach us a very useful lesson to embrace the chaos of the real world. Because every failure is an opportunity to make our architectures better, more resilient. While it’s borderline impossible to build something that never fails, but there’s one thing that we can do: we can learn and grow from each individual failure. As Dr. Werner Vogels likes to say, “Everything fails, all the time”. That’s just the reality of things. Either in life in general or with AWS services in particular, the best thing that we can actually do is be prepared and stay calm when those failures happen, because they will.

Questions and Answers

Participant 1: How do you set those limits for throttling, for timeout? Let’s say that you know that you will have a certain lot and you want to do certain performance tests or validate your hypothesis, do you have a tooling or framework for that? Also, how do you manage the unexpected spikes on those systems? Let’s say that you have a system that you are expecting to have 25k records per second, and suddenly you have triple this, because this happened in the cloud. How do you manage this scenario on these systems?

Pogosova: How do you set the timeouts and retries? It’s not easy. I’m not saying it’s easy. They do sound very simple, but you need to do a lot of load testing. You need to see how your system responds under heavy load to actually know what the appropriate numbers for you are going to be. For timeouts, for example, one practice is to try to estimate what the p99 latency of the downstream system is that you are calling, and then, based on that, try to maybe add some padding to that p99 number and then set it as your timeout.

Then you probably are safe. It’s not easy. I have seen this problem just a couple of weeks back. I know exactly what’s going to happen, but then things just happen that you don’t predict. There are libraries that have defaults that you haven’t accounted for, and then all of a sudden, you just hit a brick wall, because latencies increase on the downstream system, and then you start retrying, and then things just escalate and get worse. Then basically the entire system shuts down. It’s not easy. You need to do load tests. We don’t have any specific tooling, per se. We have certain scripts that would just send a heavy load to our systems, and that’s how we usually try to figure what the appropriate numbers are. It’s always a tradeoff.

When it comes to spikes in traffic, again, really complex issue. Usually, using serverless actually is an easier way around it, like with lambda, being able to scale, for example, pretty instantaneously. It’s very helpful. In case of Kinesis, if we speak about specific services, actually, the best thing you can do is just overprovision. That’s the harsh reality of it. If you think that you are going to have certain spikes, and you want to be absolutely sure, especially if those spikes are unpredictable, and you want to be absolutely sure that you don’t lose data. You don’t really have many options. In case of Kinesis, there is this on-demand Kinesis option where you don’t manage the shards, and you let AWS manage the shards, and you pay a bit differently, much more. What it does in the background, it actually overprovisions your stream, you just don’t see it. That’s the truth of it at the moment.

Participant 2: I was wondering whether it could be helpful to not fail the lambda in case of a batch with data that cannot be written, and instead use metrics and logs to just track that and then potentially retry on your own, separately. That way, basically do not come in this stuck situation. What do you think about that?

Pogosova: First of all, of course, you need to have proper observability and monitoring. Especially in distributed applications and serverless, it becomes extremely important to know what’s happening in your system. Definitely, you need to have logging and stuff. Also, there are certain metrics nowadays that will tell you, in some of those scenarios, that there is something going on, but you need to know that they exist before, because there’s tons of metrics. You usually don’t know what to look at. When it comes to retries in lambda, as I said, there is a lot of options that you can use, and one of them is sending the failed request to so-called failure destinations, so basically to a queue or a topic, and then you can come back and reprocess those requests.

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Earlier in the week, OpenAI announced it is restructuring its AI roadmap, consolidating its efforts around GPT-5 while scrapping the previously planned o3 standalone release.

Initially, OpenAI had intended to roll out GPT-4.5 (code-named Orion) as an intermediary update, but internal reports suggested that its improvements over GPT-4 were marginal. Instead, CEO Sam Altman confirmed that OpenAI will deliver a “unified intelligence” model with GPT-5, eliminating the need for users to select different versions within ChatGPT.

Altman has said GPT-5 will be designed to integrate multiple capabilities—reasoning, voice synthesis, search, and deep research—into a single model. OpenAI aims to streamline its product lineup by removing the current model picker and letting the AI dynamically determine how much computational power is needed for a given task. This move follows OpenAI’s increasing focus on reasoning models, which self-verify outputs for greater reliability at the cost of additional inference time. While OpenAI pioneered this approach with o1, competitors like DeepSeek have quickly closed the gap, prompting OpenAI to accelerate its release schedule to maintain its lead.

“We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings… We want AI to just work for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.” – Sam Altman

Altman outlined OpenAI’s planned subscription tiers for GPT-5, where free users will have access to a standard intelligence level, while ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers will receive progressively more advanced reasoning capabilities. This marks a shift in OpenAI’s monetization strategy, moving beyond usage limits toward tiered model intelligence.

Technical hurdles remain, particularly around inference efficiency. As reasoning models require additional processing to validate outputs, computational costs rise, and latency becomes a concern. OpenAI, already reliant on Microsoft Azure for cloud resources, must balance these factors while scaling GPT-5’s capabilities. Additionally, growing competition from open-source AI models threatens OpenAI’s position in the market, as organizations increasingly seek customizable, locally hosted AI solutions. Indeed, while Altman has discussed GPT 4.5 getting good reception from testers, AI developer Elvis Saravia has also playfully noted tomorrow Altman may also comment GPT 4.5 ‘still has a long way to go’.

This comes at a time when Anthropic has also been developing a hybrid AI model that dynamically adjusts reasoning power, allowing developers to control computational resources via a sliding scale, unlike OpenAI’s fixed low-medium-high settings. This model excels in business-focused coding tasks, particularly in handling large codebases and generating accurate code, outperforming OpenAI’s top reasoning model in certain programming benchmarks. Some have speculated OpenAI, recognizing Anthropic’s approach, plans to merge its reasoning and traditional models into a single AI, potentially following Anthropic’s lead. Anthropic reportedly plans to release its new model in the coming weeks.

The competition for AI talent has been fierce, with OpenAI and its rivals aggressively trying to retain and attract top researchers. Thrive Capital, a major OpenAI investor, recently presented to OpenAI staff, emphasizing the potential financial losses of leaving for a startup, given OpenAI’s rapid valuation growth. This comes amid high-profile departures, including ex-research head Ilya Sutskever who left for Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and ex-CTO Mira Murati, who has recruited multiple OpenAI researchers for her new venture, Thinking Machines Lab. 

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TraefikLabs recently announced the latest release of Traefik Proxy v3.3 (codenamed “saint-nectaire” due to a French cheese). This release focuses primarily on two critical areas: observability capabilities and improved documentation structure. These enhancements aim to make the popular open-source reverse proxy even more powerful for platform engineers working in complex cloud-native environments.

Observability has become essential in modern infrastructure, allowing engineers to quickly identify and recover from service disruptions. Traefik v3.3 significantly expands its observability toolkit through extended OpenTelemetry integration. Building on the foundation established in v3.0, this release adds experimental support for logs and access logs alongside existing metrics and tracing capabilities. This creates a comprehensive observability solution that provides complete visibility into ingress traffic patterns.

Additionally, the new version introduces granular configuration control. Previously, observability features could only be enabled globally. With v3.3, platform engineers can now define default behaviors at the entryPoint level, enable or disable tracing, metrics, and access logs on a per-router basis, override inherited configurations for specific routers, and apply temporary observability settings during troubleshooting. This flexibility allows teams to implement precise monitoring strategies tailored to their specific needs, reducing unnecessary data collection while ensuring critical services remain observable.

This is now equivalent:

entryPoints:
  foo:
	address: ':80'

To this:

entryPoints:
  foo:
	address: ':80'
	observability:
  	tracing: true

In this release, Traefik has begun a major revamp of its documentation architecture, recognizing this as a crucial entry point for users. The v3.3 release delivers the first milestone with a completely reorganized reference section that targets three distinct personas: beginners, advanced operators, and advanced developers. It separates high-level use cases from detailed configuration options and creates a more intuitive structure for finding information.

The new reference documentation follows a logical progression from installation through configuration discovery, entry points, observability settings, and more. This improved organization helps both newcomers and experienced users quickly locate the information they require.

Beyond the core focus areas, v3.3 introduces several quality-of-life improvements. These include better control over ACME (Let’s Encrypt) propagation checks, configuration dump support via API endpoint for easier troubleshooting, optional IngressRoute kind in Kubernetes configurations, and Kubernetes serving endpoint status support for stickiness. The update also brings configurable paths for sticky cookies, host header configuration in the HTTP provider, preservation of Location headers in ForwardAuth middleware, and more efficient basic auth hash calculation for concurrent requests. Platform engineers will also appreciate request body forwarding to authorization servers, configurable API and Dashboard base paths, and the option to abort startup if plugin loading fails.

When considering alternatives to Traefik Proxy, many other reverse proxies and load balancers stand out: Nginx, serves as both a web server and a reverse proxy, offering stability and low resource consumption, making it ideal for handling high-traffic applications. For those seeking simplicity with built-in automatic HTTPS, Caddy is another option, featuring an easy-to-use configuration and strong security defaults. Envoy Proxy, originally developed by Lyft, is a cloud-native proxy that excels in dynamic service discovery, observability, and advanced traffic management, making it a great fit for microservices architectures. Lastly, Kong doubles as an API gateway and microservices management tool, providing authentication, rate limiting, and logging functionalities on top of Nginx. Each of these alternatives presents unique strengths, catering to different needs based on security, scalability, and ease of use.

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Transcript

Ikonne: How many people have ever wondered to themselves, thought to themselves, if only I had more power, I could make things happen in my group? I’ve thought about that many times. I have a story to tell about that. In the late 90s, early 2000s, a little bit earlier on in my career, I was part of a team, and I felt like if we made certain changes on that team, we’d just be excellent, we’d be stellar.

My problem was, I was what we might call an IC, or individual contributor. I just thought to myself, there’s no way I can do anything that’s going to change the outcome, the situation that we find ourselves in. I thought, maybe if I can orchestrate and work myself into a position of being responsible for the team, then yes, I could make things happen. What do you think I did? I worked really hard to do what? To become the one responsible for the team, for the manager. I became the manager of the team, and I was so excited. I said, yes, all the dreams, all the aspirations, all the change I want to cause to happen is now going to happen because I have the power. Was I disappointed? Everything I did failed. The team nearly ran me out of the company. They were so frustrated with me. I learned very early on that power as we often think about it or think of it, is not really what is required to make change happen in groups.

I’m Ebenezer. I work for Cox Automotive. I’m really passionate about joy at work. I’m here to talk to you about how to catalyze change in groups. We’re going to talk about a few things that are all connected. Talk about some words, authority and power, that I’ve already used. We’re going to talk about different types of change. Then we’re going to talk about things to catalyze change in groups.

Authority

Let’s start with authority. This is going to be real quick for just definitions. There are many ways to talk and think about authority. There’s really one way most of us think about authority, and it’s the first definition there, it’s formal. Most of us think about authority, and authority is defined really as the right to do something. Most of us think about authority really from a formal perspective. That’s the authority that comes from our position in our organization. How many people have formal authority? I’ll make this simple, you could theoretically fire somebody. How many people have the authority to change code in a system? How many people thought about the second thing I said as authority? Most people don’t see the ability to change software as a right on authority. It’s that formal authority based on your position.

Whenever we’re hired into an organization, we are given the right to do certain things, and that’s the formal authority that comes from the position we occupy. There’s another type of authority that we rarely talk about, and that’s informal authority, and that’s authority that stems from other sources than our position. It might be personal characteristics. Maybe you’re a really kind person. It could be your expertise. Maybe you’re well versed in a particular set of technologies or knowledge. Whatever the case is, people look to you and people accept what you have to say, because they hold you in high regard. They hold you in esteem. From that you have authority in that situation. We have formal authority and informal authority.

Power

Then we look at power. Power is generally defined as a capacity to get things done. There are many ways of thinking about and talking about power, but two ways of looking at power really speak to me. Mary Parker Follett identified really two basic forms of power: power over and power with. Power over, some have described this as the coercive power. It’s telling people to do something in a forceful manner. It’s basically using the power that you have to get people to do things. Whereas power with is shared power. It’s mutual power. It’s everybody bringing their power to the table and saying, how do we move forward? Authority and power, two things we talk about, two things we see in the organizations. Many people believe that they cannot initiate change in groups without formal authority and power over others.

In fact, I was that person. That’s why, when I told the story, I said, for me, I thought I needed to be in a position where I had power over people and I had formal authority. I had the right to tell them what to do. I had the right to say, you must change now, because Eb says so. Many people actually believe this. We may not say this, but we believe it. When I talk to a lot of people in my org about why they want to get promoted or why they want to change positions, the number one response I get is, so I can make people do things. Because people believe to make people do things, we need to have positional power, and we need to have the authority. This, to me, is because we assume that change must be coercive. Change must be forced. Change must be pushed on people.

When you work with this basic assumption, then what happens as a result of it is that you’re compelled to accumulate as much power as you can. It’s a race to the top. I want to accumulate all the power. I want to grow my empire, because I want to be able to make people do what I want them to do. We know that this really doesn’t work. What it ends up causing for a lot of people is heartache and pain. That assumption is ultimately wrong.

The question then becomes, can we catalyze change in our groups in the absence of formal authority, in the absence of power over others? I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with formal authority. No, we need that for structure. I’m not saying that power over is wrong as well. Sometimes we need to be able to tell people to do things. When power over and formal authority are the only things we can rely on to cause change to happen in our organizations, then we’re going to be in a world of hurt over time. It’s not sustainable. That’s why I believe, yes, we can.

Change

Let’s talk about change. When I do talks, I really like for people to reflect as we go along. How many people here have a change that they wish would happen in the group they’re a part of, if there’s something you’re thinking about right now? If there’s nothing, you might want to pinch yourself, make sure you’re still awake. Write down that change. What’s the change you want to see happen in your group? One or two. Just take a second to write it down right now. Express it. Just write down this change, because I’m going to ask you to continue to refer to that change as we go through this talk. If you have a situation where the status quo is perfect, I really wish I was in your situation. Change, you’ve written down the change.

Osmer’s Heuristic on Change, what’s happening? Why is this happening? What do you want to have happen? How do you get there? Why is this happening is in parentheses, because sometimes it doesn’t really matter why something is happening. We’ve had talks about getting to the whys, and whys can be important. Sometimes why something is happening is not as important as we need to do something different, and we need to spend our energies focusing on what do we want to have happen, and how do we get there? What’s happening is just an empirical fact. Everyone should be able to look at what’s happening and say, this is what’s happening. Why this is happening is often a subject of debate. That becomes interpretive. It becomes subjective. What do we want to have happen, then becomes our ideal next state. How do we get there? What you want to have happen is obviously the change that you need.

How do we get there requires differentiating between two kinds of change: first-order change and second-order change. People have described these changes in different ways. This is a very important point, because not all change is the same. We talk about change in generic terms. We talk about change as if all change is the same, as if all ice cream is the same. I’ll tell you right now that cookie dough is better than any other form of ice cream on the face of the earth. It’s non-negotiable. You cannot argue that with me. It’s a fact. You all accept it. No response. Everyone agrees.

First-order change and second-order change, what’s the distinction? There’s a lot of information on that slide there. I’ll boil it down to this, first-order change really means just picking up a new practice. It’s really a technical change, maybe doing things differently. Second-order change really begins to get to the way we make sense of the world, our world view, a set of assumptions, the paradigms we hold dear. A first-order change doesn’t ask me to change anything about the way I see the world. It might ask me to do things a little bit differently, but it generally fits within my mental constructs as they exist today.

A second-order change says, you need to wake up and look at the world a little bit differently. It’s quite often the case that when we want a change to occur, this happens a lot, that we misdiagnose the nature of the change, and we assume that it’s a first-order change, because for us, it’s very straightforward. I’ve already, in my mind, made the shift in my paradigm, I just want to go act differently. I believe everybody else should be there alongside with me, but they’re not there. They have not made that shift. I’m treating a second-order change for other people as if it’s a first-order change, because that’s what it is for me. You need to ask yourself, what kind of change is this for the people that I’m trying to get to change in my group? Could be a very straightforward change for me, doesn’t make it a straightforward change for everybody else. Contrived examples here.

We’re going from VersionOne to Jira. I don’t know if that’s a great decision. I don’t know who would make that kind of a decision. If you’ve made that decision, I’m sorry. These are tools, ALMs, or however you use them, for tracking software development and things like that. Going from one system to the next might be a very straightforward change. It’s something you already come to terms with the fact that you’re changing systems. There’s no problem with that. You’ve come to terms with the fact that you are tracking what you do, how you work in an electronic system. No problems with that. It’s just implementing a brand-new system, and you’re completely comfortable with that. That might be an example of a first-order change in some organization. Could be, it’s straightforward.

On the other hand, maybe you’re trying to make a transition from solo development where everybody just sits in their corner and pounds out whatever they’re trying to pound out together, to saying, let’s maybe adopt mob programming or something like that. You have people who really can’t accept, or are struggling with accepting a different way of working together. Again, this is not a right or wrong thing, it is simply a shift in the way you’re thinking about the world. In the first situation, we’re not asking anybody to change their paradigms, but in this situation, we’re basically saying we’re redefining the way we think about developing software. This might be a second-order change. When you think about change and the change you want to have your group adopt, you have to ask yourself, what kind of change is this? Right now, a number of you wrote down changes that you’d like to see happen.

Beside that change, do a quick diagnosis. Is that a first-order change? Are you asking people to make a change that fits in with the way they see the world today? Are you asking them to begin to look at the world differently and make behavioral change alongside of it. Make that diagnosis right now and write it beside the change that you just captured. What kind of change is this? Because if it is a second-order change, but you’re treating it like a first-order change, then you’re going to face a lot of problems. You’re not going to take the time to really help people understand and see why you want them to think about the way they’re approaching a situation a bit differently. When we think about change, we really need to take the time to analyze the content of the change itself. You need to pause and say, what type of change is this? It is a simple 2×2. You can tell that I did a stint in consulting because it’s not completed. There isn’t a 2×2.

The 2×2 basically says, are we working with familiar practices or unfamiliar practices, existing paradigms and attitudes, new paradigms and attitudes? When you now analyze a change, depending on how big or small the change is, you might even have different parts of the change that fall in different quadrants, but it’s important to take the time to assess the change and really understand the content of the change that you’re asking people to go through in any given situation, regardless of your role in your organization. You need to know the change type. That is really important, that you know the change type. Knowing is not enough, you have to do something about it.

Four Vital Actions

We’re going to talk about four vital things that I think are really important. Some of these things have actually come up in some of the talks. This is going to be repeating things you’ve already heard. As they say, repetition deepens the impression. Identify your allies. Invite participation. Change via small bites. Create and keep engagement through storytelling. It’s been said that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. My spin on this is, when it comes to group change, if you want to go fast and go far, you must go with others. You can’t go it alone.

That means you have to find allies, people that will go with you on this journey. If you don’t have any allies, you might want to reconsider the change, because it’s probably going to die on the vine. If you don’t have any allies, you probably need to think about who or why don’t I have any allies? Why isn’t there anybody else who is passionate about this thing I think we need to have happen in this group? Even as you wrote down a change right now, who are the allies that you have for that change. If you don’t have any allies for that change, do you need to begin to work to create or find allies in your group for that change. You need to spend the time to build the relationships for that change. This is where informal authority is so important. We talked about this earlier.

With formal authority, it’s really easy to do things that already exist. You can use your formal authority to ensure that the routines and procedures and policies that have existed are executed. That’s pretty straightforward at any role in any level. When you want to cause change to happen, formal authority doesn’t really do much for you. It might move things a little bit, but it will not sustain the change. That’s when informal authority, that’s the authority that comes from other sources, authority that comes from the respect that people have from you, the trust that people place in you, that’s when informal authority makes a difference. That’s when you find allies. That’s how you get allies, through your informal authority. When it comes to group change, if you want to go fast and far, you must go with others. You cannot go alone. You have to identify the folks who are going to be your allies. Organizations are essentially political systems.

A lot of people say, I don’t like politics, or, in my organization, I don’t want to be a part of politics. If you have an agenda in your organization, then you’re part of the whole thing. You’re part of the politics. We all engage in one way or the other. Because organizations are political systems, we’re all going to have needs. I have needs. You have needs. How we go about satisfying those needs may differ, and that often leads to conflict. When you’re bringing in change, you should expect that that’s going to generate a level of resistance. It’s only through the use of allies that you can find some form of momentum to overcome this resistance. Allies are important. Who are the allies and who can help you with the change that you have?

Second thing is invitation. Invitation over coercion. You want to invite participation into the change that you want to have happen as part of what you’re going on. How do you invite people to participate in the change that you have? What do I mean by invitation? Peter Block, who wrote the famous book, “The Empowered Manager”, and a number of other books, identified five elements of a great invitation. Five elements of asking people to engage in doing something different. The invitation declares the possibility. It says, this is what we can make happen if we do this. It frames the choice. It makes it very clear what you’re asking people to sign up for. It names the hurdle in that it is very honest about the challenges that you might face in the process of trying to make this change. It reinforces the request. It makes it very clear to people why you want them to be part of it, and then it uses the most personal form possible.

This is very important in this day and age where we’re remote in a lot of places. You don’t see people in the hallway maybe as you used to see them before. Invitations need to be as personal as possible. If you can’t talk to somebody in person, call them up. Email or Slack or whatever, should be the last form that we use when we’re trying to engage people in change. If we’re going to engage people in change, we need to use the most personal form possible.

Here’s just a contrived example. We can all read it there. Just imagine that you’re trying to get people to participate in a change that has to do with how we go about developing software. We want to do it completely different. The way we’re doing it today doesn’t work. You want to engage people in change through participation. You want to engage people through invitation. You want them to participate. You want to make sure that the invitation is clear. You can see in this invitation, what is possible is that we have the potential to unlock new levels of creativity and effectiveness on our team if we modify how we work. What you have to sign up for is sharing your authentic perspective on how we can improve. You’re making it very clear that this is how you’re going to engage. We’re also honest that adopting a new approach brings challenges.

Too often, we don’t want to be honest about the challenge that comes with some of the changes we want to do. You will need to accept, embrace, and work to overcome these challenges. Those are the hurdles, but we’ll do it together. Invitation is important when it comes to bringing about change in an organization, change in a group. Look for your allies. If you don’t have allies, then invite other people to join you in the change. Who you invite is very important as well. Some of the most influential people in our orgs, in our groups within a team, are the people we least expect.

Sometimes we think that the person with the most formal authority, the person with the most positional power are the most influential people. I know a lot of people in my organization that are highly influential, that positionally are not highly positioned, and are just ICs, but when they speak, for example, everybody listens. When they engage in initiatives, people join them, because they’ve developed their informal authority so widely in the organization that they are influencers for everybody else. The perceived influencers versus the actual influencers are very important to pay attention to, and to make sure that you know who is an actual influencer versus a perceived influencer in the group.

Small bites, taking small bites. This has to do with being sure that when you’re initiating change in the organization, that you take it and increment at a time. One of the mistakes people often make with initiating change in the organization is making the change too big for people to absorb. Another 2×2. This is where you have to think about what is the nature of this change, and where does it fall between high effort, large impact, low effort, small impact. A lot of change lives in the blood, sweat, and tears quadrant.

As a result of it, a result of living in that quadrant never sees the light of day, because it requires too much for people to engage. I’ll tell a quick story here. Someone in a department wanted to have their group adopt a Lean practice of identifying waste in a process and making changes to it immediately. When the person thought about having their group pick this up, for them the way they wanted to go about doing this was to make their team actually identify a source of waste, come up with a resolution or a way of addressing this waste, and implement that resolution all at once.

Everybody on the team balked at what they were being asked to do. Why did they balk at it? They balked at it because they were being asked to do too much in one go. This is why small bites is important. When it comes to change, we often spend a lot of time trying to convince people why they should participate in the change. We’re better off spending time trying to get people to take a small step in the direction of the change. What’s the smallest step I can ask people to take in the direction of the change that I desire? Can I keep it as close to where they are today, so that the resistance, or the barrier to resistance is almost minimal? It’s almost non-existent.

I think it’s Richard Pascal who said that we are more likely to act our way into new thinking than to think our way into new acting. It just so happens that we spend a lot of time trying to think people into new actions. In fact, that’s what a lot of conferences are about: a lot of information. It’s important, but people change their thinking through new actions. You need to think, what’s the smallest action, what’s the smallest thing I can introduce in my group that can get us moving in the direction that we desire to go in? What’s the smallest thing I can do?

We started off by saying, you need to find allies. I asked for the change that you want to do. Who are your allies in your group right now? Write them down. If you don’t have any allies, then you need to go find allies. You need to invite people to join you. Think about what that invitation is going to look like. Then you’re going to have people join you, and you’re going to say, we want to do this. What’s the smallest thing in the direction of that change that you could have people do right now? That if you said, let’s do this right now, you’d get almost zero pushback to it, but it’s a step in the right direction. What’s the smallest thing you could do? These are things that are available to anybody, regardless of your role, regardless of your position, as long as you use them in the right way.

Again, who are your allies? Who are you inviting? What’s the smallest thing we can do to create the flywheel effect? Because once people do something and see something positive from it, they are more likely to be receptive to adding to it. That’s the way we all function. When I start introducing a new habit into my life, and I begin to see it yield results, then I’m more motivated to build upon that habit. That’s just the way we work. That’s the way we’re wired to work. We want to reduce the barrier to entry for people when it comes to change. We don’t want to make the change big that it’s so overwhelming that when we talk about it, people are like, no, I don’t want to engage. You want to find the smallest thing, again, you can do to help people move along. I spent some time on that point because I think that’s one of the biggest things I see whenever I talk with people about change.

The change that they bring to the team, the thing they want the team to do is so radically different from what they’re doing today that everyone is like, no way we’re going to do that. Find a small thing that moves you in that direction, and build upon it. When you think about change, if you want change to stick and last, you have to think about it as a long game. I know this runs counter to the way we tend to operate, which is why change doesn’t stick in many places, because we’re thinking about immediate. It’s the microwave age. We want it done now and quickly. Change takes time. For it to stick and for it to really be embedded in our groups, it takes time.

Last thing I’m going to leave us with, as we talk about this, is storytelling. Throughout this talk, I’ve shared a number of stories. It’s because storytelling and stories are so integral to the way we operate in the world. As much as we like to think we’re rational people, the fact is, we are emotional first then rational. I think the previous talk talked about motivated reasoning, which is, we have an emotional commitment to something, and then we come up with a whole bunch of reasons to support why we want to operate in a certain way. Stories actually speak to our emotions quite a bit. Storytelling is extremely important. Storytelling is important in engaging people in any change. Storytelling is also very important in keeping people in a change. When you think about change and how you ensure that it sticks within your group and that you’re catalyzing it, you want to make sure that you continue to tell the story of what the change is doing within the group.

Every single win, every single positive experience that comes out from that change is something that needs to be shared and needs to be celebrated, and is something that needs to be told to others. It’s something that you want to keep front and center of any type of change initiative. When you think about elements of a great story, the acronym CRIS is something that you think about. They’re clear. They’re relevant. They’re inspiring. They’re simple. Clear in the sense that when the story is told, you should be able to leave the room as a hearer and tell that story to somebody else. If the story is so convoluted that when you leave the room you’ve completely forgotten what the story was about, then it’s a bad story. If you tell a story, you can’t remember the story you told, it’s a bad story too. You need to be able to remember the story, and it should be straightforward. It should be relevant.

The story should be focused on what you’re trying to accomplish. It should be inspiring. It should speak to our emotions. It should motivate us to want to do something. It should be simple. All good stories have those attributes. All of us can tell stories. I think people sometimes think that some people are good at telling stories, and others are not good at telling stories. If you’ve ever had a conversation with somebody else in your life, then you know how to tell a story. Anyone who hasn’t had a conversation with somebody else? We’ve all had conversations, so we know how to tell stories. We need to make storytelling part of how we contribute and motivate change in our groups. Again, these are things that are accessible to all of us. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re vice president or this is your second day on the job. These are things that any one of us can do, and we can bring to the table.

Recap

When we think about catalyzing change in groups, we want to attract and invite people towards the change. The assumption that change must be pushed upon people, change must be coercive, and as a result, I need to have the power to make people do the things I want them to do, to force them to do what I want them to do, is not a mode that we need to operate from. We can attract and invite people towards the change. Does it take time? Does it take effort? Yes. That’s what leads to long lasting change. You need to know the type of change desired. Am I asking people to fundamentally change the way they make sense of this world?

If that’s the case, then I really need to take the time to work with them and understand that for some people, it might take a minute. Or am I just asking people to adopt a new practice that fits the way they operate today, and all they need is just my support and my encouragement? I need to find allies, and this is where our networks are extremely important. Who are the allies? Who are the people on my team that can really help me move forward with this change? Remember, if I want to go far and fast, I need to go with people. I have to use the power of my network. I have to have allies. I need to engage and inspire through storytelling. Let it be clear, relevant, inspiring, and simple. Start with small, impactful actions. Find the smallest thing that will not cause much of a resistance that people can engage in so that they can act their way into new thinking.

Action Items?

What will you immediately put into practice today? Everyone took a few minutes to write down a change that they want to see, a change they would like to see in their group, your organization, whatever the case may be, what are you going to put into practice? What are you going to take and apply in this moment? Is it finding allies? Is it incorporating storytelling? Is it rethinking the change? That’s up to you. What will you put into practice immediately?

How to Find Allies

Lichtensteiger: It can be really challenging trying to make a change when you feel you’re fighting the lonely fight. You talk about the social network and allies, and some of us, myself included, especially in a new organization where I have to make change, find it socially difficult to find those allies. Any tips?

Ikonne: Find those allies.

Lichtensteiger: How?

Ikonne: It’s really important to spend time building the relationships that you need to build, finding the allies, because that’s how you win at the long game. If you want the change to stick, if you want people to thrive and flourish with the change as well, then you have to spend the time working to find allies and developing that in your org.

Lichtensteiger: Just get better at finding allies.

Ikonne: Yes, make the investment.

Questions and Answers

Participant 1: What would be one of the tips that you have for encouraging your team member, the people that are in your org, that small changes are something that you appreciate and actually induce that change into them, like have a culture that emphasize small changes. You can do it. I encourage you to do it. What would the tip be? What is the tip to encourage your team member to induce changes?

Ikonne: I think it’s celebrating those changes, talking about it. It’s said that where energy goes, attention flows. It’s said the other way as well. When you pay attention to small changes, celebrate small changes, people begin to see that that type of thing matters. One of the things that plagues us in our orgs is that mixed messaging abounds. People will say, we really appreciate the small change, but the thing that’s ever only celebrated is the big change. That’s the only thing that’s ever recognized. As a result, people are like, you can’t say you really appreciate small changes, and then the only thing we ever talk about more broadly is the big change. I think it’s very important to talk about it, focus on it, celebrate it, show it, repeat it. Ask people, what’s the smallest change you’ve made today? Make that part of your organizational discourse. What you talk about repeatedly is eventually what begins to happen.

Participant 2: I just wonder what things you could think of to motivate people to actually make change.

Ikonne: What things you can think about to motivate people to make change? The status quo is often very strong. When the status quo has been successful, it really can be challenging to get people to have the desire to make change. When you think about the invitation, the situation needs to be very clear about why if we don’t make this change, things are not going to be as good as they can be. That needs to be the conversation. Not everybody is going to make change. That’s definitely true. I’ve also seen that we’re often not as clear on why this change matters, why it’s important. We don’t take the time to share that.

One of the things, as a leader and somebody who has done this is, very often leaders or people in positions or the supervisory type of positions, they’ve had the opportunity to process the change. They’ve had the opportunity to understand where we are, but they’re bringing it to people who haven’t had the opportunity to go through that journey, and they expect them to get on board immediately, when you’ve had months, maybe, to prepare yourself. In the same way you’ve had time to prepare yourself, you should also be willing to have some time with people to come along as well.

Lichtensteiger: It’s telling the story of the why.

Ikonne: Tell the story of the why.

Participant 3: You talked about, you thought you needed power over people, and you thought you had to have the authority over people, but you come here with an entirely different story, what is needed. What was it for you to recognize the change you had to make yourself to be where you are right now?

Ikonne: The fear of being fired caused me to pause and say, time out. What’s going on here? Then to do some soul searching and say, is there another way of approaching the way I want to lead here? There have been people who have coercively pushed change on people. I’ve experienced it. A number have probably experienced it. It’s not long lasting. Many of us don’t want to stay in those places for a long time, and that’s not the kind of environment you want to create as well. Eventually, as I began to think about, what would an environment be where I’d want to be part of that, and have people really commit to the change we want to do, and also initiate change. Because if you find yourself as the only person kicking off change in your environment, then there’s a problem as well. If you don’t have people saying, let’s do things differently, it’s probably a sign that there’s something going on that needs to be looked at more broadly.

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3. For early feedback or additional questions, send your title and abstract to editors@infoq.com

Article Requirements

We think that the story is best told by developer to developer, architect to architect, and team lead to team lead. That’s why we focus on in-depth technical articles written by domain practitioners and experts. The main requirements to consider before sending a proposal:

• Length: 2,000-3,000 words
• Focus: Technical insights, architectural decisions, or emerging technology implementation
• Target Audience: Senior software engineers, architects, and team leads

Content Guidelines

To ensure the best chance of having your article accepted, it should be:

• Technically substantial with specific, actionable takeaways
• Focused on emerging trends in software development
• Based on real-world implementation experience
• Free from marketing content
• Complete guidelines on the public InfoQ page.

If you would like feedback regarding the suitability of an article proposal before writing the actual draft, please send us a title and abstract. However, the acceptance is always based on the complete article draft; first drafts are also considered. Contact us at editors@infoq.com for any questions or further information.

Selected topics

We welcome articles that fit into the innovator and early adopter stages of the following topics: AI, ML and Data Engineering, Software Architecture & Design, DevOps & Cloud.

Here is a more detailed list of the sub-topics for each topic:

[Click on topic name to display full list of sub-topics selected for the article contest]

Winner Selection Process

Winners will be determined by evaluating:

• Reader interest (page views within 14 days of publication)
• Social media impact (engagement on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook)

Here’s how we’ll select the winners:  We’ll identify the top three articles based on page views within 14 days of publication.  From those three, the article with the most social media engagement across the listed platforms will be awarded 1st place, the second-most engaged will receive 2nd place, and the third, 3rd place.

Page views will be counted for 14 calendar days from the article’s publication date to ensure fair competition.

Winners will be notified by email and publicly announced on our social media channels, on 30 May 2025.

Ready to join the contest? Send your proposal now: 2025 articles contest form.