Author: Mark Makary

Combining Data Streaming and RAG for Smarter AI Conversations

February 24, 2025

Introduction In the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence, the integration of real-time data streaming and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is paving the way for smarter and more efficient AI conversations. This innovative approach was recently highlighted at the Winter Data Meetup 2025, the below is a summary of the talking points, for more detailed presentation and … More Combining Data Streaming and RAG for Smarter AI Conversations

Data Pipelines, Streaming vs. Batch, the Past, the Present and the Future

February 14, 2024

Streaming is the new Batch Data Pipelines, Streaming vs. Batch, the Past, the Present and the Future Introduction Data and Analytics continue to gain momentum within the enterprise, rising to the top of the heap of tools that would provide the business with a competitive advantage. Data Pipelines or how we transfer and transform data … More Data Pipelines, Streaming vs. Batch, the Past, the Present and the Future

The Curious case of Stateful Architecture!

June 2, 2021

Introduction As an Architect, when we start working on a new application or solution architecture; we study the requirements and see if the solution requires maintaining a specific set of states to support a business use case that requires maintaining a workflow or a state-machine (Event-Driven). Now, this is the tricky part; many would consider … More The Curious case of Stateful Architecture!

Bringing sanity back to Cloud Architecture

November 23, 2020

Why Cloud fails? Attempting to migrate to the Cloud without thoughtful planning and adopting the proper Cloud-Native architecture proved to be problematic and dangerous, it could easily lead to the failure of a strategic Cloud Migration initiative. Lightbend recently released their “Cloud Native Adoption Trends” survey, this is Gold, it is an eye opener and … More Bringing sanity back to Cloud Architecture

Akka is not a Swedish food, it’s a swiss army knife

August 31, 2020

Few years ago, during an architecture round-table discussion, focusing on building distributed systems, many questions came up regarding distributing computing design patterns which naturally are difficult to implement and get right. Those design patterns are focusing on addressing modern applications use cases where you need to increase performance and cut on the infrastructure cost. Where … More Akka is not a Swedish food, it’s a swiss army knife

Why Akka if you have Kubernetes?

July 30, 2020

During our latest joint webinar with our partner Lightbend, we discussed building future-proof system architecture. This is the link to the webinar recording. We highlighted the importance of architecture flexibility and the role of Reactive Architecture and Cloud-Native architecture in supporting adaptability while achieving resilience and elasticity. We also highlighted the importance of loose coupling … More Why Akka if you have Kubernetes?

The New Norm

April 20, 2020

Few months ago, in the old world, before the pandemic hits, the retail industry experts were looking for ways to replace the overused expressions “digital transformation”, “digital advantage” and “customer experience” with other creative words. Why? Simply, because it sounded old, just a useless hype and many started to consider this as a merely crying … More The New Norm

Modern Application Architecture and Java

April 14, 2020

Introduction Modern day web applications are increasingly under pressure to provide a richer user experience. Usually those applications start with the ability to support hundreds of concurrent users with few thousands concurrent requests or calls per day, however that could increase to millions if the venture proved to be successful. In such a case, the … More Modern Application Architecture and Java

JPA Error-Handling for the Play Framework Asynchronous Setup

April 10, 2020

This is valid for the Play Framework 2.8 Release Introduction Recently, Play Framework added asynchronous processing for blocking operations. JPA operations are generally I/O intensive and is it is one of those blocking operations that Play is recommending to process asynchronously. Play does so, by using Java “CompletionStage” interface and the “CompletableFuture” Future implementation which … More JPA Error-Handling for the Play Framework Asynchronous Setup

MicroSystems Vs. MicroServices

March 10, 2020

Microservices Anti-patterns Microservices architecture has been a dominant architecture style for the last few years, it fits well into the Cloud-Native architecture and the agile methodology. The Enterprise is constantly looking for creative ways to speed up time to market; and the Microservices evolution is a big part of that. Lately, many seasoned industry experts … More MicroSystems Vs. MicroServices