theVar is the successor of the popular Software Architecture Newsletter, with more content, better design, and great plans for the future!

In this edition - When AWS was down, Shift-left strategies for serverless, orchestration vs agentic AI and more

As usual, if you found something interesting that you think should be included here, you're interested in a sponsorship, or you have something to say about the content of this newsletter - drop me a mail at [email protected]

Sponsored

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15 Year of Android Architecture - Android apps architecture changed quite a lot since its inception. What began with Activities, through MVVM and RxJava is now usually based on MVI with a State Machine.
 Read about the various phases of Android architectures, and their pros and cons, in this post.

On Messaging and Distributed Systems - Messaging is probably the most crucial part of distributed systems. We have software components “floating” in our network - how can we make them communicate with each other? Well, for that we have messaging.
But how can we implement them in the correct way?
Read about it here.


The Architect’s Dilemma  - Architecting AI systems looks like an easy task - just write the prompt, man!
But no. There are a lot of decisions the architect should make, even in the AI era.
Read about the architect’s dilemma in this article in O’Reilly.

How when AWS was down, we were not - A few weeks ago, a large AWS shutdown in one of their regions took down thousands of popular websites.
But some websites, that we designed just for this scenario, were able to continue working as usual.
In This blog post, Authress explains how their architecture was able to handle this shut down gracefully and keep the website up and running.


Shift-Left Strategies for Cloud-Native and Serverless Architectures - Software is being developed and deployed in faster pace these days, and that means we need to be able to support this pace by using as much automation as possible, as early as possible.
This article explains how to do that in a cloud-native, serverless environment, and provides great guidance for automating and accelerating development in modern environments.


Ceilometer: Uber’s Adaptive Benchmarking Framework  - Changes in cloud infrastructure, new SKUs, updated products - all these, and lots more, require vigorous testing and vetting before being pushed into production.
This process can become cumbersome and slow, but Uber has a new solution for that - the Ceilometer.
Read about it here.

Traditional Orchestration vs Agentic AI - Orchestration is one of the most popular architecture paradigm in the microservices world. The new Agentic AI paradigm is a completely different paradigm, offering a different way to operate agents at scale.
How do these paradigm compare? And when to use which? Read about it here.

Azure OpenAI Services just got a major facelift, and now it's your opportunity to learn it.

Azure OpenAI Services are the major building block in the AI strategy in Azure. Using these services you can use the various OpenAI models - ChatGPT, DALL-E, Sora and more - with the power and security of Azure.

And to help you learn the most up-to-date version of these services, I just released the new and improved
Azure OpenAI Services - The Complete Guide course.

This is the updated version of the first course that covers the new OpenAI Service in Azure, allowing you to combine the creativity of ChatGPT and DALL-E with the power, security and customization capabilities of Azure.

The new version covers the new APIs, new ChatGPT versions, the Foundry portal and lots more.

And in this course we'll learn everything there's to know about ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Azure OpenAI Services.

Here are some of the topics we're going to learn in this innovative course:
- Introduction to ChatGPT and DALL-E
- Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT
- Introduction to Azure OpenAI Services
- Using your own data with OpenAI Services
- Working with OpenAI's APIs
- Publishing an App Service based on OpenAI model
- Securing Azure OpenAI Service

And even a bonus section about Azure AI Content Safety, a new service that helps you automatically moderate and filter user generated content.

This course will help you take the next step in the AI evolution, and will make you an expert in ChatGPT and AI models in Azure.

There's no other course like this. This is the only course covering OpenAI Services in Azure, and it does so in a comprehensive, practical and fun way.

This new course is now offered for a special launch price of $10.99 only, for a few days only, so enroll now and enter the fascinating world of AI in the cloud.

Get the Azure OpenAI Services - The Complete Guide course now for the special launch price!

Remember: This special price expires soon, so hurry up!

So, that was the February 2026 edition of theVar.
I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to suggest and comment on it, simply by replying to this mail.
Also, if you created a unique content you think can be included here - drop me a note!
Looking forward for your feedback!

Cheers,

Memi

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