The Infoq Podcast

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Lorin Hochstein about how real-world failures provide insight into how software systems actually work. Our first topic was understanding that while automated fault injection tools can introduce basic robustness into a system, they cannot replicate the understanding that comes from mitigating complicated software failures in the real world. We then pondered how do we get this information to software architects so that they can learn from failure. Ironically, in reliable systems, adding more reliability can often lead to complexity which can lead to new failures. We often focus on making our systems robust against known failure patterns, but we have not learnt how to make software systems resilient to unknown failure modes, or failures due to changes in the external world or the evolving system design. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3NVhtf3 Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience

Are you ready for your new non-deterministic co-workers? Autonomous agents promise to help build, operate, and run software systems, but they can also be unpredictable, chaotic, and difficult to control without the right operating model. In this episode of Next Generation Architecture Playbook, Shweta Vohra and Joseph Stein explore what changes when software systems start planning, acting, and making decisions on their own. The conversation distinguishes truly agentic use cases from traditional automation and looks at how architects and engineers should think about boundaries, orchestration, and system design in this new environment. The episode also explores the practical realities organisations face early in adoption. These include emerging risks such as prompt injection and tool misuse, the growing need for stronger observability and explainability, and how human-in-the-loop models fit into autonomous workflows. Joseph shares lessons from building a centralised AI platform used across multiple teams and p

Andres Almiray, a serial open-source contributor and the creator of JReleaser, discusses the project's state, noting that the tool is usable across any ecosystem, not just Java. He also touches on the Common House Foundation's mission. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4sGNOFg Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. h

In this episode, Thomas Betts and Sam McAfee discuss how AI hype is reshaping organizational behavior, why many companies struggle with experimentation, and how unclear decision structures create friction. They explore psychological safety and mindful leadership as essential foundations for healthier, more effective engineering cultures. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4l6G7FN Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Bos

This conversation explores why generative AI is not just another automation layer but a shift into autonomy. The key idea is that we cannot retrofit AI into old procedural workflows and expect it to behave. Once autonomy is introduced, systems will drift, show emergent behaviour, and act in ways we did not explicitly script. The real architectural shift is not about controlling every step, but about defining clear boundaries. Instead of telling AI exactly how to do the work, we must define what it cannot do, what it is allowed to touch, what decisions it can make, and what goal it must achieve. Governance and design must be built together from the start, not added later. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4aX34GS Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon

In this episode, Thomas Betts talks with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, the author of Accelerate and one of the most prominent and important minds in DevOps and developer productivity. The conversation is about identifying and removing developer friction, the subject of her new book, Frictionless. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/40vbpMN Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are

In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with Chris Richardson about using microservices to modernize software applications and the use of artificial intelligence in software architecture. We first discussed the problems of monolithic enterprise software and how to use microservices to evolve them to enable fast flow - the ability to achieve rapid software delivery. The discussion also focused on some of the key problems in accomplishing this. We also discussed how greenfield development fails because you can wait years for your product to be validated in a rapidly changing business environment. Then the discussion focused on the problems using generative artificial intelligence in understanding an existing code base as well as the usefulness of artificial intelligence in architecting systems. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4qQpkbb Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and tech

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Muzeeb Mohammad about building event-driven microservices for financial systems. The discussion covers some of the core principles and patterns for event-driven architectures, reasons for using these patterns, and some of the challenges related to finance and other highly-regulated industries. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3LZAgoI Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston

AI coding assistants promise speed, but what do they mean for quality, trust, and the architect’s craft? In this inaugural episode of Next Gen Architecture Playbook, Shweta Vohra and Grady Booch explore a principled view of how architecture must evolve when machines begin writing code alongside humans. They unpack the third golden age of software engineering, where productivity gains are real, where the risks lie, and how architects can design review gates and practices that preserve long term integrity. Drawing on decades of experience across the history of software engineering, the conversation goes beyond hype to examine what should remain firmly human in an AI augmented world, and why architectural judgement, responsibility, and creative thinking matter more now, than ever. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4tmTR30 Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: http

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Madelyn Olson, a maintainer of the Valkey project and a Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB. The conversation covers how Valkey started as an open source fork of Redis and how the maintainers optimized the memory usage and improved throughput. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4qhsIM6 Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston 2026

Erica Pisani, host of the performance and sustainability track at QCon London 2025, retrospects on the lessons learned from assembling the track and the lessons learned from attending the talks. She touches on the importance of the environmental-social aspects of software and hints on how developers can improve these aspects with small steps in the architecture and practices of building software. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3Zquqjj Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughe

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke with David Gudeman about software architecture for startups. The discussion starts by illuminating how to make decisions with imperfect information, and how uncertainty and ambiguity flow through all aspects of developing the architecture. This leads to analyzing how the architect must focus on both product strategy and technical decisions, and how there must be a collaborative effort between the product and technical teams. David Gudeman then talks about how one never really throws away working software, and how to evolve your architecture as the startup grows. The podcast concludes with advice for somebody who is thinking about being a software architect in a startup. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3NEvVrc Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QC

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Olivia McVicker, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft about AI-driven software development. The conversation covers the current, mainstream AI coding assistants and gets into where those tools are quickly heading. They then look to the future of how the entire software development lifecycle will see the benefits of AI in the next few years. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4qIJT9F Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software chal

In this podcast, InfoQ spoke with Somtochi Onyekwere on recent developments in distributed data systems, how to achieve fast, eventually consistent replication across distributed nodes, and how Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDTs) can help with conflict resolution when managing data. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3Lrq9Zf Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams ar

In this end-of-year panel, the InfoQ podcast hosts reflect on AI’s impact on software delivery, the growing importance of sociotechnical systems, evolving cloud realities, and what 2026 may bring. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3Lk6SsF Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai The InfoQ Podca

In this episode, Simon Ritter, Deputy CTO at Azul, sat down with podcast host Michael Redlich, Lead Editor of the Java topic at InfoQ, and discussed the latest features in OpenJDK and Simon’s experiences serving on the JCP Expert Group since JDK 9. OpenJDK topics included: the six-month release cycle, Generational Shenandoah, JDK Flight Recorder, Project Leyden and Compact Object Headers. Please note that this podcast was recorded on October 29, 2025 before anticipated upcoming events were discussed and before the public announcement on the acquisition of Payara by Azul. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4aqpTEe Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights t

Will McGugan, the maker of Textual and Rich frameworks, speaks about the reasoning of developing the two two libraries and the lesson learned. Also, he shares light on Toad, his current project, which he envisions being a more visually appealing way of interacting with agentic LLMs through command line. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4j1MtFq Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges. https://qconlondon.com/ QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn ho

QCon AI New York Chair Wes Reisz talks with LinkedIn’s Karthik Ramgopal and Prince Valluri about enabling AI agents at enterprise scale. They discuss how platform teams orchestrate secure, multi-agentic systems, the role of MCP, the use of foreground and background agents, improving developer experience, and reducing toil. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4prPukO Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI New York 2025 (December 16-17, 2025) - SOLD OUT! https://ai.qconferences.com/ QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving to

Gabriele Columbro, managing director of the Linux Foundation Europe, discusses the differences in the open-source landscape between Europe, China and the US. Stressing that the open-source landscape is the last favorable ground for global innovation in the current geo-political landscape. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4rFIhPu Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI New York 2025 (December 16-17, 2025) - SOLD OUT! https://ai.qconferences.com/ QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges.

In this episode, QCon AI New York 2025 Chair Wes Reisz speaks with Reken CEO and Google Trust & Safety founder Shuman Ghosemajumder about the erosion of digital trust. They explore how deepfakes and automated social engineering are scaling cybercrime. Shuman argues defenders must move beyond default trust, utilizing behavioral telemetry and game theory to counter attacks that simulate human behavior. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4p7zX9z Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI New York 2025 (December 16-17, 2025) https://ai.qconferences.com/ QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026) QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from s