InfoQ Homepage Articles
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MCP: the Universal Connector for Building Smarter, Modular AI Agents
In this article, the authors discuss Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard designed to connect AI agents with tools and data they need. They also talk about how MCP empowers agent development, and its adoption in leading open-source frameworks.
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The Virtual Think Tank: Using LLMs to Gain a Multitude of Perspectives
The virtual think tank leverages LLMs to simulate diverse stakeholder and expert perspectives, enabling architects to explore trade-offs, challenge biases, and refine decisions. By prompting personas of real industry experts, the method fosters rich, contextual debates—offering a scalable, low-cost alternative to a traditional think tank.
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Ransomware-Resilient Storage: the New Frontline Defense in a High-Stakes Cyber Battle
Cybersecurity has evolved, with ransomware now primarily targeting data storage and backups. To combat this, modern defense strategies focus on making storage systems more resilient. Key tactics include using immutable storage that prevents data from being altered or deleted, employing AI-powered detection, and implementing air-gapping to create isolated, tamper-proof recovery points.
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The Missing Layer in AI Infrastructure: Aggregating Agentic Traffic
In this article, author Eyal Solomon discusses AI Gateways, the outbound proxy servers that intercept and manage AI-agent-initiated traffic in real time to enforce policies and provide central management.
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Zero-Downtime Critical Cloud Infrastructure Upgrades at Scale
Engineers can avoid common pitfalls in large-scale infrastructure upgrades by studying others' experiences. The article provides lessons learned from big firms like eBay and Snowflake, offering solutions for legacy systems, performance validation, and rollback planning. It emphasizes systematic preparation and clear communication to handle challenges and ensure zero-downtime upgrades at scale.
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Infusing AI into Your Java applications
Equip yourself with the basic AI knowledge and skills you need to start building intelligent and responsive Enterprise Java applications. With the help of our simple chatbot application for booking interplanetary space trips, see how Java frameworks like LangChain4j with Quarkus make it easy and efficient to interact with LLMs and create satisfying applications for end-users.
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One Network: Cloud-Agnostic Service and Policy-Oriented Network Architecture
Bringing together software infrastructure leads to faster development time and easy control of large, spread-out systems through clear rules. In this QCon SF 2024 presentation, Anna Berenberg shared learnings and achievements when building One Network, addressing complex infrastructure layers, open-source integration, and uniform policy enforcement for improved reliability and security.
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Sandbox as a Service: Building an Automated AWS Sandbox Framework
This article outlines an automated AWS Sandbox Framework to provide secure, cost-controlled environments for innovation. It leverages AWS services like Control Tower and open-source tools to automate provisioning, enforce security policies, manage resource lifecycles, and optimize costs through automated cleanup and governance.
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Keep the Terminal Relevant: Patterns for AI Agent Driven CLIs
Well-designed CLIs are crucial in the agentic AI era—serving both human users and autonomous agents with precision and reliability. Treat CLI output formats as stable API contracts and prioritize adoption of the MCP protocol for agent integration from day one.
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Backend FinOps: Engineering Cost-Efficient Microservices in the Cloud
Backend FinOps integrates financial discipline into microservices, crucial for cutting cloud costs. Challenges such as resource fragmentation and cold starts underscore the need for intelligent design, effective language choice, robust tagging, and automation. Implementing FinOps via IaC, CI/CD checks, and dynamic autoscaling (e.g., Karpenter) ensures sustained efficiency.
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Building Reproducible ML Systems with Apache Iceberg and SparkSQL: Open Source Foundations
Traditional data lakes are great for storing massive amounts of stuff, but they're terrible at the transactional guarantees and versioning that ML workloads desperately need. Apache Iceberg and SparkSQL bring database-like reliability to your data lake. Time travel, schema evolution, and ACID transactions help support reproducible machine learning experiments.
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A First-Timer’s Guide to Curating a Technical Conference Track
One first-time track host shares the process, constraints, and takeaways from building a track from scratch at QCon London 2025.