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Background A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a document that outlines how well a product aligns with accessibility (a11y) standards. Its primary purpose is to inform customers about a product’s a11y features, enabling them to make informed decisions before purchasing software. At Slack, we conducted a VPAT by a third party a11y vendor in 2024 following our significant UI change (IA4). During this VPAT process, we identified a total of 542 a11y issues, with Android having 135, iOS having 163, and desktop having 244 issues. Of the 135 issues identified in Android, we immediately assigned the obvious shovel-ready issues, such as those with color contrast and missing image labels, to the responsible teams for resolution. ...

Be part of P99 CONF – All things performance (Sponsored)Obsessed with performance and low latency engineering? Discuss your optimizations and lessons learned with ~30K like-minded engineers… at P99 CONF 2025! P99 CONF is a highly technical conference known for lively discussion. ScyllaDB makes it free and virtual, so it’s open to experts around the world. Core topics for this year include Rust, Zig, databases, event streaming architectures, measurement, compute/infrastructure, Linux, Kubernetes, and AI/ML. ...

AWS Guide to Cloud Architecture Diagrams (Sponsored)Enhance visibility into your cloud architecture with expert insights from AWS + Datadog. In this ebook, AWS Solutions Architects Jason Mimick and James Wenzel guide you through best practices for creating professional and impactful diagrams. Get the ebook This week’s system design refresher: ...

For the third consecutive year, Gartner has named Cloudflare in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE) report. This analyst evaluation helps security and network leaders make informed choices about their long-term partners in digital transformation. We are excited to share that Cloudflare is one of only nine vendors recognized in this year’s report. You can read more about our position in the report here. What’s more exciting is that we’re just getting started. Since 2018, starting with our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service Cloudflare Access, we’ve continued to push the boundaries of how quickly we can build and deliver a mature SSE platform. In that time, we’ve released multiple products each year, delivering hundreds of features across our platform. That’s not possible without our customers. Today, tens of thousands of customers have chosen to connect and protect their people, devices, applications, networks, and data with Cloudflare. They tell us our platform is faster and easier to deploy and provides a more consistent and reliable user experience, all on a more agile architecture for longer term modernization. We’ve made a commitment to those customers to continue to deliver innovative solutions with the velocity and resilience they have come to expect from us. If you want to join them on this journey today, contact us to discuss your own SSE journey. ...

Modern software systems rarely live in isolation. Most applications today are stitched together from dozens,  sometimes hundreds, of independently deployed services, each handling a piece of the puzzle. This helps create smaller units of responsibility and loose coupling. However, the flexibility comes with a new kind of complexity, especially around how these services communicate. In a monolith, in-process function calls stitch components together. In a service-based world, everything talks over the network. Suddenly, concerns that were once handled inside the application, like retries, authentication, rate limiting, encryption, and observability, become distributed concerns. And distributed concerns are harder to get right. ...

Meta is partnering with V.tal to extend the Malbec subsea cable to Porto Alegre, Brazil by 2027. With this new extension, Malbec will become the first subsea cable to land in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, bringing more connectivity to millions of people in Southern Brazil and neighboring countries. Malbec will improve the scale and reliability of digital infrastructure in Porto Alegre, establishing it as a digital hub and improving online experiences across Southern Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Today, we’re announcing the extension of the Malbec subsea cable to the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Developed by Meta, in partnership with V.tal, Malbec is a 2,500 km cable that entered service in 2021 to provide connectivity between the Southern Cone of South America and Brazil. The new extension will be operational in 2027 and will link Porto Alegre to the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina. ...