All Posts

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Moving from Monolith to Microservices with Amazon ECS

I developed a tutorial on how to containerize a monolithic application, break it up into various microservices, and deploy them using Amazon Elastic Container Service:

Jan 5, 2018 - 14 min watch
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AWS re:Invent 2017: Getting Started with Docker and Amazon ECS

I gave this talk at re:Invent 2017, introducing Docker and Amazon ECS. This was an intro level session, so it doesn’t go super deep, but should be useful if you are considering containers!

Nov 30, 2017 - 36 min watch
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Choosing your container environment on AWS with ECS, EKS, and Fargate

The Control Plane When deploying containers on AWS the control plane is your entry point to running your application. It is the interface that you will interact with when you want to launch an application, query the state of an application, or shut an application down.

Nov 30, 2017 - 3 min read
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A quick (opinionated) guide to securing data on AWS now!

The EU General Data Protection Regulation goes into enforcement in May 2018. It applies to “all companies processing the personal data of data subjects residing in the Union, regardless of the company’s location.

Nov 22, 2017 - 6 min read
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Running Containerized Microservices on AWS

This AWS whitepaper covers strategies for running containerized microservices on AWS. It combines the 12 factor application principles with container best practices. I contributed several sections to the whitepaper, including “Smart Endpoints and Dumb Pipes” and “Decentralized Governance”.

Nov 1, 2017 - 1 min read
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Using AWS Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer with EC2 Container Service

Amazon Web Services recently released new second generation load balancers: Application Load Balancer (ALB), and Network Load Balancer (NLB). This was accompanied by a rename of the previous generation of load balancer to Classic Load Balancer.

Oct 24, 2017 - 12 min read
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Granular Application Architecture Patterns

One of the recent trends in server side application development is to decompose a large application into smaller pieces which are more granular. This article explores application architecture patterns, starting from the venerable monolithic application, to smaller microservices, and finally the most granular pattern of all: functions as a service.

Oct 18, 2017 - 8 min read
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Microservice Testing: Unit Tests

The previous article introduced the test pyramid, and some of the basics of how to apply it to a distributed system: This article zooms in on the unit test layer of the testing pyramid and explores ways to build effective unit tests for distributed systems such as microservice deployments.

Sep 27, 2017 - 6 min read
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Microservice Testing: Introduction

Automated testing is one of the most important things that a software company needs in order to be successful. Properly tested code operates in a consistent and dependable manner which generates customer trust.

Sep 19, 2017 - 6 min read