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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
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Microservice Principles: Decentralized Data Management

Microservice philosophy favors decentralization in all aspects of software design. This focus on decentralization doesn’t just guide the organization of business logic. It also guides how data is persisted.

Sep 14, 2017 - 9 min read
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Microservice Principles: Decentralized Governance

One of the most important realizations that a software engineer can make in his or her career is that there is no single perfect tool for solving every computer science problem, and that different tools should be employed in different circumstances.

Sep 5, 2017 - 8 min read
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Microservice Principles: Smart Endpoints and Dumb Pipes

As engineering organizations transition from building monolithic architecture to building microservices architecture one challenge they often face is understanding how to enable communications between microservices.

Sep 1, 2017 - 8 min read