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Software Architecture Insights

As modern applications grow more complex and valuable, their security becomes increasingly critical. Yet many organizations still operate with a flat security model—one breach and attackers gain access to everything. This approach is like building a house with a reinforced front door but paper-thin walls. How can you improve your application security to reduce your risk of attack? Use isolation zones. Isolation zones aren’t just a best practice—it’s the difference between a minor security incident and a catastrophic breach that makes headlines.

Both you and your cloud provider have a critical role in keeping your application safe. It’s a principle of security known as the Principle of Shared Responsibility. It describes a model for assigning ownership of various security aspects between the cloud provider and you.

The software development landscape has shifted dramatically. In 2024, a whopping 62% of professional developers use AI in their development process. This has done wonders for the productivity of an average software developer, and has led many people to assume this means that either we need fewer software developers or, more likely, we can get more and better software developed with existing staff.

Cloud-native applications make heavy use of services and microservice architectures. Distributed applications provide many benefits to modern application development processes and lend themselves particularly well to applications deployed in the public cloud.

In my previous article, I discussed five best practices for managing configurations in cloud-native applications. This article expands those recommendations by giving strategies for how to manage large scale configuration systems for large modern applications.

Managing configuration information in a complex, cloud-native application can be daunting. There is seemingly configuration everywhere.