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Some time ago when I was living in Silicon Valley, I often drove by a curious-looking structure called the Winchester Mystery House every day on my way to work. The Winchester Mystery House is a San Jose mansion that was once the home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester, and the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune. Originally purchased in 1884 as an unfinished eight-room farmhouse, it was expanded over the course of 36 years …

Migrating to the cloud is a commitment. It’s a commitment of time, resources, and corporate energy.

Perhaps you are migrating an on-premises application to the cloud. Or maybe you’re moving a monolithic application to service-oriented or microservice architecture. Migrations are not easy to pull off, and can involve long transitions. Because the benefit is not always immediately obvious—and, in fact, sometimes things get worse at the beginning—it’s tempting to want to quit the migration early.

Who would ever want …

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

• There’s configuration describing the network interconnections in your system, including routing rules and port blocking.
• There’s configuration for your load balancers, determining where to send traffic destined for your service.
• There’s configuration for security permissions needed for databases, caches, servers, third-party applications, and other systems.
• There’s configuration for your application itself, describing database connections, service connections, …

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.

But microservices can also create additional and unwanted vulnerability points that bad actors can leverage to compromise your application. A single compromised service, no matter how small, can lead to vulnerabilities that can be exploited in neighboring services, ultimately compromising them as well. A single small …

In the fast-paced world of software development, buzzwords and trends often dominate discussions around application architecture. One term that has garnered significant attention and, at times, confusion is microservice. 

While the concept of breaking down applications into smaller components has significant value, as anyone who reads my writings regularly will attest, there is also significant hype around the term microservices itself that leads to misconceptions and oversimplifications.

I think the biggest problem with the microservices hype is that people …

In the software world, identity is the mapping of a person, place, or thing in a verifiable manner to a software resource. Whenever you interact with nearly anything on the internet, you are dealing with identities:

• Facebook identity
• Email address
• Login name and password for a website

Everyone has multiple identities—multiple ways that people know who you are and interact with you in the virtual world. Here are a few …

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From manufacturing to transportation to retail, companies across virtually every industry are supporting their digital transformations by moving to a cloud-based infrastructure. The shift from on-premises software to cloud services has been revolutionary to the process of application development and deployment, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. But using the cloud often isn’t enough. You need to leverage cloud-native applications to benefit from the improved agility, availability, scalability, and overall performance …

Architecting modern applications is a tough job, and architecting a solid data model for modern applications is one of the toughest, yet most important, parts of modern application architecture.

Failure to create a reasonable data architecture can cause your application to fail in many bad ways, including issues related to performance, data integrity, data sovereignty, data safety, and scalability. Poor data architecture can leave your application and your company in bad shape.

Building a proper data architecture is critical to …

Consider the following story:

Software Architecture Insights is a regular newsletter providing insights into architecting your modern applications at scale. Modern digital businesses continually struggle with building new and innovative applications that also maintain high availability at cloud-scale.

Software Architecture Insights gives you, well, insights into how tech leaders and software architects function effectively. Learn how to build, operate, and maintain applications at scale, innovate new features and capabilities, and keep teams fully engaged. All while effectively managing IT complexity and technical debt.

Insightful …