Five Best Practices for Managing Configurations in Cloud-Native Applications

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 system

Don’t let your services become Trojan Horses

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 exploit

Moving Beyond the Microservices Hype

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 thin

Identity, trust, and their role in modern applications

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 of my identities: Twitter: @leeatchison LinkedIn: leeatchison Em

What cloud-native means for your business

​ 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, availa

5 Rules for Getting Your Data Architecture Right

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

What is the color of your money?

Consider the following story: “I went into my CEO’s office. Our CEO is a very driven, technical, hands-on CEO. All technical decisions have to go through him before the company goes forward with a plan. Today, the discussion was about the cloud. The problem? The CEO said we couldn’t move our application to the cloud because it was too expensive. His evidence? ‘If you compare the cost-per-hour of a cloud-based server instance to the monthly costs we pay for our servers, the cloud-based server

What is Software Architecture Insights?

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 capabilitie