Category: App Architecture

It's 2025. AI is no longer a novelty. It’s a fact of life. Generative AI models have matured, multimodal systems can process text, images, and speech relatively seamlessly, and AI-powered copilots have found their way into developer tools, office suites, and even design platforms. And yet… the hype hasn’t gone away. If anything, the AI hype is getting louder. Every product launch announcement now must include a phrase like “Now with AI!” Investors want to know what your “AI strategy” is. Com…

Not all applications are created equal. Some are built to process transactions and maintain state, while others focus on delivering content, data, or experiences to users. For software architects and engineering leaders, distinguishing between these core application types is critical for making sound decisions about scalability, infrastructure, security, and data management. Why? Because how you design, build, construct, and operate your application is different based on your customer use pat…

Another critical principle in maintaining a safe and secure application running in the cloud is understanding the Principle of Least Privilege. The Principle of Least Privilege is an industry-standard security principle widely known to reduce the impact of bad actor attacks. The idea behind the principle of least privilege is to: 1. Grant an entity the minimum permission it absolutely needs to perform its operations. 2. Grant no more permissions than that. This principle applies to cloud infra…

If you’ve ever spoken out to your iPhone and said “Hey Siri, what’s the weather in Seattle, WA”, or spoke to an Amazon Echo device and said “Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights”, you’ve given an AI a set of instructions for it to execute. You’ve given an AI a prompt. In the Alexa case, the phrase is converted from an audio snippet into text, and that text is sent to an AI system — Amazon Alexa in this case — for it to determine the desired actions. The output of that process is a set of actions …

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…

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. The Configuration Explosion ProblemRemember when our simple applications had a single configuration file? Those days are long gone. Today’s applications don’t just have more configuration—they have exponentially more complex configuration…

Software architects hold a unique and influential position in the product development lifecycle, guiding technical decisions that shape the product's future. Let me be clear - architects aren't just technical decision makers, they're risk managers who shape your entire product's future. I've seen this firsthand in my years at AWS, New Relic and other enterprises. When you're operating at scale, every architectural decision carries both opportunity and risk. Technical debt isn't just a burden - …

“Ready to pull the ripcord on VMWare? On Nov 6, join my friends over at CAST and AWS to learn how software intelligence can speed up and derisk the move to best-fit cloud services. Register today!” In the complex ecosystem of software development, the role of a software architect is critical in shaping the direction and success of product development. Software architects wield significant influence that extends well beyond writing code or making isolated technical decisions. Software architect…

In world of software development, the role of a software architect often appears to stand at the top of the technical leadership ladder. With that responsibility comes an even greater need for continuous learning and adaptation. As someone who's spent years in the trenches of cloud architecture, I can tell you that the moment you stop learning is the moment you start becoming obsolete. The Shifting Sands of Technology Let's face it: the tech landscape is changing faster than ever before. What…

As the world of software development continues to evolve at a rapid pace, organizations are increasingly turning to tools such as Kubernetes to deploy, scale, and manage their containerized applications. Kubernetes and containers have, in particular, revolutionized how we build and deploy applications, but with this power comes the responsibility of ensuring our systems' health, performance, and reliability. This is where effective monitoring comes into play. I've spent years working with comp…

The world of artificial intelligence (AI) is undergoing a profound transformation, and at the heart of this change is the rise of open-source AI models. According to Stanford University's AI Index report for 2024, a remarkable 65.7% of the 149 foundation models released in 2023 were open-source, up from 44.4% in 2022 and 33.3% in 2021. This shift towards open-source AI is not just a passing trend; it's a movement that is redefining the very nature of AI development and deployment. Open-Source A…

In the dynamic world of software development, complexity is often viewed as the arch-nemesis of productivity and efficiency. Yet, here lies the paradox: embracing complexity can actually pave the way to simplicity. How can this be the case? Let’s focus a bit on complexity in software development. We can often think of complexity as a big, tangled ball of yarn. The more you pull on one thread, the messier it gets. Now imagine breaking up that big ball of yarn into smaller, neat little bundles…

Don’t be fooled into thinking your site is highly available when it isn’t. Planned and regular maintenance involving unavailable applications still counts against availability for those applications. After all, from your customer’s viewpoint, your application is still unavailable. The fact that you planned that it would be unavailable is not important to your customers.</p> I often hear companies using routine maintenance windows as an excuse. Usually, the argument goes like this: ““We have fan…

Your application is large. You have many customers, and they make good use of your many features and capabilities. You have a large catalog of products, and your store is big and feature-rich. You are doing well. Except, you are having problems. Your application crashes too often. Your developers are always on it when it fails, and they are very fast at fixing your site, but it takes time and energy. You are down at least once a month or so—and you can be down for hours at a time. Imagine the…

First, there was DevOps. Then, ModernOps and CloudOps. Now, there is ScaryOps. Welcome to the special Halloween Edition of the Modern Digital Business podcast. In this episode, the 3 Scariest Mistakes Companies Make in the Cloud. It's time to turn our attention to scary things…scary movies, scary TV shows, scary home decorations, scary costumes. But when it comes to working with customers and clients on their cloud projects, sometimes I get quite scared…and not in a good way. Working with cus…

Low code has received a lot of press recently. There seems to be quite a debate about whether the use of low code makes the application development process better or if it interferes with the development process, resulting in inferior applications. I read an article recently that talked about how an inevitable outcome of using Low Code was application complexity. Further, this application complexity leads to increased difficulty with security issues. This article got me thinking. I’ve been wri…

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 exploite…

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 t…