September 27, 2021
Unless you’ve been developing software in a cave, you’ve probably heard people sing the praises of microservices. They’re agile, simple, and an overall improvement on the monolith and service-oriented architecture days. But of course, with all the benefits of microservices comes a new set of challenges.
July 26, 2021
A common architectural design pattern these days is to break up an application monolith into smaller microservices. Each microservice is then responsible for a specific aspect or feature of your app. For example, one microservice might be responsible for serving external API requests, while another might handle data fetching for your frontend.
November 10, 2020
Open-source application diversity is both the biggest boon in the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement, and its greatest hindrance to adoption. You don’t always own the application you’re consuming, and it often comes with certain opinions and limitations imposed by the software author—either intentionally or otherwise.
November 9, 2020
In the last several years, Google’s Kubernetes project has generated huge buzz. The project has grown and evolved into a titan of the cloud infrastructure world. While it’s a great project and serves many purposes, it remains a complex beast. Even with the managed Kubernetes services from major cloud providers, teams have to maintain complex, interwoven architectures using an ever-expanding cosmos of plugins and paradigm shifts. With such complexity inherent with its flexibility, Kubernetes requires its own set of skills in order to implement, maintain, upgrade, and operate this diverse orchestration ecosystem.
November 3, 2020
In this article, we’re going to walk through some of the basic setup for Slash GraphQL and then take a look at how I built a Pokémon Pokédex app with React and Slash GraphQL in just a few hours! Frontend developers want interacting with the backend of their web application to be as painless as possible. Requesting data from the database or making updates to records stored in the database should be simple so that frontend developers can focus on what they do best: creating beautiful and intuitive user interfaces.
October 30, 2020
As long as I can remember, I’ve included log messages in my code to provide run-time insight into what the code is really doing. From developers running locally all the way to the eyes of a production support engineer, these extra lines of code are meant to help troubleshoot unexpected scenarios.
December 16, 2016
Occasionally, I’ll talk to a developer or operations engineer who says they only use APM or logs as a monitoring solution. They’ll say something like, “We don’t look at logs much since we have New Relic.” Even worse, some rely on their customers to know when something is wrong: “We just check Google Analytics to see if popular pages or actions have gone down.” The surprising thing isn’t necessarily that they have a favorite go-to tool, but that they think it’s sufficient for all their needs. Have we finally achieved the holy grail: a single pane of glass that tells us everything we need to know about operations and performance?
November 9, 2016
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) allows websites and web services to serve more requests from users by adding more servers based on need. An unhealthy ELB can cause your website to go offline or slow to a crawl. The right dashboards and meaningful metrics provide insights to remediate issues faster, and a powerful analytics engine makes alerts smarter.
July 1, 2016
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is used to provide disk volumes for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. It’s elastic because it allows users to quickly create volumes based on their needed size and performance. EBS also offers greater durability by automatically replicating within an availability zone, making it easy to setup encryption and create snapshots.
June 2, 2016
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is one of the most popular products on Amazon Web Services (AWS), used by 84% of companies on AWS according to 2nd Watch’s 2015 AWS Scorecard. Part one of this blog series described the top 12 challenges of monitoring Amazon EC2 when dealing with larger scale production deployments.
