• aws 23
• architecture 22
• terraform 8
• ha 7
• infosec 7
• microservices 7
• caching 5
• patterns 5
• api-gateway 4
• cdktf 4
• iac 4
• iam 4
• nodejs 4
• serverless 4
• bff 3
• ecs 3
• eda 3
• fargate 3
• github 3
• jekyll 3
• lambda 3
• resilience 3
• work-practices 3
• alb 2
• availability 2
• containers 2
• ddd 2
• docker 2
• dynamodb 2
• events 2
• hexagonal-architecture 2
• jeckyll 2
• nines 2
• o11y 2
• python 2
• security 2
• api 1
• aws-cli 1
• career 1
• cloud-native 1
• cloudformation 1
• compliance 1
• cost 1
• cqrs 1
• css 1
• data-mesh 1
• datamesh 1
• design 1
• devops 1
• distributed-systems 1
• dns 1
• eks 1
• enviy 1
• eventbridge 1
• excel 1
• git 1
• hexagonal 1
• ipv6 1
• javascript 1
• jest 1
• json 1
• liquid 1
• mach 1
• monolith 1
• negotiation 1
• nginx 1
• o18y 1
• podman 1
• rest 1
• sam 1
• sandbox 1
• sbom 1
• single-table 1
• solid 1
• sqs 1
• ssh 1
• tagging 1
• team-topologies 1
• testing 1
• threat-modeling 1
• ubuntu 1
• vpc 1
• wasm 1
• webauthn 1
• well-architected 1
• wsl2 1

Architecture

From monolithic to MACH architecture

It’s been a while since my last proper post, but I’ve given a presentation last week that, I believe, deserves to be expanded into a post.

Architecture descriptions in the cloud

This week I have started documenting our target architecture. Now, what I was actually asked to do was “document our target cloud infrastructure”, but I have been there before and believe a formal (ish) overall architecture description is required before diving into any specific problem area.

REST API design resource modeling

Good article about reconciling domain driven design and REST. Quite old, but then again the DDD books I have read are as well, and couched in very old fashion SOA language, which I haven’t had much to do in recent years. Feels like both a trip down memory lane and a refresher 🤨

5 patterns to make your microservice fault-tolerant

Some good info in there about handling failure in downstream services

A quick introduction to clean architecture

Overview (or data dump) of clean architecture concepts

AWs Caching challenges and strategies

Tons of information about caching strategies in this AWS builders library article

Avoiding fallback in distributed systems

Another information packed article from AWS builders library, advising, surprisingly, against fallback strategies

Failure Isolation and Recovery: Learning from High-Scale and Extreme-Scale Computing

Covers a broad swath of resilience issues, with links and references to further material

GROWTH BLOG Scalability and Technology Consulting Advice for SaaS and Technology Companies

Scroll to the bottom to the categories. Lot of good stuff in there.

Google SRE book

TIL that Google book on Site Reliability Engineering is available online!

Hexagonal Architecture: three principles and an implementation example

Interesting dive into hexagonal architecture, ports and adapters, dependencies always facing inward, etc…

Seeing the BFF Pattern used in the wild

Good overview of the BFF Pattern and its relationship with other patterns

The API gateway pattern versus the Direct client-to-microservice communication

Microsoft view on the API gateway and backend-for-frontend patterns

How to keep complexity in check with hexagonal architecture

Description of the use and advantages of hexagonal architecture in frontend components, which would include BFF. (backend for frontend), although they are not referred to as such in this article

Interview with Alistair Cockburn About Hexagonal Architecture… and more

Always fascinating to find out where patterns originated from, from the authors themselves

Layered Architecture: Still a Solid Approach

There is a misconception that layered architectures equate to N-tiers architectures. They don’t and this article supports this (my) interpretation.

Layering Microservices

Another article supporting my view that layering your architecture is good, doesn’t equates to N-tiers and doesn’t clash with microservices, hexagonal and cell based architecture descriptions

DDD, Hexagonal, Onion, Clean, CQRS, … How I put it all together

Aot to unpack in this article, saving it to read later, not convinced about everything in it but worth a proper resd

From monolith to resilient microservices

R

Cloud Native Architecture in Practice

Good summary of the things to look for when architecting for the cloud

API interaction types in a microservice architecture: queries, commands, and events

Nice post with interesting links

Binbash Leverage Documentation

A good reference reference architecture. The documentation is good as well. the leading, easy to deploy, reusable and most automated solution for defining, provisioning and managing your secure and scalable multi-account AWS infrastructure environment.

Back to Top ↑

Aws

From monolithic to MACH architecture

It’s been a while since my last proper post, but I’ve given a presentation last week that, I believe, deserves to be expanded into a post.

Yor: Automated IaC tag and trace

This could be a useful tool

Fargate networking 101

Quick overview of AWS Fargate networking

The Complete History of AWS Outages

Good read, puts things in perspective

iamlive: Generate an IAM policy from AWS calls using client-side monitoring (CSM) or embedded proxy

This could be a useful tool to identify which minimum set of action to allow on my IaC user to allow it to do its works while preserving least privilege.

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

Saving Money By Replacing API Gateway With Application Load Balancer’s Lambda Integration

Our AWS support architect (whatever their title actually is) has pointed out that our planned use of API Gateway could prove quite expensive, and that, on the face of it, the Application Load Balancer might be all we need.

I am therefore doing my own research, and this article supports their argument.

Tips to prevent a serverless wreck

Nice simple article pointing to some useful reference material

Serverless.tf

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

Do not use AWS CloudFormation

A useful comparison of Terraform and Cloudformation

AWS Fargate: Understanding the Networking and Security Considerations

First part of this article provides a simple overview of fargate networking

ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?

Things I know or think I know but fail to explain easily

Ws Security Documentation by Category

This is worth bookmarking - a list of all AWS services security pages

AWS and IPv6

Besides more IPs, what are the benefits of adopting all ipv6 and is it practical today?

Serverless Container-based APIs with Amazon ECS and Amazon API Gateway

This blog post guides you through the details of the option based on API Gateway and AWS Cloud Map, and how to implement it: first you learn how the different components (Amazon ECS, AWS Cloud Map, API Gateway, etc.) work together, then you launch and test a sample container-based API.

Application Load Balancer-type Target Group for Network Load Balancer

This new feature allows AWS customers to directly register an ALB as an NLB target, eliminating the need to actively manage changing ALB IP addresses. This is achieved by making use of a newly introduced Application Load Balancer-type target group for NLB.

AWS Access Keys - A Reference

AWS Access Keys are the credentials used to provide programmatic or CLI-based access to the AWS APIs. This post outlines what they are, how to identify the different types of keys, where you’re likely to find them across the different services, and the order of access precedence for the different SDKs and tools.

A Detailed Overview of AWS API Gateway

Tons of useful details in this article

Cross-account role trust policies should trust AWS accounts, not roles

Found this in the context of access control to event carried sensitive data

Binbash Leverage Documentation

A good reference reference architecture. The documentation is good as well. the leading, easy to deploy, reusable and most automated solution for defining, provisioning and managing your secure and scalable multi-account AWS infrastructure environment.

AWS Routing 101

Good summary of routing in aws

AWS: 10 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong as an Architect

A few gotcha worth knowing about in this article

Lessons Learned From Running Serverless In Production

Great blog entry feom the serverless monk

Back to Top ↑

Aws-certification

Back to Top ↑

Briwser

Back to Top ↑

Ddd

REST API design resource modeling

Good article about reconciling domain driven design and REST. Quite old, but then again the DDD books I have read are as well, and couched in very old fashion SOA language, which I haven’t had much to do in recent years. Feels like both a trip down memory lane and a refresher 🤨

DDD and Messaging Architectures

TA ververy useful list of patterns

Back to Top ↑

Data

Back to Top ↑

Devoos

Back to Top ↑

Devops

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

Back to Top ↑

Dynamodb

Exporting DynamoDB Data to Excel using Lambda with s3 on AWS

This is something I might need to replicate for my current project,where my dynamodb is just a staging stage before the data is eventually sent to our data lake. In the meantime, emailing the data to my colleagues in marketing will do nicely 😁

Safe List updates with DynamoDB

More dynamodb stuff I should really know already

Back to Top ↑

Fidi

Back to Top ↑

Git

Configuring Git to use the proper SSH key across multiple remote repositories

The new job uses both GitLab and BitBucket, and mandates SSH to access both.

Back to Top ↑

Iam

Defining IAM Policies with Terraform safely

Good tip on terraforming IAM policies

AWS IAM Permission Boundaries Has A Caveat That May Surprise You

This looks interesting…

iamlive: Generate an IAM policy from AWS calls using client-side monitoring (CSM) or embedded proxy

This could be a useful tool to identify which minimum set of action to allow on my IaC user to allow it to do its works while preserving least privilege.

AWS Access Keys - A Reference

AWS Access Keys are the credentials used to provide programmatic or CLI-based access to the AWS APIs. This post outlines what they are, how to identify the different types of keys, where you’re likely to find them across the different services, and the order of access precedence for the different SDKs and tools.

Back to Top ↑

Iac

Terraform CDK - part 2

It’s been 2 week since the previous post in this series and I am really starting to enjoy the Terraform CDK.

Terraform CDK - part 1

In this post I start building infrastructure components in my AWS sandbox, using the recently released Terraform Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I am going to keep it very basic, simply create an IAM role and policy, just to get myself going. What I am going to do however is dig into each little command and instructions I found in various tutorials, to make sure I understand the magic they hide from me.

Scripting access to my AWS sandbox

Today I am documenting how I intend to use the AWS sandbox environments provided by my current employer. These are phoenix environments - we can book them for anything between 1 and 7 days, after which time they get wiped out with AWS nuke.
We get given near free rein, with AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy. We are also supposedly restricted in the EC2 instances size we can launch, although I have not seen this reflected in the policies attached to my user .

Inframap - generate pretty terraform graphs

Looking for something to make my CDK TF posts prettier

Back to Top ↑

Idempotency

Back to Top ↑

Infosec

Defining IAM Policies with Terraform safely

Good tip on terraforming IAM policies

An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities

This is a great write up of json interops (or lack of) and the security consequences

Fundamental Practices for Secure Software Development

The best practices in the guide apply to cloud-based and online services, shrink-wrapped software and database applications, as well as operating systems, mobile devices, embedded systems and devices connected to the Internet.

developer security essentials

Another great resource from the footnotes of “Continuous architecture in practice”, handbooks and training materials on “developer security essentials”.

Terraform, can you keep a secret?

Did you now terraform state can and very likely holds sensitive data?

Canarytokens.org - Quick, Free, Detection for the Masses

How to test your apps for #log4shell vulnerability 1. Generate a DNS token https://t.co/vCzVG0O03i2. Wrap that token in Prefix: ${jndi:ldap://Suffix: /a}3. Use that value in search forms, profile data, settings etc. of your apps4. Get notified when you triggered a reaction

All things FUDI2/webAuthb

TA curated list of awesome WebAuthn/FIDO2 and now Passkey resources

Back to Top ↑

Javascript

CountAPI This API allows you to create simple numeric counters. IaaS, Integer as a Service.

I’m curious to see whether anyone actually visits the blog pages that I’ve shared (aka attention seeking) and implementing a basic page counter would help.

Back to Top ↑

Log4shell

Back to Top ↑

Microservices

Distributed transaction patterns for microservices compared

This is a good write up on distributed transaction patterns.

5 patterns to make your microservice fault-tolerant

Some good info in there about handling failure in downstream services

GROWTH BLOG Scalability and Technology Consulting Advice for SaaS and Technology Companies

Scroll to the bottom to the categories. Lot of good stuff in there.

Seeing the BFF Pattern used in the wild

Good overview of the BFF Pattern and its relationship with other patterns

Layering Microservices

Another article supporting my view that layering your architecture is good, doesn’t equates to N-tiers and doesn’t clash with microservices, hexagonal and cell based architecture descriptions

From monolith to resilient microservices

R

API interaction types in a microservice architecture: queries, commands, and events

Nice post with interesting links

Back to Top ↑

Miscellaneous

Back to Top ↑

Ml

Back to Top ↑

O11y

Journey on observability

Great thread on observability (i11y) as a practice

Tips to prevent a serverless wreck

Nice simple article pointing to some useful reference material

Back to Top ↑

Sre

Back to Top ↑

Serverless

Tips to prevent a serverless wreck

Nice simple article pointing to some useful reference material

Serverless.tf

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

Lessons Learned From Running Serverless In Production

Great blog entry feom the serverless monk

Skip The Lambda Function, Connect Directly To Your AWS Services

Thhow to call aws services directly from api gateway

Back to Top ↑

Terraform

Terraform CDK - part 2

It’s been 2 week since the previous post in this series and I am really starting to enjoy the Terraform CDK.

Terraform CDK - part 1

In this post I start building infrastructure components in my AWS sandbox, using the recently released Terraform Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I am going to keep it very basic, simply create an IAM role and policy, just to get myself going. What I am going to do however is dig into each little command and instructions I found in various tutorials, to make sure I understand the magic they hide from me.

Yor: Automated IaC tag and trace

This could be a useful tool

Defining IAM Policies with Terraform safely

Good tip on terraforming IAM policies

Terraform, can you keep a secret?

Did you now terraform state can and very likely holds sensitive data?

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

A Terraform CDK Construct which doubles as native Terraform Module

I want to see how to consume terraform modules from my CDK code. This covers the other direction, as well

Serverless.tf

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

Back to Top ↑

Alb

Saving Money By Replacing API Gateway With Application Load Balancer’s Lambda Integration

Our AWS support architect (whatever their title actually is) has pointed out that our planned use of API Gateway could prove quite expensive, and that, on the face of it, the Application Load Balancer might be all we need.

I am therefore doing my own research, and this article supports their argument.

AWS: 10 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong as an Architect

A few gotcha worth knowing about in this article

Back to Top ↑

Api

Serverless API Essentials - Idempotency

Great write-up on API Idempotency

Back to Top ↑

Api-gateway

The API gateway pattern versus the Direct client-to-microservice communication

Microsoft view on the API gateway and backend-for-frontend patterns

Saving Money By Replacing API Gateway With Application Load Balancer’s Lambda Integration

Our AWS support architect (whatever their title actually is) has pointed out that our planned use of API Gateway could prove quite expensive, and that, on the face of it, the Application Load Balancer might be all we need.

I am therefore doing my own research, and this article supports their argument.

Serverless Container-based APIs with Amazon ECS and Amazon API Gateway

This blog post guides you through the details of the option based on API Gateway and AWS Cloud Map, and how to implement it: first you learn how the different components (Amazon ECS, AWS Cloud Map, API Gateway, etc.) work together, then you launch and test a sample container-based API.

A Detailed Overview of AWS API Gateway

Tons of useful details in this article

Back to Top ↑

Architecture

From monolithic to MACH architecture

It’s been a while since my last proper post, but I’ve given a presentation last week that, I believe, deserves to be expanded into a post.

Architecture descriptions in the cloud

This week I have started documenting our target architecture. Now, what I was actually asked to do was “document our target cloud infrastructure”, but I have been there before and believe a formal (ish) overall architecture description is required before diving into any specific problem area.

REST API design resource modeling

Good article about reconciling domain driven design and REST. Quite old, but then again the DDD books I have read are as well, and couched in very old fashion SOA language, which I haven’t had much to do in recent years. Feels like both a trip down memory lane and a refresher 🤨

5 patterns to make your microservice fault-tolerant

Some good info in there about handling failure in downstream services

A quick introduction to clean architecture

Overview (or data dump) of clean architecture concepts

AWs Caching challenges and strategies

Tons of information about caching strategies in this AWS builders library article

Avoiding fallback in distributed systems

Another information packed article from AWS builders library, advising, surprisingly, against fallback strategies

Failure Isolation and Recovery: Learning from High-Scale and Extreme-Scale Computing

Covers a broad swath of resilience issues, with links and references to further material

GROWTH BLOG Scalability and Technology Consulting Advice for SaaS and Technology Companies

Scroll to the bottom to the categories. Lot of good stuff in there.

Google SRE book

TIL that Google book on Site Reliability Engineering is available online!

Hexagonal Architecture: three principles and an implementation example

Interesting dive into hexagonal architecture, ports and adapters, dependencies always facing inward, etc…

Seeing the BFF Pattern used in the wild

Good overview of the BFF Pattern and its relationship with other patterns

The API gateway pattern versus the Direct client-to-microservice communication

Microsoft view on the API gateway and backend-for-frontend patterns

How to keep complexity in check with hexagonal architecture

Description of the use and advantages of hexagonal architecture in frontend components, which would include BFF. (backend for frontend), although they are not referred to as such in this article

Interview with Alistair Cockburn About Hexagonal Architecture… and more

Always fascinating to find out where patterns originated from, from the authors themselves

Layered Architecture: Still a Solid Approach

There is a misconception that layered architectures equate to N-tiers architectures. They don’t and this article supports this (my) interpretation.

Layering Microservices

Another article supporting my view that layering your architecture is good, doesn’t equates to N-tiers and doesn’t clash with microservices, hexagonal and cell based architecture descriptions

DDD, Hexagonal, Onion, Clean, CQRS, … How I put it all together

Aot to unpack in this article, saving it to read later, not convinced about everything in it but worth a proper resd

From monolith to resilient microservices

R

Cloud Native Architecture in Practice

Good summary of the things to look for when architecting for the cloud

API interaction types in a microservice architecture: queries, commands, and events

Nice post with interesting links

Binbash Leverage Documentation

A good reference reference architecture. The documentation is good as well. the leading, easy to deploy, reusable and most automated solution for defining, provisioning and managing your secure and scalable multi-account AWS infrastructure environment.

Back to Top ↑

Availability

AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?

More on AWS managed component availability

Uptime and downtime with 99.99 % SLA

Was glad to note that AWS SLAs are given with monthly values, basically their invoicing period Their SLAs vary between 3 and 4 nines, or 43m 49s to 4m 22s, per month.

Back to Top ↑

Aws

From monolithic to MACH architecture

It’s been a while since my last proper post, but I’ve given a presentation last week that, I believe, deserves to be expanded into a post.

Yor: Automated IaC tag and trace

This could be a useful tool

Fargate networking 101

Quick overview of AWS Fargate networking

The Complete History of AWS Outages

Good read, puts things in perspective

iamlive: Generate an IAM policy from AWS calls using client-side monitoring (CSM) or embedded proxy

This could be a useful tool to identify which minimum set of action to allow on my IaC user to allow it to do its works while preserving least privilege.

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

Saving Money By Replacing API Gateway With Application Load Balancer’s Lambda Integration

Our AWS support architect (whatever their title actually is) has pointed out that our planned use of API Gateway could prove quite expensive, and that, on the face of it, the Application Load Balancer might be all we need.

I am therefore doing my own research, and this article supports their argument.

Tips to prevent a serverless wreck

Nice simple article pointing to some useful reference material

Serverless.tf

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

Do not use AWS CloudFormation

A useful comparison of Terraform and Cloudformation

AWS Fargate: Understanding the Networking and Security Considerations

First part of this article provides a simple overview of fargate networking

ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?

Things I know or think I know but fail to explain easily

Ws Security Documentation by Category

This is worth bookmarking - a list of all AWS services security pages

AWS and IPv6

Besides more IPs, what are the benefits of adopting all ipv6 and is it practical today?

Serverless Container-based APIs with Amazon ECS and Amazon API Gateway

This blog post guides you through the details of the option based on API Gateway and AWS Cloud Map, and how to implement it: first you learn how the different components (Amazon ECS, AWS Cloud Map, API Gateway, etc.) work together, then you launch and test a sample container-based API.

Application Load Balancer-type Target Group for Network Load Balancer

This new feature allows AWS customers to directly register an ALB as an NLB target, eliminating the need to actively manage changing ALB IP addresses. This is achieved by making use of a newly introduced Application Load Balancer-type target group for NLB.

AWS Access Keys - A Reference

AWS Access Keys are the credentials used to provide programmatic or CLI-based access to the AWS APIs. This post outlines what they are, how to identify the different types of keys, where you’re likely to find them across the different services, and the order of access precedence for the different SDKs and tools.

A Detailed Overview of AWS API Gateway

Tons of useful details in this article

Cross-account role trust policies should trust AWS accounts, not roles

Found this in the context of access control to event carried sensitive data

Binbash Leverage Documentation

A good reference reference architecture. The documentation is good as well. the leading, easy to deploy, reusable and most automated solution for defining, provisioning and managing your secure and scalable multi-account AWS infrastructure environment.

AWS Routing 101

Good summary of routing in aws

AWS: 10 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong as an Architect

A few gotcha worth knowing about in this article

Lessons Learned From Running Serverless In Production

Great blog entry feom the serverless monk

Back to Top ↑

Aws-cli

Scripting access to my AWS sandbox

Today I am documenting how I intend to use the AWS sandbox environments provided by my current employer. These are phoenix environments - we can book them for anything between 1 and 7 days, after which time they get wiped out with AWS nuke.
We get given near free rein, with AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy. We are also supposedly restricted in the EC2 instances size we can launch, although I have not seen this reflected in the policies attached to my user .

Back to Top ↑

Bff

Seeing the BFF Pattern used in the wild

Good overview of the BFF Pattern and its relationship with other patterns

The API gateway pattern versus the Direct client-to-microservice communication

Microsoft view on the API gateway and backend-for-frontend patterns

How to keep complexity in check with hexagonal architecture

Description of the use and advantages of hexagonal architecture in frontend components, which would include BFF. (backend for frontend), although they are not referred to as such in this article

Back to Top ↑

Caching

AWs Caching challenges and strategies

Tons of information about caching strategies in this AWS builders library article

A Guide to Caching with NGINX and NGINX Plus

Useful info about using NGINX as a caching proxy or reverse-proxy

Bloom is a REST API caching middleware

I’m bothered that there are so few implementations of transparent read through caching for REST APIs. This is one, but doesn’t even use the proper cache-control headers, or asynchronous cache refresh

Cache-Control for Civilians

More stuff about caching

cacheable-response

An HTTP compliant nodejs route path middleware for serving cache response with invalidation support

Back to Top ↑

Career

Fearless Salary Negotiation

This is a great website, full of advice about salary negotiations for software developers (tho the advice seems portable to other job types). Not sure I agree with it all but this most likely down to doing it all wrong myself. Definitely worth a browse! Might even buy the book…

Back to Top ↑

Cdktf

Terraform CDK - part 2

It’s been 2 week since the previous post in this series and I am really starting to enjoy the Terraform CDK.

Terraform CDK - part 1

In this post I start building infrastructure components in my AWS sandbox, using the recently released Terraform Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I am going to keep it very basic, simply create an IAM role and policy, just to get myself going. What I am going to do however is dig into each little command and instructions I found in various tutorials, to make sure I understand the magic they hide from me.

Jest testing tutorial

Jest is what terraform cdk uses for unit testing, so this tutorial could come handy

A Terraform CDK Construct which doubles as native Terraform Module

I want to see how to consume terraform modules from my CDK code. This covers the other direction, as well

Back to Top ↑

Cloud-native

Cloud Native Architecture in Practice

Good summary of the things to look for when architecting for the cloud

Back to Top ↑

Cloudformation

Do not use AWS CloudFormation

A useful comparison of Terraform and Cloudformation

Back to Top ↑

Compliance

Compliance in a DevOps Culture

These pattern could become useful in the new job, streamline our compliance processes and align them with devops

Back to Top ↑

Containers

Installing Podman on WSL2

As I have a new laptop to go with the new job I am setting up my usual toolset on it.

ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?

Things I know or think I know but fail to explain easily

Back to Top ↑

Cost

Aws cost control resources

This looks interesting…

Back to Top ↑

Cqrs

DDD, Hexagonal, Onion, Clean, CQRS, … How I put it all together

This looks interesting…

Back to Top ↑

Css

Writing Logic in CSS

Thiao many things I didn’t know about CSS

Back to Top ↑

Data-mesh

HelloFresh Journey to the Data Mesh

Well written description of hello fresh transformation of their approach to data

Back to Top ↑

Datamesh

Data Mesh: An Architectural Deep Dive

Zhamak Dehghani introduces the architecture of new Data Mesh concepts

Back to Top ↑

Ddd

REST API design resource modeling

Good article about reconciling domain driven design and REST. Quite old, but then again the DDD books I have read are as well, and couched in very old fashion SOA language, which I haven’t had much to do in recent years. Feels like both a trip down memory lane and a refresher 🤨

DDD and Messaging Architectures

TA ververy useful list of patterns

Back to Top ↑

Design

Avoiding Premature Software Abstractions

A good point, well maxe

Back to Top ↑

Devops

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

Back to Top ↑

Distributed-systems

Distributed transaction patterns for microservices compared

This is a good write up on distributed transaction patterns.

Back to Top ↑

Dns

AWS: 10 Things You’re Probably Doing Wrong as an Architect

A few gotcha worth knowing about in this article

Back to Top ↑

Docker

Installing Podman on WSL2

As I have a new laptop to go with the new job I am setting up my usual toolset on it.

Anti-Patterns When Building Container Images

Some great advice in here if you’re writing Dockerfiles, and some pointers for when not to!

Back to Top ↑

Dynamodb

Exporting DynamoDB Data to Excel using Lambda with s3 on AWS

This is something I might need to replicate for my current project,where my dynamodb is just a staging stage before the data is eventually sent to our data lake. In the meantime, emailing the data to my colleagues in marketing will do nicely 😁

Safe List updates with DynamoDB

More dynamodb stuff I should really know already

Back to Top ↑

Ecs

ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?

Things I know or think I know but fail to explain easily

Anti-Patterns When Building Container Images

Some great advice in here if you’re writing Dockerfiles, and some pointers for when not to!

Serverless Container-based APIs with Amazon ECS and Amazon API Gateway

This blog post guides you through the details of the option based on API Gateway and AWS Cloud Map, and how to implement it: first you learn how the different components (Amazon ECS, AWS Cloud Map, API Gateway, etc.) work together, then you launch and test a sample container-based API.

Back to Top ↑

Eda

DDD and Messaging Architectures

TA ververy useful list of patterns

Asynchronous Messaging and Eventing Resources

Clement Vaters super list of resources about events and message driven architecture

How to choose between EventBridge and SQS in Event Driven Architecture

This looks interesting…

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Eks

season of the Elastic Bytes

Curated list of elastic observability videos

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Enviy

WASM framework - Spin

For future reference, I’m excited about WASM in Envoy, and this could maybe help

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Eventbridge

How to choose between EventBridge and SQS in Event Driven Architecture

This looks interesting…

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Events

DDD and Messaging Architectures

TA ververy useful list of patterns

Asynchronous Messaging and Eventing Resources

Clement Vaters super list of resources about events and message driven architecture

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Excel

Exporting DynamoDB Data to Excel using Lambda with s3 on AWS

This is something I might need to replicate for my current project,where my dynamodb is just a staging stage before the data is eventually sent to our data lake. In the meantime, emailing the data to my colleagues in marketing will do nicely 😁

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Fargate

Fargate networking 101

Quick overview of AWS Fargate networking

AWS Fargate: Understanding the Networking and Security Considerations

First part of this article provides a simple overview of fargate networking

ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?

Things I know or think I know but fail to explain easily

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Git

Configuring Git to use the proper SSH key across multiple remote repositories

The new job uses both GitLab and BitBucket, and mandates SSH to access both.

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Github

Generate Jekyll pages with GitHub actions

Now that I have customised Jekyll I want to simplify my workflow.

Customising Jekyll

Following my initial setup of Jekyll (as per Setting up my GitHub page with Jekyll), I now want to customise the site to meet my personal requirements.

Setting up my GitHub page with Jekyll

I have decided to finally set up a mini blog type site on my under utilised GitHub. The main intention is to have a single place to put all the random stuff I find when browsing the internet, twitter and linkedin, in a format I can then share as and when I think it could be useful to the wider world.

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Ha

5 patterns to make your microservice fault-tolerant

Some good info in there about handling failure in downstream services

AWs Caching challenges and strategies

Tons of information about caching strategies in this AWS builders library article

Avoiding fallback in distributed systems

Another information packed article from AWS builders library, advising, surprisingly, against fallback strategies

Failure Isolation and Recovery: Learning from High-Scale and Extreme-Scale Computing

Covers a broad swath of resilience issues, with links and references to further material

Google SRE book

TIL that Google book on Site Reliability Engineering is available online!

AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?

More on AWS managed component availability

Uptime and downtime with 99.99 % SLA

Was glad to note that AWS SLAs are given with monthly values, basically their invoicing period Their SLAs vary between 3 and 4 nines, or 43m 49s to 4m 22s, per month.

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Hexagonal

DDD, Hexagonal, Onion, Clean, CQRS, … How I put it all together

This looks interesting…

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Hexagonal-architecture

How to keep complexity in check with hexagonal architecture

Description of the use and advantages of hexagonal architecture in frontend components, which would include BFF. (backend for frontend), although they are not referred to as such in this article

Interview with Alistair Cockburn About Hexagonal Architecture… and more

Always fascinating to find out where patterns originated from, from the authors themselves

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Iac

Terraform CDK - part 2

It’s been 2 week since the previous post in this series and I am really starting to enjoy the Terraform CDK.

Terraform CDK - part 1

In this post I start building infrastructure components in my AWS sandbox, using the recently released Terraform Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I am going to keep it very basic, simply create an IAM role and policy, just to get myself going. What I am going to do however is dig into each little command and instructions I found in various tutorials, to make sure I understand the magic they hide from me.

Scripting access to my AWS sandbox

Today I am documenting how I intend to use the AWS sandbox environments provided by my current employer. These are phoenix environments - we can book them for anything between 1 and 7 days, after which time they get wiped out with AWS nuke.
We get given near free rein, with AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy. We are also supposedly restricted in the EC2 instances size we can launch, although I have not seen this reflected in the policies attached to my user .

Inframap - generate pretty terraform graphs

Looking for something to make my CDK TF posts prettier

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Iam

Defining IAM Policies with Terraform safely

Good tip on terraforming IAM policies

AWS IAM Permission Boundaries Has A Caveat That May Surprise You

This looks interesting…

iamlive: Generate an IAM policy from AWS calls using client-side monitoring (CSM) or embedded proxy

This could be a useful tool to identify which minimum set of action to allow on my IaC user to allow it to do its works while preserving least privilege.

AWS Access Keys - A Reference

AWS Access Keys are the credentials used to provide programmatic or CLI-based access to the AWS APIs. This post outlines what they are, how to identify the different types of keys, where you’re likely to find them across the different services, and the order of access precedence for the different SDKs and tools.

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Infosec

Defining IAM Policies with Terraform safely

Good tip on terraforming IAM policies

An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities

This is a great write up of json interops (or lack of) and the security consequences

Fundamental Practices for Secure Software Development

The best practices in the guide apply to cloud-based and online services, shrink-wrapped software and database applications, as well as operating systems, mobile devices, embedded systems and devices connected to the Internet.

developer security essentials

Another great resource from the footnotes of “Continuous architecture in practice”, handbooks and training materials on “developer security essentials”.

Terraform, can you keep a secret?

Did you now terraform state can and very likely holds sensitive data?

Canarytokens.org - Quick, Free, Detection for the Masses

How to test your apps for #log4shell vulnerability 1. Generate a DNS token https://t.co/vCzVG0O03i2. Wrap that token in Prefix: ${jndi:ldap://Suffix: /a}3. Use that value in search forms, profile data, settings etc. of your apps4. Get notified when you triggered a reaction

All things FUDI2/webAuthb

TA curated list of awesome WebAuthn/FIDO2 and now Passkey resources

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Ipv6

AWS and IPv6

Besides more IPs, what are the benefits of adopting all ipv6 and is it practical today?

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Javascript

CountAPI This API allows you to create simple numeric counters. IaaS, Integer as a Service.

I’m curious to see whether anyone actually visits the blog pages that I’ve shared (aka attention seeking) and implementing a basic page counter would help.

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Jeckyll

Jeckyll plug in to create heading anchors

Reminder to myself to add this plug in to my site to enable me to link to individual sections in posts.

CountAPI This API allows you to create simple numeric counters. IaaS, Integer as a Service.

I’m curious to see whether anyone actually visits the blog pages that I’ve shared (aka attention seeking) and implementing a basic page counter would help.

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Jekyll

Generate Jekyll pages with GitHub actions

Now that I have customised Jekyll I want to simplify my workflow.

Customising Jekyll

Following my initial setup of Jekyll (as per Setting up my GitHub page with Jekyll), I now want to customise the site to meet my personal requirements.

Setting up my GitHub page with Jekyll

I have decided to finally set up a mini blog type site on my under utilised GitHub. The main intention is to have a single place to put all the random stuff I find when browsing the internet, twitter and linkedin, in a format I can then share as and when I think it could be useful to the wider world.

Back to Top ↑

Jest

Jest testing tutorial

Jest is what terraform cdk uses for unit testing, so this tutorial could come handy

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Json

An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities

This is a great write up of json interops (or lack of) and the security consequences

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Lambda

Operating Lambda: Performance optimization

This three-part series discusses performance optimization for Lambda-based applications.

Exporting DynamoDB Data to Excel using Lambda with s3 on AWS

This is something I might need to replicate for my current project,where my dynamodb is just a staging stage before the data is eventually sent to our data lake. In the meantime, emailing the data to my colleagues in marketing will do nicely 😁

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

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Liquid

Customising Jekyll

Following my initial setup of Jekyll (as per Setting up my GitHub page with Jekyll), I now want to customise the site to meet my personal requirements.

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Mach

From monolithic to MACH architecture

It’s been a while since my last proper post, but I’ve given a presentation last week that, I believe, deserves to be expanded into a post.

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Microservices

Distributed transaction patterns for microservices compared

This is a good write up on distributed transaction patterns.

5 patterns to make your microservice fault-tolerant

Some good info in there about handling failure in downstream services

GROWTH BLOG Scalability and Technology Consulting Advice for SaaS and Technology Companies

Scroll to the bottom to the categories. Lot of good stuff in there.

Seeing the BFF Pattern used in the wild

Good overview of the BFF Pattern and its relationship with other patterns

Layering Microservices

Another article supporting my view that layering your architecture is good, doesn’t equates to N-tiers and doesn’t clash with microservices, hexagonal and cell based architecture descriptions

From monolith to resilient microservices

R

API interaction types in a microservice architecture: queries, commands, and events

Nice post with interesting links

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Monolith

From monolithic to MACH architecture

It’s been a while since my last proper post, but I’ve given a presentation last week that, I believe, deserves to be expanded into a post.

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Negotiation

Fearless Salary Negotiation

This is a great website, full of advice about salary negotiations for software developers (tho the advice seems portable to other job types). Not sure I agree with it all but this most likely down to doing it all wrong myself. Definitely worth a browse! Might even buy the book…

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Nginx

A Guide to Caching with NGINX and NGINX Plus

Useful info about using NGINX as a caching proxy or reverse-proxy

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Nines

AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?

More on AWS managed component availability

Uptime and downtime with 99.99 % SLA

Was glad to note that AWS SLAs are given with monthly values, basically their invoicing period Their SLAs vary between 3 and 4 nines, or 43m 49s to 4m 22s, per month.

Back to Top ↑

Nodejs

Exporting DynamoDB Data to Excel using Lambda with s3 on AWS

This is something I might need to replicate for my current project,where my dynamodb is just a staging stage before the data is eventually sent to our data lake. In the meantime, emailing the data to my colleagues in marketing will do nicely 😁

Cache-Control for Civilians

More stuff about caching

cacheable-response

An HTTP compliant nodejs route path middleware for serving cache response with invalidation support

Tao of Node - Design, Architecture & Best Practices

This looks interesting…

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O11y

Journey on observability

Great thread on observability (i11y) as a practice

Tips to prevent a serverless wreck

Nice simple article pointing to some useful reference material

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O18y

Lessons Learned From Running Serverless In Production

Great blog entry feom the serverless monk

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Patterns

GROWTH BLOG Scalability and Technology Consulting Advice for SaaS and Technology Companies

Scroll to the bottom to the categories. Lot of good stuff in there.

The API gateway pattern versus the Direct client-to-microservice communication

Microsoft view on the API gateway and backend-for-frontend patterns

Interview with Alistair Cockburn About Hexagonal Architecture… and more

Always fascinating to find out where patterns originated from, from the authors themselves

DDD and Messaging Architectures

TA ververy useful list of patterns

What is backoff for?

This looks When do you want backoff and jitter, and when do you want adaptive retries? Are they just two ways to do the same thing, or is there something different about them?

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Podman

Installing Podman on WSL2

As I have a new laptop to go with the new job I am setting up my usual toolset on it.

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Python

ugit: DIY Git in Python

implement Git in Python to learn more about how Git works on the inside.

Web Browser Engineering

TThis book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.

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Resilience

5 patterns to make your microservice fault-tolerant

Some good info in there about handling failure in downstream services

Avoiding fallback in distributed systems

Another information packed article from AWS builders library, advising, surprisingly, against fallback strategies

What is backoff for?

This looks When do you want backoff and jitter, and when do you want adaptive retries? Are they just two ways to do the same thing, or is there something different about them?

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Rest

REST API design resource modeling

Good article about reconciling domain driven design and REST. Quite old, but then again the DDD books I have read are as well, and couched in very old fashion SOA language, which I haven’t had much to do in recent years. Feels like both a trip down memory lane and a refresher 🤨

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Sam

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

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Sandbox

Scripting access to my AWS sandbox

Today I am documenting how I intend to use the AWS sandbox environments provided by my current employer. These are phoenix environments - we can book them for anything between 1 and 7 days, after which time they get wiped out with AWS nuke.
We get given near free rein, with AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy. We are also supposedly restricted in the EC2 instances size we can launch, although I have not seen this reflected in the policies attached to my user .

Back to Top ↑

Sbom

SLSA dip — At the Source of the problem!

This article is part of a series about the security of the software supply chain. Each article will be analyzing a component of the Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) model in depth, from the developer’s workstation all the way to the consumer side of the chain.

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Security

AWS Fargate: Understanding the Networking and Security Considerations

First part of this article provides a simple overview of fargate networking

Ws Security Documentation by Category

This is worth bookmarking - a list of all AWS services security pages

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Serverless

Tips to prevent a serverless wreck

Nice simple article pointing to some useful reference material

Serverless.tf

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

Lessons Learned From Running Serverless In Production

Great blog entry feom the serverless monk

Skip The Lambda Function, Connect Directly To Your AWS Services

Thhow to call aws services directly from api gateway

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Single-table

DynamoDB Design Patterns for Single Table Design

I need to up skill on dynamodb, planning to use it in a design but don’t know anywhere as much as I’d like about it. Single table design is especially interesting, seems to be a pattern worth understanding within a microservices architecture

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Solid

Layered Architecture: Still a Solid Approach

There is a misconception that layered architectures equate to N-tiers architectures. They don’t and this article supports this (my) interpretation.

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Sqs

How to choose between EventBridge and SQS in Event Driven Architecture

This looks interesting…

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Ssh

Configuring Git to use the proper SSH key across multiple remote repositories

The new job uses both GitLab and BitBucket, and mandates SSH to access both.

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Tagging

Yor: Automated IaC tag and trace

This could be a useful tool

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Team-topologies

HelloFresh Journey to the Data Mesh

Well written description of hello fresh transformation of their approach to data

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Terraform

Terraform CDK - part 2

It’s been 2 week since the previous post in this series and I am really starting to enjoy the Terraform CDK.

Terraform CDK - part 1

In this post I start building infrastructure components in my AWS sandbox, using the recently released Terraform Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I am going to keep it very basic, simply create an IAM role and policy, just to get myself going. What I am going to do however is dig into each little command and instructions I found in various tutorials, to make sure I understand the magic they hide from me.

Yor: Automated IaC tag and trace

This could be a useful tool

Defining IAM Policies with Terraform safely

Good tip on terraforming IAM policies

Terraform, can you keep a secret?

Did you now terraform state can and very likely holds sensitive data?

How to setup a Serverless application with AWS SAM and Terraform

Some good stuff in there. Not exactly what I’m looking for, I think, which is a strong(er) separation of infrastructure and code, but still a good read.

A Terraform CDK Construct which doubles as native Terraform Module

I want to see how to consume terraform modules from my CDK code. This covers the other direction, as well

Serverless.tf

serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.

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Testing

Jest testing tutorial

Jest is what terraform cdk uses for unit testing, so this tutorial could come handy

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Threat-modeling

Ws Security Documentation by Category

This is worth bookmarking - a list of all AWS services security pages

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Ubuntu

Installing Podman on WSL2

As I have a new laptop to go with the new job I am setting up my usual toolset on it.

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Vpc

AWS Routing 101

Good summary of routing in aws

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Wasm

WASM framework - Spin

For future reference, I’m excited about WASM in Envoy, and this could maybe help

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Webauthn

All things FUDI2/webAuthb

TA curated list of awesome WebAuthn/FIDO2 and now Passkey resources

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Well-architected

Binbash Leverage Documentation

A good reference reference architecture. The documentation is good as well. the leading, easy to deploy, reusable and most automated solution for defining, provisioning and managing your secure and scalable multi-account AWS infrastructure environment.

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Work-practices

Liberating structures

This website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices.

The use of POWER for meaningful meetings

The POWER Start is a facilitation technique developed by the Agile Coaching Institute to put an end to bad meetings.

Journey on observability

Great thread on observability (i11y) as a practice

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Wsl2

Installing Podman on WSL2

As I have a new laptop to go with the new job I am setting up my usual toolset on it.

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