All Things Modern Applications

Welcome to a new year and a new newsletter!

During January, in my various articles, posts, and interviews, I focused on diverse topics from DNS to right sized services. I talked about growing interest in Kubernetes and the waning interest in serverless. And I talked about how to build processes that help give your engineering teams escalated permissions during emergency incident responses. The biggie for the month, though, was being featured in an interview for the Goto Book Club. In that interview, my good friend Ken Gavranovic and I talk about the value of chaos testing in production.

Lots of great content, take a look and subscribe!

The Goldilocks Calculation

Just like Goldilocks looking for the perfect fit, it's not always easy to determine the right size for the services you need to build your organization's applications.

How big should your services be, anyway? ?Download "The Goldilocks Calculation"and you'll find how to size your services just right.

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More Kubernetes, Less Serverless, According to Latest CNCF Report

An interesting trend has started to occur in the world of cloud computing. Non-cloud native technologies are growing in popularity and cloud native technologies are decreasing in popularity.

Namely,?Kubernetes?is growing in popularity, and serverless computing is decreasing. That’s?right,?serverless?computing?is?decreasing?in?popularity.

So, who says that serverless computation is falling and?Kubernetes?is rising? Who is saying that a non-cloud native technology is growing while a cloud native technology is decreasing?

None other than the Cloud Native Computing Foundation itself. You can read all about their new “State of Cloud Native Development” report?in my blog post.

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8 Steps to Better DNS

It seems like wherever we look, there is a massive outage of some major application caused by DNS. Whether it’s Facebook, AWS, or whatever, DNS sure seems unstable.

Well, it’s not. DNS is an extremely scalable, highly available, distributed protocol that is absolutely essential to all modern web applications.

But, make a single small mistake, and poof! Everything’s down.

How do you keep your application functioning, when it is so dependent on a single capability that seemingly fails more often than it should?

By reading,?8 Steps to better DNS. Your application will thank you.

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Architecting for Scale Podcast Interview

Listen as Ken interviews me about my book,?Architecting for Scale?in celebration of the second edition of my book. Ken and I talk about organizational management, risk management, microservices, cloud migration, and many other topics, straight from my book.

Do you want to hear a good inside story from the early days of Amazon Web Services and hear what was fundamentally different about the Elastic Beanstalk service?

Listen Now

4 Models for Escalating Access Permissions During Emergencies

When building modern applications, managing permissions during operational events is a tricky problem.

Do you give your engineers access to everything? That’s dangerous and goes against all basic production security best practices. The best practice is to give your engineers as little access as possible. Then,?escalate?their permissions as needed during operational events only if and when it is needed.

But how do you create a process to escalate your engineers permissions during operational events without opening yourself up to the same dangerous activities you were trying to avoid in the first place?

Well, let me give you?four strategies for how to give your engineers escalated permissions?without sacrificing the security best practices that keeps your Chief Security Officer awake at night.

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More Blog Posts and Articles

• Do You Need a Cloud Center of Excellence?
• Manage Permissions to Keep Applications Safe and Secure in the Cloud