This is an article from DZone's 2023 Software Integration Trend Report. For more: Read the Report Designing an application architecture is never complete. Regularly, all decisions and components need to be reviewed, validated, and possibly updated. Stakeholders require that complex applications be delivered more quickly. It's a challenge for even the most senior technologists. A strategy is required, and it needs to be nimble. Strategy combines processes, which aid in keeping a team focused, and principles and patterns, which provide best practices for implementation. Regardless, it's a da ..read more

As organizations migrate to the cloud, they desire to exploit this on-demand infrastructure to scale their applications. But such migrations are usually complex and need established patterns and control points to manage. In my previous blog posts, I covered a few of the proven designs for cloud applications. In this article, I’ll introduce the Orchestration Pattern (also known as the Orchestrator Pattern) to add to the list. This technique allows the creation of scalable, reliable, and fault-tolerant systems. The approach can help us manage the flow and coordination among components of a distr ..read more

An architecture spike in agile methodologies usually implies a software development method, which originates in the extreme programming offshoot of agile. It boils down to determining how much effort is needed to solve a particular problem or discover a workaround for an existing software issue. So, let us explore the benefits and see how these spikes can help in improving quality and making testing easier—by shifting our attention to the left—challenging the specification at a very early phase, asking questions, and getting the ground ready for sensible software architecture, which will, in t ..read more

Docker has revolutionized the way we build and deploy applications. It provides a platform-independent environment that allows developers to package their applications and dependencies into a single container. This container can then be easily deployed across different environments, making it an ideal solution for building and deploying applications at scale. Building Docker images from scratch is a must skill that any DevOps engineer needs to acquire for working with Docker. It allows you to create custom images tailored to your application's specific needs, making your deployments more effic ..read more

This is an article from DZone's 2023 Software Integration Trend Report. For more: Read the Report Our approach to scalability has gone through a tectonic shift over the past decade. Technologies that were staples in every enterprise back end (e.g., IIOP) have vanished completely with a shift to approaches such as eventual consistency. This shift introduced some complexities with the benefit of greater scalability. The rise of Kubernetes and serverless further cemented this approach: spinning a new container is cheap, turning scalability into a relatively simple problem. Orchestration chang ..read more

Let’s start with the basics. After successfully starting a Redpanda or Apache Kafka® cluster, you want to stream data into it right away. No matter what tool and language you chose, you will immediately be asked for a list of bootstrap servers for your client to connect to it. This bootstrap server is just for your client to initiate the connection to one of the brokers in the cluster, and then it will provide your client with initial sets of metadata. The metadata tells the client the currently available brokers, and which the leader of each partition is hosted by which brokers so that the cl ..read more

This is an article from DZone's 2023 Software Integration Trend Report. For more: Read the Report A microservices architecture is an established pattern for building a complex system that consists of loosely coupled modules. It is one of the most talked-about software architecture trends in the last few years. It seems to be a surprisingly simple idea to break a large, interdependent system into many small, lightweight modules that can make software management easier.  ..read more

In recent years, the term MLOps has become a buzzword in the world of AI, often discussed in the context of tools and technology. However, while much attention is given to the technical aspects of MLOps, what's often overlooked is the importance of the operations. There is often a lack of discussion around the operations needed for machine learning (ML) in production and monitoring specifically. Things like accountability for AI performance, timely alerts for relevant stakeholders, and the establishment of necessary processes to resolve issues are often disregarded for discussions about specif ..read more

Security in one's information system has always been among the most critical non-functional requirements. Transport Layer Security, aka TLS and formerly SSL, is among its many pillars. In this post, I'll show how to configure TLS for the Apache APISIX API Gateway. TLS in a Few Words TLS offers several capabilities ..read more

Containerization is a technology that has revolutionized software development and deployment. In recent years, containerization has gained tremendous popularity in the world of software development. Containerization is the process of packaging an application along with its dependencies and configurations into a single unit, known as a container. As a result, containerization enables developers to build, test, and deploy their applications faster and more efficiently than ever before. It has made it easier to develop, package, and deploy applications, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing ..read more