In today’s highly regulated business landscape, compliance has become a critical aspect of product development and deployment. Adhering to various compliance standards not only helps a company avoid fines and penalties but also ensures trust and confidence among customers and stakeholders. To effectively plan for compliance, organizations must understand the what, why, and how of compliance, relevant frameworks and identify the ones that best align with their needs. What is compliance? On a fundamental level, compliance can be considered as following a rulebook. Compliance means essentially ad ..read more

Large Language Models (LLM) are great at answering questions based on which they have been trained on, mostly content available in the public domain. However, most enterprises want to use the LLMs with their specific data. Methods like LLM finetuning, RAG, and fitting data into the prompt context are different ways to achieve this. This article explains the basics of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and demonstrates how your data can be used with LLM-backed applications. Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) involves retrieving specific dat ..read more

Despite the initial excitement surrounding containers as a solution to the “it runs on my machine” problem, development teams encountered hurdles in realizing this promise. Packaging applications into containers and deploying them across different environments turned out to be quite complex, especially at scale. Many teams find themselves navigating a maze of tools for scripting, templating, and managing environment - and platform-specific configuration to get their apps running consistently. Today, cloud-native development teams commonly refer to their containerized applications as “workloads ..read more

Microfrontends have emerged as a revolutionary architectural pattern in web development, providing a solution to the limitations of monolithic frontends. Traditionally, web applications were built as a single and tightly coupled unit. Microfrontends offer a fresh perspective to web development by breaking down the front end into smaller, independent units that can be developed and deployed separately. The central concept behind microfrontends is to divide the frontend into multiple self-contained modules, each responsible for a specific functionality or feature of the application. These module ..read more

Managing security and compliance can be a tough job when we have our infrastructure spread over multiple public cloud accounts. In most organizations, there are dedicated cloud accounts for each product line, and each product line can have multiple environments like development, staging, integration, and production. Keeping separate accounts for various environments is a good strategy to stop the lateral movement in case of any compromise, but managing those multiple accounts is hectic. When we talk about security management, it consists of user management, password policies, detection and pro ..read more

Data security and privacy are one of the top priorities for organizations and their clients in the current digital era. Industry standards and regulatory frameworks have been developed to make sure that businesses manage sensitive data appropriately. The SOC (System and Organisation Controls) 2 is one such standard. Obtaining SOC 2 compliance demonstrates an organization’s commitment to data security and privacy, which can enhance trust and confidence among customers and partners. It’s particularly relevant for businesses that handle sensitive or private data, such as technology, healthcare, f ..read more

Platform engineering aims to enhance developer productivity and experience, while reducing cognitive load by identifying gaps in DevOps principles. With over 90% of organizations adopting platforms in the next 5 years, platform engineering is set to grow by leaps and bounds. However, as more and more enterprises aspire to build a platform, a common challenge appears - the need for a clear starting point. Taking insights from our experience of building platforms for our customers, interacting with platform leaders, and being involved in the platform engineering community, we’ve developed a plat ..read more

Managing the flow of requests between different services is a crucial aspect of communication among services. Request routing enables us to direct incoming traffic to specific services based on various criteria, such as headers, query parameters, or other aspects of the request. Request routing is essential, but it can become challenging to manage with existing tools. Suppose you have a microservices-based application with multiple service versions running simultaneously. You wish to gradually roll out a new version of the application to a subset of users for A/B testing. However, the existing ..read more

River was buried with work. It was time for the Quarterly Earnings call, and they seemed to be getting nowhere. Additional piles of work were being dumped on their desk every day. Business teams did not follow scrum or sprints like the tech folks on the second floor. You had to do whatever was assigned to you, and yesterday. They had to clear all the pending orders for Q3 that somehow got stuck in the system due to glitches or downtimes and prepare their quarterly summary of dispatch throughput once that was done. River also had to write their self-assessment and performance reviews for all th ..read more

Internal developer portals (IDPs) are becoming increasingly popular as organizations strive to improve their developer experience. Developer platforms serve as access points to a more organized development environment, where developers can access tools, share knowledge, and collaborate to create better software faster. Two of the most popular internal developer portals are Backstage and Port. Both platforms offer a wide range of features, but they have different fortes and shortcomings. This blog post is a detailed comparison of Port vs Backstage, what they’re good at, and where they might fal ..read more