The era of the monolithic application is over, and it has been replaced by a distributed, microservice-oriented world. Modern applications and services are no longer independent; instead, they are highly dependent on a host of external systems and code. Without these dependencies, the service or application will not run correctly, if it even runs at all.

Unfortunately, managing these dependencies successfully is not as simple as just making sure that all your dependencies exist; it's a complex task that needs to consider not just what your system relies on but also what other systems rely on you. Additionally, it isn't isolated to just part of your team—successful management is critical for all of your engineers. From developers to architects, the whole team needs to understand proper dependency management.

In this blog post, we'll look at five tips for managing your dependencies so that your teams can implement changes safely and efficiently.

If you build software, then you know that one of the most critical parts of the process is also one of the most challenging: testing.

In order to preview your application, you have to build an environment that reflects the conditions in which your code will run. So, by extension, you're expected to be an expert on the secondary and tertiary systems that support the app. That includes everything from CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code to knowing which cloud providers and services to use and understanding how to integrate with the pipelines of other developers.

That's not your job—nor should it be. You do your best work when you can focus on the actual product. Instead of managing the complicated underlying frameworks necessary for your launch tests and previews, it makes a lot more sense to have a solution that understands them for you.

Welcome to the ultimate Terraform cheat sheet! If you're a developer looking to take control of your infrastructure, you've come to the right place. With this cheat sheet in hand, you'll be able to accomplish basic tasks with Terraform in no time. From creating plans and applying them to importing and managing your infrastructure, this cheat sheet has got you covered. So, whether you're new to Terraform or just need a quick reference, don't hesitate to use this cheat sheet to make your life easier. Just remember, with Terraform, the world is your oyster!

To be an efficient developer, you need to iterate quickly on your code while initially isolating your code changes from the rest of your team. In order to accomplish those quick, isolated iterations, you need a private test environment—one that can be set up and torn down with little effort.

In this post, we will walk through how to set up your own private developer test environment in two ways—first, using Docker Compose and second using Architect. We’ll also walk through a few different types of tests you might run and how your new environment can support them.

A container orchestration platform makes it easier for developers to focus on their applications while the system manages scaling and redundancy. Since Kubernetes is the leading platform for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications, it's no surprise that all the major cloud infrastructure providers offer their own implementations.

In this post, we'll look at deploying a Kubernetes cluster in AWS. We'll build an EKS cluster with a single node group, configure kubectl to manage it, and deploy a simple application.

In recent years, microservices have become a central topic in blog posts, conference talks, and video tutorials. It seems like the whole world is abandoning the monolith and embracing microservices with open arms. If you haven't been involved with developing a microservice-based application, you might think, “What's the big deal? What does building software this way get me?” Here are five of the benefits of a microservice-based software architecture.

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform that automates the steps required to build, test, and deploy code in a GitHub repository. GitHub released this feature only four years ago, and over 50% of development teams have already adopted it as their CI/CD platform, according to Postman's 2022 State of the API Report.

The beauty of GitHub Actions is that it is native to GitHub and available directly from each repository, so workflows can authenticate and access your repository seamlessly. Plus, other CI/CD platforms require additional configuration using webhooks or polling intervals to achieve bidirectional communication with your GitHub repository, while communication between GitHub and GitHub Actions just works.

Zero Trust Networking (ZTN) is a hot new buzzword, but the concept has been around since the early 90s. At its core, ZTN is a “trust no one” approach to network security that assumes any entity on the network is a potential security threat, even those that are already inside the network perimeter. Not that there really is a true network perimeter now that we've moved our applications to the cloud. This blog post will give you an overview of the philosophy of Zero Trust Networking and get you started with implementing some of its best practices for Kubernetes.

When building microservices in the cloud, if you were to use the default Postgres container for your database, all of the data would be stored in the container itself. Because containers are meant to be destroyed and recreated, the data in that container would be lost every time the container is replaced. The solution for this is easy: use a volume. Mount a path on the host, put the data there, and every time the container is replaced, it mounts to that place on the host system. There's one problem: in hosted cloud environments, there is no dry land. There's no “host” for you to mount a volume to.

In recent years, containers have become an integral part of software development. A good grasp of containers and what they do is essential for most developers. If containers still make you feel like, “I kinda know what containers are, but I'm still pretty fuzzy on what the big deal is,” this is the post for you.