Daniel Watrous on Software Engineering

An unfortunate digression in many technology selection efforts amounts to philosophical debates around tools and procedures. These debates revolve around tool selection, access controls, SLAs, ownership, responsibility, etc. What’s so bad about this? These debates too often fail to identify and measure against the outcomes that will benefit the business and the activities that will […]

I’ve recently had many conversations related to developer productivity. In order for a developer to be productive, he must have control over enough of the application lifecycle to complete his work. When a developer gets stuck at any point in the application lifecycle, his productivity drops, which can often reduce morale too. One question I’ve […]

One of the most significant enablers of IT and software automation has been the shift away from fixed infrastructure to flexible infrastructure. Virtualization, process isolation, resource sharing and other forms of flexible infrastructure have been in use for many decades in IT systems. It can be seen in early Unix systems, Java application servers and […]

I found this article on serverwatch today: http://www.serverwatch.com/server-trends/why-kubernetes-is-all-conquering.html It’s not technically deep, but it does highlight the groundswell of interest for and adoption of kubernetes. It’s also worth noting that GCE and Azure will now both have a native, fully managed kubernetes offering. I haven’t found a fully managed docker datacenter offering, but I’m sure […]

May applications require authentication to secure protected resources. While standards like oAuth accommodate sharing resources between applications, more variance exists in implementations of securing the app in the first place. A recent standard, JWT, provides a mechanism for creating tokens with embedded data, signing these tokens and even encrypting them when warranted. This post explores […]

Container orchestration is at the heart of a successful container architecture. Orchestration takes as input a definition of how a deployed application should look. This usually includes how many containers for a certain image are needed, volumes for persistent data, networking for communication between containers and awareness of various discovery mechanisms. Discovery may include such […]

I’m interested in allowing a user to register on my site/app using their social account credentials (e.g. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). It should also be possible to register using an email address. Since the site/app will be composed of a handful of microservices, I would want to provide my own identity service, which might includes […]

Infrastructure as a Service, like OpenStack and AWS, have made it possible to consume infrastructure on demand. It’s important to understand the ways in which both humans and machines interact with IaaS offerings in order to design optimal systems that leverage all possible automation opportunities. I drew the diagram below to help illustrate. Everything is […]

Someone asked me today whether he should use HEAT or Ansible to automate his OpenStack deployment. My answer is that he should use both! It’s helpful to understand the original design decisions for each tool in order to use each effectively. OpenStack HEAT and Ansible were designed to do different things, although in the opensource […]

I’ve recently had some people ask how I deploy MongoDB. For a while I used their excellent online tool to deploy and monitor my clusters. Unfortunately they changed direction and I couldn’t afford their new tools, so I turned to Ansible. In order more easily share the process, I posted a simple example that you […]