Matt Stine

Cloud Native Architecture Patterns & Katas Workshop

As a software architect, confronting the cloud can feel quite daunting. We are confronted with an onslaught of public cloud providers; which one should we choose? Are we ready for public cloud? Or do we need to focus on private cloud? And what does that even mean? Or are we looking for a hybrid solution? And these questions are only the beginning. Soon we’ll be looking at IaaS vs. PaaS. Containers vs. Unikernels. Servers vs. Serverless! Is there any way to make sense of all of the choices and cut through all of the hype?

Cloud Native Architecture Fundamentals: Part 1

Cloud continues to grow in importance in even the most conservative companies’ IT strategies. Because of this, even experienced software architects must confront a new world in which many of our normal architectural assumptions no longer hold. Before we create architectures that leverage cloud infrastructure, we need to rebuild our mental model of infrastructure around the appropriate concepts and principles. The purpose of this session is to do just that.

Cloud Native Architecture Patterns: Part 1 - Brick Patterns

Now that we’ve been equipped with an understanding of how software architectures can exploit the unique aspects of cloud infrastructure environments, it’s time to construct a pattern catalog that can guide our decision making as we journey from concepts and principles to concrete implementations. The software industry has long been motivated by the promise of a “component marketplace” from which we can draw commodity components which can be composed via standardized mechanisms to create powerful systems. These systems are often compared to the myriad of possible creations that can be produced using Lego pieces. The power in the Lego “architecture” is found in the amazing diversity of individual pieces that are composed via a universal system of compatibility. Cloud native architectures approximate the same power via Lego-like patterns.

Cloud Native Architecture Patterns: Part 2 - Mortar Patterns

Now that we’ve been equipped with an understanding of how software architectures can exploit the unique aspects of cloud infrastructure environments, it’s time to construct a pattern catalog that can guide our decision making as we journey from concepts and principles to concrete implementations. The software industry has long been motivated by the promise of a “component marketplace” from which we can draw commodity components which can be composed via standardized mechanisms to create powerful systems. These systems are often compared to the myriad of possible creations that can be produced using Lego pieces. The power in the Lego “architecture” is found in the amazing diversity of individual pieces that are composed via a universal system of compatibility. Cloud native architectures approximate the same power via Lego-like patterns.

Cloud Native Architecture Migration Strategies

If you’ve been following along, you’ve realized by now that cloud native architectures are fundamentally different than most traditional architectures. Most of the cloud native architectures that we can see in the wild have been built by relatively young companies that began from a zero-legacy state. Architects in more mature organizations are faced with the daunting challenge of building modern systems that exploit the unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure while simultaneously attempting to migrate legacy systems into those same environments, all the while “keeping the lights on.”

Being Good at Software: a Tragedy in Three Acts

The late Stephen Covey, world-renowned leadership author and speaker, said many times that “You don’t break principles. You only break yourself against them.” Like any other discipline, software engineering is governed by its own set of unbreakable principles. Those who discover and align their behavior with them often seem to be good at this business we call software, and those who ignore or willfully violate them inevitably fail, sometimes in spectacular ways.

An Architect's Guide to Evaluating Cloud Services

The verdict is in: Cloud is NOT a fad. If you haven't already, as a software architect you will be called upon to evaluate various cloud services and determine their suitability for your company's use. In this session, we'll examine ten key criteria that you can use to evaluate any cloud service.

Serverless State of the Union: 2018

On the 2017 tour, I introduced the notion of “serverless” and Functions as a Service (FaaS) platforms. We understood the motivation for serverless computing, compared serverless to other cloud-native infrastructure approaches, navigated some architectural tradeoffs, and took a whirlwind tour of the Big 3 FaaS providers.

Introduction to Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering, pioneered by Netflix, is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

Cloud Native Architecture Fundamentals: Part 2

Cloud continues to grow in importance in even the most conservative companies’ IT strategies. Because of this, even experienced software architects must confront a new world in which many of our normal architectural assumptions no longer hold. Before we create architectures that leverage cloud infrastructure, we need to rebuild our mental model of infrastructure around the appropriate concepts and principles. The purpose of this session is to do just that.

AWS Lambda Deep Dive

In this presentation, we'll build, test, and deploy an image-processing pipeline using Amazon Web Services such as Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and Rekognition.

Monitoring and Metrics and Logging: Oh My!

Visibility is one of the primary characteristics of applications that aren’t just coded well, but run well in production. We need visibility to understand:

• how our system performs
• how our system misbehaves
• how our system fails
• how our users interact with our system
• what’s providing value to users and what’s not
• and more!

In this talk we’ll look at the three disciplines of monitoring, metrics, and logging, and see how properly used, they can dramatically increase our system’s inherent visibility.