MDB Weekly for Jan 16, 2023

First up this week, it's here. It's out. My latest book, Overcoming IT Complexity is now shipping. This book is published by O'Reilly Media, and it's available on paperback and in Kindle format at amazon.com. Simply search for it complexity, and you'll find the book. The book is also available in O'Reilly's Safari Online Reading program. Click the link in the show notes or go to leeatchison.com/itcomplexity. In other topics, modern businesses rely on applications and they also rely on continued innovation in those applications to drive their business. This drive for innovation creates a need for improved techniques for validating that an application will work as expected. But constant innovation means a constant chance for problems and testing applications at scale is not an easy task. Last week I had the honor to talk with Nate Lee, co-founder of Speed Scale. Speed Scale, assists in stress testing applications by recreating real world traffic loads in a test environment. You can listen to my discussion with Nate on the Modern Digital Business Podcast. This episode was released last week on January 12th. And now last week's top story, speaking about it, complexity, managing configuration information in a complex cloud native application is a huge task. Configurations exist everywhere across the system, and it's difficult to keep track of all of the configurations needed in order to operate your application. There's configuration that described the network interconnections in your system, including routing rules and port blocking. There's configuration for your load balancers determining where to send traffic destined for your service. There's configuration for security permissions needed for databases, caches, servers, third party applications, and other systems. There's configuration for your application itself describing database connections, service connections, and various secrets and other configuration values necessary to run a modern application. In a cloud native application using a microservice based architecture, the problem is multiplied. There literally is configuration everywhere. Some configurations are well known and managed sometimes in a revision control system. But some of these configurations are stored within the system or component that requires the. A router may contain configuration information within the router itself. A SaaS application used by your application may have its own configuration system and your cloud provider and the various cloud services you are using. Each has a set of configuration information. Some of this configuration is known but not. Some of it may be simply unknown and untracked, face it, there's configuration everywhere and it's making your application and its infrastructure more complex and necessary. How do you take control and reduce the complexity associated with this large quantity of configuration information in a cloud native environment? Last week, in my most recent container journal article, I gave five best practices to help you get a hand on your configuration. Click the link in the show notes and read the article now. And finally. The Cloud Native Security Conference is coming up. This conference sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation focuses on security needs for cloud native applications. As recent news stories indicate application security and protection against bad actors is increasing in difficulty and importa. I'm going to be at this conference this year. It's being held in Seattle, Washington, my hometown on February 1st and second. If you're planning on coming into town and attending, let me know. I hope to see you there.