What’s the Difference Between an Agile Retrospective and an Incident Retrospective?
Blameless Chief Operating Officer Ken Gavranovic recently sat down with me to discuss the topic of conducting effective incident retrospectives. You can watch our engaging, informative discussion below, or read on for an overview of the greatest hits from our talk. Agile development and incident management are the backbones of any tech-driven development cycle. At the heart of these practices lies the art of retrospectives. But what sets apart an Agile retrospective from an inci
Moving Beyond the Microservices Hype
In the fast-paced world of software development, buzzwords and trends often dominate discussions around application architecture. One term that has garnered significant attention and, at times, confusion is microservice. While the concept of breaking down applications into smaller components has significant value, as anyone who reads my writings regularly will attest, there is also significant hype around the term microservices itself that leads to misconceptions and oversim
Improve Software Application Availability in 5 Steps
As a software application scales, it invariably becomes more complex. And with that increase in complexity comes the increased risk of problems that could potentially impact the application’s availability. Take, for example, the case of a well-known monitoring company that suffered from serious availability problems while it was growing from a small to a midsize company. Its traffic was increasing dramatically, but its infrastructure couldn’t keep up. Worse yet, the company didn&rsqu
5 Rules for Getting Your Data Architecture Right
Architecting modern applications is a tough job, and architecting a solid data model for modern applications is one of the toughest, yet most important, parts of modern application architecture. Failure to create a reasonable data architecture can cause your application to fail in many bad ways, including issues related to performance, data integrity, data sovereignty, data safety, and scalability. Poor data architecture can leave your application and your company in bad shape. Building a prope
Make Sure You Understand How Cloud Costs Differ from Other Business Costs
Do you know what “color” your cloud money is? An odd question, perhaps, but an important one. Because the emergence of the cloud hasn’t only changed how we leverage software applications, it has also changed the type of money it takes businesses to operate those applications. To better understand this, a brief overview of corporate finances is needed. There are three distinct types of money that most companies use for various business expenditures: 1. Capital expenditure A ca
Are You Using the Right Analytics to Keep Your Applications Running Smoothly?
Analytics are essential to the successful operation of every modern SaaS application. Effectively managing a SaaS application requires continuous tracking of its performance, what’s going on inside the application, and whether or not it’s accomplishing its goals. However, there is a wide variety of analytics that need to be monitored and tracked to successfully run an application. The purpose, value, accuracy, and reliability of those analytics vary greatly depending on how they are
Getting What You Intend from Your Organizational Design: Business Breakthrough 3.0 with Ken Gavranovic [podcast]
On this special edition of Modern Digital Business, I’d like to introduce my co-author on my latest book that was just released, Business Breakthrough 3.0. Are you ready to break free of your old ways of doing business and transform your company from within? Eager to build teams of engaged employees who bring their best selves to work—every day? Ready to weave sustainability and cultural longevity into the very fabric of your company? Then BUSINESS BREAKTHROUGH 3.0 is
Castles in the Sky: Secure Your App Dev Pipeline From Laptop to Cloud
I had the pleasure this morning of joining some of my friends at Uptycs in a live panel discussion on securing the application development pipeline. Check out the recording here: Castles in the Sky Event Recording Modern cyber attacks are on the rise, and attackers are targeting the development process itself. The reason: developer laptops often operate in an insecure environment, and their repositories and templates are inadequately protected. So… how can we continue to unify #D
How Data Sharding Can Affect Your Ability to Scale
Seldom do emerging SaaS startups consider the scalability of their applications from the outset. While they may anticipate future expansion and incorporate growth into their financial strategies, their primary emphasis tends to be on developing marketable features rather than designing their applications for scalability. However, it’s important to think about scalability right from the start, even before landing your first customer. As the company introduces one feature after another and a
ICYMI: Do You Need a Cloud Center of Excellence? [podcast]
On this episode of Modern Digital Business, we explore the necessary transition to a digital business model and the challenges that come with it, specifically in the realm of cloud computing. As the leader in enterprise IT, it’s important to adapt to newer, more flexible and scalable technologies. The solution? Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence! We dive into the benefits of a CCoE and how it can help guide organizations towards a common goal. Tune in for expert insights, actionable
3 Important Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Centralize Your Data
Modern applications and systems are commonly built using microservice architectures. Their distinguishing feature is the division of the business responsibility of a complex application into discrete, self-contained units that can be developed, managed, operated, and scaled independently. Microservice architectures offer a viable approach for scaling an application, enabling larger and less connected development teams to work autonomously on their respective components while contributing to a c
5 Steps to Bring Your Enterprise Application into the Modern World
Modern web applications are the backbone of our digital world. Customers today expect a smooth and seamless digital experience whenever they visit a commercial website. Without high-performing applications, you risk losing customer trust and your business could suffer. That’s why it’s important to modernize enterprise applications. Of course, keeping web apps running smoothly is easier said than done. They need to be able to handle all the traffic that gets thrown at them, without an
How to Ensure Continuous Availability with Multiple AWS Accounts
To ensure that a modern, high-performance application can operate smoothly even if a data center experiences an outage, it’s crucial to distribute individual application instances across multiple data centers. This approach is widely recognized as a best practice within the industry and is an essential characteristic to incorporate into your application architecture to increase resilience against potential data center issues. When constructing an application in the cloud, a similar princip
How to Overcome the 5 Major Pain Points of Modern Software Development
Today’s customers have become increasingly demanding when it comes to software and website quality, expecting regular updates with new features and functionalities from their vendors. However, meeting these expectations and ensuring customer satisfaction requires the use of agile application development methods and techniques, as well as highly skilled software engineers who can adeptly use the latest development tools, technologies, and methodologies. Consequently, the world of software d
Automating Your Automation with Tyson Kunovsky, CEO of AutoCloud [podcast]
AutoCloud is an enterprise software platform companies use to assist in their infrastructure-as-code (IaC) deployments. Customers using AutoCloud can reduce cloud costs, security risks, complexity, and adoption time for IaC using Terraform in all the major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. AutoCloud is a critical risk-mitigation tool for cyber security, compliance, and ongoing infrastructure monitoring and management. Tyson Kunovsky is the founder and CEO of AutoCloud, and h
New Course Available: ‘Basics of Cloud Security’
How do you keep your private data safe in the public cloud? Is it even possible? The truth is, your data and your application are likely safer in the public cloud than in your own private data center. But how can this be true? Do you want to learn what you must you do to build security into your cloud-native application architecture? I’m excited to announce that my latest course, Basics of Cloud Security, is now live at Atchison Academy! This course will show you, at a hig
The Long March: Cloud Native Panel Discussion
This January I was fortunate enough to be a panelist at Predict 2023, for an engaging panel discussion titled The Long March. The other panelists and I discussed how to make Kubernetes more accessible to a larger group of companies, and the cloud-native technologies needed to support mission-critical workloads in the data center and in less compute-intensive environments. You can watch the full panel discussion here: The Long March: Predict 2023 Panel Discussion If you enjoyed this conver
What’s in Store for DevOps in 2023?
In the past couple of years, businesses have been leveraging DevOps to drive their digital and cloud transformations and enable rapid innovation. Now it’s time to look back at lessons learned as well as look forward into the future. With so much change happening in the industry, what does 2023 have in store for DevOps? What are the DevOps practices and technologies that will shape the future of business? Join me on the Techstrong.tv panel of experts as we talk about our predictions for the