Modern Digital Business Blog

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

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

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

Overcoming IT Complexity—My Latest O’Reilly Book

The complexity of modern IT systems can impact your application’s quality and security. It’s that simple. Business pressures have caused IT organizations to focus on creating new applications as well as adding new features and capabilities to existing applications in order to meet the increasingly competitive demands. The result is insufficient time to work on managing, operating, and maintaining existing applications and capabilities. Ignoring ongoing issues increases technical deb

Simplifying Cloud Complexity with Tim Holm of Nitric [podcast]

The cloud has enabled various software and software-enabled infrastructure options for application development. It’s easy to get lost in the variety of shapes and sizes of offerings available: ECS EKS, Lambda, Fargate Azure functions, Google Cloud Containers—IT complexity is a real issue. And this means we need better tools to help us simplify our complex cloud infrastructure options. In this episode, I talk with Tim Holm, CTO of Nitric, a company that is trying to solve this exact

Application Security: Securing Data at Rest and in Motion [podcast]

How seriously is your business taking application security? Creating a secure software application requires many actions, but by far the most important are those that involve securing the data in the application—and these are the most difficult actions. When it comes to securing application data, there are two unique and distinct types of data that must be secured. Typically, data at rest is data that is stored in a database, ready to be used by some part of the application, while data

Don’t Let Technical Debt Sink Your Business [podcast]

The pandemic accelerated large-scale digital transformations for many companies. However, accelerated application growth often leads to increased technical debt. This debt makes it difficult for leaders to innovate and create new and improved customer experiences from their technologies. This stifled innovation means lower long-term revenue. Eventually, technical debt will sink your business. But what is technical debt—and how can you control it? In the latest episode of the Modern Digit

The Dangers of Data Partitioning While Scaling

Data partitioning is a common practice to make use of multiple databases to store larger datasets, or datasets accessed at a higher frequency than a single database can handle. It’s a common practice used in large software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems for scaling to handle larger quantities of traffic. Typically, a partitioning key is used to determine which partitioned database to use for a particular data request. A simple example of data partitioning is to partition all data for an appli

Don’t Let Your Application Turn into Another Winchester Mystery House

Some time ago when I was living in Silicon Valley, I often drove by a curious-looking structure called the Winchester Mystery House every day on my way to work. The Winchester Mystery House is a San Jose mansion that was once the home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester, and the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune. Originally purchased in 1884 as an unfinished eight-room farmhouse, it was expanded over the course of 36 years to an overall footprint of 24,000 square feet.&nb

Modern Application Caching With Redis

Our modern world demands modern applications. Today’s applications must be able to handle large quantities of data, perform complex operations, maintain numerous relationships among data elements, and operate on distinct and disparate states between transactions.Doing this at the high scale demanded by our modern world is a challenge that requires significant resources—and those demands are constantly growing based on ever-changing needs. Handling these needs while maintaining high av