MDB Weekly is a multi-format, weekly summary of information from the past week in Modern Digital Business. It's available as an article, a podcast, or an email newsletter. It will be published weekly on Mondays.

First Up: Overcoming IT Complexity is now available!

It’s here! It’s out! My latest book, Overcoming IT Complexity, is now shipping! It’s available in paperback and Kindle 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 for more information.

MDB Podcast: Testing at Scale with Nate Lee

Modern businesses rely on applications, and they also rely on continued innovation in those applications to drive their business.
This strive 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 SpeedScale. SpeedScale 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.

Last Week’s Top Story: Do You Have a Handle on Your Configurations?

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 the configurations needed to operate your application.

  • There’s configuration describing 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.

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 information.

  • A router may contain configuration information within the router itself.
  • A SaaS system used by your application may have its own configuration system.
  • 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 managed. 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 than 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 mess.

Live Event: Cloud Native Security Conference 2023

I will be at the Cloud Native Security Conference this year. 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 are increasing in difficulty and in importance.

The conference will be held in Seattle, WA, on February 1st and 2nd. If you are planning on attending, let me know! I hope to see you there.

Links for the week:

Photo by Ferenc Almasi on Unsplash

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Modern Digital Business weekly. If you enjoyed this, check out other formats available, including email, and audio podcast. All versions are released weekly on Mondays.