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

First up: Overcoming IT Complexity is now shipping!

The first copy of Overcoming IT Complexity

As you can see from this photo, I received my first copy of my latest O’Reilly Media book, Overcoming IT Complexity. This book is now shipping, and you can get your own copy.

Here is what you will learn in Overcoming IT Complexity:

  • How to assess your current IT environment to identify complexity-centered risks
  • How to structure cross-functional teams to reduce friction points
  • How to create a framework for IT investments that’s aligned with your business goals
  • How to measure your outcomes for continued success

This is a short book and a quick read. But it will help you assess and improve your ability to manage complex IT systems.

I hope you’ll enjoy it!

O’Reilly Media: Overcoming IT Complexity

Live last week: The Long March at Techstrong’s Predict 2023

Techstrong’s Predict 2023 was last week, and it was a great event! I was a guest on the panel “The Long March,” where we had a great conversation about where DevOps and cloud-native technologies were going beyond 2023.

I’d love to relate the entire discussion, but it’s too long for here. But keep checking out TechStrong events website, and I’m sure they’ll put the entire discussion up soon. Once I receive notice that the recording is on their website, I’ll send out the link!

Last week’s top story: Building cloud-native applications using isolation zones

Cloud-native architectures are perfect for creating and operating modern, innovative applications. Cloud-native applications provide many advantages both to consumers of the applications and to those building and managing them.

But bad actors abound, and securely maintaining your cloud-native application is no easy task. There are many things you can—and should—do to keep your application secure.

One technique to improve the security of your cloud-native application that is often overlooked is the use of isolation zones.

What are isolation zones? Isolation zones are a process of separating your application into multiple security regions that are, as much as possible, isolated from each other.

Isolation zones protecting sensitive services from the public internet.

An application is stored in multiple zones. Each zone performs some necessary part of the overall application processing. The outer zone is the closest to customers—and the public internet—and is considered the least secure. Only those actions that must occur in this exposed area occur here. When an application needs to perform more secure operations, it calls back into successively more secure zones. The innermost zone is the most secure and is where the most sensitive processing and sensitive data is stored. Each zone can only talk to the zones immediately adjacent to it, and cannot reach into zones deeper inside the application without going through services at each intervening layer.

The isolation zone technique works best for cloud-based applications based on service and microservice architectures. This is because cloud providers offer easy-to-set-up tools (such as VPCs) to create and manage isolation zones, and service-based applications can be divided into multiple zones much more easily than monoliths can be. Hence, using isolation zones is particularly useful for cloud-native applications.

How do you decide how to segment your application into security zones? Read the full article in last week’s Container Journal article.

Links for the week:

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