Could the Equifax Hack Have Been Prevented by a Microservices Architecture?

David Pitt Architecture, Articles, DevOps, Java, Microservices, Opinion, Security Leave a Comment

When I heard that the Struts Open Source framework played a role in the recent Equifax hack, I wanted to do some research to understand how it happened. Struts is a commonly-used Java framework that I have applied in the past. And I’m not alone in that: it is reported that in 65% of Fortune 500 companies currently implement Struts in some way.

So, I did a little digging and performed a thought experiment asking myself the following question: “If Equifax had a pure-play Microservices Architecture in place, would it have solved the problem?”

Using Docker + AWS to Build, Deploy and Scale your App

Brandon Klimek Articles, AWS, Cloud, DevOps, Docker, Python, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial 8 Comments

I recently worked to develop a software platform that relied on Spring Boot and Docker to prop up an API. Being the only developer on the project, I needed to find a way to quickly and efficiently deploy new releases. However, I found many solutions overwhelming to set up.

That was until I discovered AWS has tools that allow any developer to quickly build and deploy their application.

In this 30 minute tutorial, you will discover how to utilize the following technologies:
– AWS CodeCommit – source control (git)
– AWS Code Build – source code compiler, rest runner
– AWS Codepipeline – builds, tests, and deploys code every time the repo changes
-AWS Elastic Beanstalk – service to manage EC2 instances handling deployments, provisioning, load balancing, and health monitoring
-Docker + Spring Boot – Our containerized Spring Boot application for the demo

Once finished, you will have a Docker application running that automatically builds your software on commit, and deploys it to the Elastic beanstalk sitting behind a load balancer for scalability. This continuous integration pipeline will allow you to worry less about your deployments and get back to focusing on feature development within your application.

Using ELK In .NET Applications

Chase Aucoin .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Microservices, moderntoolingseries 6 Comments

This article is part of a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems in DotNet.

In our first article, we saw how easy it was to set up a full ELK stack by leveraging pre-built containers. In this blog, I show how to leverage ELK in a .NET application and aggregate our logs into a single place. You will see just how simple it is to start getting some insights into your application. Let’s get started…

Containers For .NET Developers

Chase Aucoin .NET, .NET Core, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Microservices, moderntoolingseries, Python Leave a Comment

This is going to be the first post in a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems. In this post, I will show how to use Docker for Windows to set up an ELK (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) server that we are going to use in future articles. The series is particularly geared toward traditional .NET developers. Let’s get started…