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 Iโ€™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: โ€œIf Equifax had a pure-play Microservices Architecture in place, would it have solved the problem?โ€

Using Spring Integration In Conjunction With Spring Batch

Mark Fricke Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Spring, Spring Batch, Spring Boot 6 Comments

Recently I was working on a development project for a client focused on Spring Batch. The program required a pull of the SFTP directory for an encrypted file, decryption of that file, starting of the Spring Batch program, and archive of that file.

Initially, my first thought was to use a shell script to perform all the tasks. Then one of my colleagues suggested Spring Integration; I thought this was great opportunity to learn and get my hands dirty with something new.

In this blog, I will show an example of Spring Integration configuration code, break it apart, and show how each part works.

Spring Integration turned out to be a simple solution to my clientโ€™s needs. Using Spring Integration and Spring Batch with Spring Boot, I was able to have a single deployable jar that included everything to run the application. I no longer needed separate deployments for the shell script, and batch process and all code is one Java project.

Migrating to Java 9

Billy Korando Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Java, Programming, Spring, Spring Boot Leave a Comment

Java 9, after many delays and failed votes, looks to be finally arriving this September.

Java 9 will bring several new features: enhancements to Streams, a REPL, improvements to Collections, among others. But by far the biggest and most controversial change is Jigsaw. Jigsaw is introducing modularity to the JDK, a long topic in and of itself, but it is one of the major reasons upgrading to Java 9 will be more difficult than previous major releases of Java.

In this blog we will take a look at some of the benefits of running in a Java 9 environment, how to migrate a Spring Boot application to Java 9, and finally review some of the common problems you may run into and strategies for resolving them…

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…

Auto-Publishing & Monitoring APIs With Spring Boot

David Pitt API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Keyhole Creations, Microservices, REST, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial Leave a Comment

If you are heading down the path of a Microservices style of architecture, one tenant you will need to embrace is automation. Many moving parts are introduced with this style of architecture. If successful, your environment will have a plethora of service APIs available that the enterprise can consume for application development and integration.

This means that there must be a way that available API documentation can be discovered. API information needs to be effectively communicated throughout the enterprise that shows where APIs are used, how often APIs are used, and when APIs change. Not having this type of monitoring in place will hinder and possibly cripple the agility benefits that a Microservice style of architecture can bring to the enterprise.

This blog will describe how Swagger/OpenAPI documentation can be applied to aย Spring Boot implementation. We will show how API documentation and monitoring can be automatically published toย an API documentation portal.

As an example, we introduce a reference Spring Boot API CRUD application (using Spring MVC/Data with Spring Fox) and set up the automatic publishing of API documentation and statistics to documentation portal GrokOla. In the example, we introduce two open source utilitiesย to help and allow published APIs the ability toย be searched and notify users whenย changed….