If you are following best practices, you have adopted a multi-account strategy for your cloud applications, with different workloads spread across different accounts. Users log in to one account and assume roles in other accounts as needed. Even your build system lives in a tools account separate from all the applications it deploys. This is Read more…
It is often very useful to share diagrams when describing a software architecture to others. It applies the old adage that a “picture is worth a thousand words”. What’s more, it also helps you – as a builder – understand what you built and to learn areas to improve as you develop your software. While Read more…
Development against Legacy Databases A “legacy” relational production database can be a challenge to develop new software against, whether it be “reports” or a feature for a web application. The schema sets a minimum for what to expect, but the actual data content may be “dirty” or inconsistent. There can be any number of curiosities Read more…
This is the final blog post in a three-part series about the use of the Visual Studio Code Remote – Containers extension. The first post went over the benefits and general concepts of using a dev container to develop a project. The second showed some basic examples on how to get started along with introducing Read more…
CloudFormation Development Process and Privilege As a developer works through the development of a CloudFormation template, they are likely working in a “sandbox” account where they have significant “power user” privileges. This is convenient in order to allow the developer to focus on the business needs, but what happens when the same template is converged Read more…
Identity Management had a curious beginning in the early 1500s in England, where parish churches kept elaborate written records “for the purpose of preventing bigamy and consanguineous marriage.” It was the invention of the automobile 400 years later that furthered the creation of personal identification when in 1903 two US states issued the first driver’s Read more…
Automated integration testing of a python AWS Config rule is a challenging, but necessary undertaking to ensure that the rule provides accurate results. Creating resources, waiting for the result to show up in AWS Config, testing the results and tearing down the resources in best case circumstances takes several minutes. And it can take many Read more…
config-lint: Up and Running How to leverage config-lint to validate JSON and YAML based configurations. Configuration Validation with config-lint Stelligent config-lint is an open source command line tool to lint configuration file in a variety of formats, including JSON, YAML, Terraform, and Kubernetes. Config-lint offers a lightweight method to provide custom validation for unique compliance Read more…
This blog post is the second in a three-part series about the Visual Studio Code Remote – Containers extension. The first post went over the benefits and general concepts of using a container for development work on a project. This post will go over some instructions on how to implement this for a project, basic Read more…
Test Automation for Integrating with External Services Developing test automation code for an interface to an “external” service is always a difficult proposition. There is a spectrum of techniques for developing reproducible tests against an external service. On one end of the spectrum are “mocking” techniques and on the other far end of the spectrum Read more…