API Design Patterns and Evolution Strategies for Long-Lived Systems
September 23, 2022
Architectural approaches to designing APIs that evolve gracefully over years, balancing stability for existing clients with innovation for new capabilities.
Engineering Team Structure and Conway's Law: Architecting for Alignment
August 19, 2022
How team structure shapes system architecture and vice versa, with practical patterns for organizing engineering teams around microservices and distributed systems.
Distributed Tracing in Production: Architecture and Design Decisions
July 14, 2022
Architectural approaches to implementing distributed tracing at scale, covering design decisions, trade-offs, and patterns for observability in microservices architectures.
Managing 60+ Microservices: Lessons from Large-Scale Systems
March 17, 2022
Practical strategies for operating dozens of microservices, from service mesh to observability, deployment automation, and organizational patterns that work.
2021 in Review: Lessons from Building at Scale
December 30, 2021
Reflecting on a year of building distributed systems, managing large engineering teams, and the key technical and organizational lessons learned.
Platform Engineering: Building Internal Developer Platforms That Scale
November 18, 2021
Strategies for building internal developer platforms that improve productivity, reduce cognitive load, and enable teams to move faster while maintaining reliability.
GraphQL Federation: Building Distributed Graph APIs at Scale
October 21, 2021
Practical guide to implementing GraphQL Federation for microservices, enabling teams to build a unified API while maintaining service autonomy.
Breaking the Monolith: A Practical Guide to Microservices Migration
March 20, 2021
Step-by-step approach to decomposing monolithic applications into microservices, with real-world patterns, pitfalls to avoid, and migration strategies that work.
Event-Driven Architectures: Building Systems That Scale to Billions of Events
January 15, 2021
Deep dive into designing event-driven architectures that can handle massive scale, exploring patterns, anti-patterns, and real-world implementation strategies.
Distributed Tracing at Scale: Architecture and Design Patterns
August 17, 2020
Architectural approaches to implementing distributed tracing across thousands of services including sampling strategies, storage patterns, and query optimization
Microservices Communication Patterns: Synchronous, Asynchronous, and Hybrid Architectures
June 22, 2020
Architectural trade-offs between communication patterns in distributed systems including request-response, event-driven, and message-based approaches
Observability-Driven Development: Building Systems for Production Understanding
April 20, 2020
Architectural approaches to embedding observability into system design from inception, enabling production debugging and operational insights
API Gateway Architecture: Patterns for Microservices Edge
March 16, 2020
Architectural patterns for API gateways including routing strategies, authentication flows, rate limiting, and service aggregation trade-offs
GraphQL API Design: Schema Patterns and Best Practices
April 17, 2019
Designing scalable and maintainable GraphQL APIs for microservices, covering schema design, resolvers, and performance optimization
Service Mesh Observability: Deep Insights into Microservices Traffic
March 19, 2019
Leveraging service mesh capabilities for comprehensive observability across distributed microservices architectures
Serverless Architectures at Scale: Beyond Hello World
February 14, 2019
Real-world patterns and practices for building production serverless applications that handle millions of requests
Envoy Proxy Deep Dive: The Foundation of Modern Service Mesh
October 19, 2018
Understanding Envoy proxy architecture, configuration, and its role as the data plane for service mesh implementations
Multi-Tenant Architecture Patterns: Isolation, Efficiency, and Trade-offs
August 20, 2018
Exploring multi-tenancy strategies for SaaS applications, from database isolation to Kubernetes namespace designs
gRPC for Microservices: Moving Beyond REST APIs
April 18, 2018
A comprehensive guide to adopting gRPC for microservices communication, including protocol buffers, streaming, and production considerations
Running Service Mesh in Production: Lessons from the Trenches
March 20, 2018
Real-world experiences and practical guidance for deploying Istio and Linkerd service meshes in production environments
2017 Year in Review: Cloud-Native Evolution and Security Maturity
December 28, 2017
Reflecting on a transformative year in cloud-native infrastructure, security practices, and distributed systems
Building Resilient Microservices: Patterns for Failure Handling
October 19, 2017
Essential resilience patterns for microservices including circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, and bulkheads to handle failure gracefully
Unified Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces Together
September 20, 2017
How to build a comprehensive observability strategy that unifies metrics, logs, and distributed traces for effective system understanding
Cloud Migration Strategies: From Legacy to Cloud-Native
August 17, 2017
Practical patterns and strategies for migrating legacy systems to the cloud, minimizing risk while maximizing business value
Security at Scale: Protecting Microservices Architectures
May 18, 2017
Practical strategies for implementing security in large-scale microservices deployments, from authentication to data protection
Distributed Tracing with OpenTracing: Making Sense of Microservices
April 20, 2017
A practical guide to implementing distributed tracing using OpenTracing to debug and understand complex microservices interactions
Service Mesh: A New Layer for Microservices Communication
March 15, 2017
Understanding service mesh architecture and how it solves critical challenges in microservices communication, security, and observability
Observability in Distributed Systems: Beyond Logging and Monitoring
September 22, 2016
Building comprehensive observability into microservices architectures with distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging to understand complex system behavior.
Serverless and Key Management: Evaluating AWS Lambda for Cryptographic Services
June 16, 2016
Exploring whether serverless functions are suitable for key management workloads and the unique challenges of managing cryptographic state in ephemeral environments
Building High-Performance Microservices with Go
April 14, 2016
Why we chose Go for performance-critical key management services and lessons learned from rewriting Java services in Go
Kubernetes in Production: Running Security Services at Scale
March 22, 2016
Taking Kubernetes from experimental to production for key management microservices, sharing lessons learned from six months of real-world operation
Distributed System Design Patterns for Reliability and Scale
November 20, 2015
Essential patterns for building reliable distributed systems: circuit breakers, retry strategies, eventual consistency, and handling partial failures.
Building CipherTrust Monitor: ELK Stack for HSM and Microservices Monitoring
October 22, 2015
Designing a comprehensive monitoring solution using Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana for tracking HSM health, key operations, and microservices performance
Building Cloud Services with Go: Performance, Concurrency, and Simplicity
October 18, 2015
Why Go has become my language of choice for building cloud-native security services, with practical examples of concurrency patterns and performance characteristics.
Microservices Architecture for Enterprise Key Management
September 17, 2015
Decomposing monolithic key management systems into microservices: design patterns, challenges, and lessons learned from production deployments
First Look at Kubernetes: Orchestrating Security Microservices
August 20, 2015
Exploring Kubernetes for orchestrating containerized key management microservices and evaluating if it's ready for production security workloads
Containerizing Security Services: Docker for Key Management Microservices
July 16, 2015
Exploring how Docker containers can be used for security-sensitive microservices while addressing unique challenges around secrets management and HSM access
Security Considerations for Microservices Architecture
June 25, 2015
Exploring the unique security challenges that emerge when moving from monolithic applications to microservices, and practical patterns to address them.
Microservices Patterns for Storage Networking
April 22, 2014
Exploring how emerging microservices architecture patterns can improve modularity and scalability in storage networking systems