Tech Insights

Deciding to replace your legacy application with a newer, bigger, faster application with the existing functionality your users have come to expect is not for the faint of heart. You likely have a huge investment in the original legacy app; users have learned how to navigate it and work within its strengths and weaknesses. It’s a known quantity.

Here are some tips on how to ensure the migration to a new generation is successful and embraced by the user community.

The benefits of decomposing your business’s large monoliths are well established. Your company’s systems may have started small, and their simplicity may have allowed for rapid initial development. However, as they’ve grown, complexity has increased, and work has slowed. It’s time to break things up into loosely coupled systems so that a slowdown in one area doesn’t affect the whole system, and multiple teams can make rapid iterations without getting bogged down in negotiating dependencies with other parts of the system.

Now the question is how. You’ve got ideas, and some of the components to break out seem obvious, but do those ideas add up to a coherent vision that puts you where you want to be a few years down the road? Or are you likely to hit stumbling blocks, like systems not getting the data they need via a reasonable path, complications arising from unexpected dependencies, or user experiences made complex by asynchronous data? Where should you start if you want to avoid troubles down the line?

You might have heard about Terraform and wondered what it has to do with the cloud. The first thing you may think of is terraforming (deliberately shaping) planets to be habitable by humans. However, I’m not a planetary expert, so this article is not about that! Today, I’d like to share exciting information about a product from HashiCorp called Terraform, which enables Infrastructure as Code (or IaC).

Utilizing Terraform allows you to modernize your infrastructure, improve your productivity, increase release velocity, and foster collaboration within your teams. Here is a rundown on the basics of Terraform and how it can benefit your team.

Automating cloud security is like flying on autopilot. It can handle day-to-day cloud building, maintenance, and security tasks that you don’t have the time to complete, allowing you to focus on other work instead. Scheduled maintenance periods or wait states can be a thing of the past. That also means your team can get back to doing what they do best: creating innovative digital products.

Cloud security automation can sound like a scary prospect, especially when so many components are involved — servers, data storage, networking equipment, you name it. However, implementing these practices can provide your team with abundant benefits. We use the following four-step approach, complete with tool recommendations and best practices.

It’s not unusual for software developers to offer a Proof of Concept (POC) early in the software development cycle — before time and resources are fully committed to the project. A POC demonstrates the viability of what you’re proposing, whether it’s an idea, a procedure, or a technical concept. As you move forward in the software development life cycle, you arrive at something more akin to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a small, releasable product with limited features and functionality.

Here’s an overview of the POC and MVP, when to use them, and why they are essential to the software validation and development life cycle.