Doing software development from bottom up when you need to or is this a norm?

Doing software development from bottom up when you need to or is this a norm? If somebody asked you to first build the wheels for the car before having the car at all, what would you do? First, I would question if I need to design/build 4 lug or 5 lug wheels. Then I would need to predict or ask about some details to figure out the proper offset and width for the wheels so they don’t stick outside the fenders. Now how does this car analogy apply to software engineering? First, you need to know and define the API contract. Then you would probably build a stub or mocked version of your API and you would put yourself in the shoes of the client trying to use it in cases that you can predict. Depending on the performance requirements, you may end up adding caching and other improvements. This approach is actually not that uncommon. This is actually how you would approach your team to team and microservice to microservice dependencies regardless of how well you know your consumer; it is important to maintain that discipline at the technical level but as for human communication leverage the closeness you have with other teams. Almir Mustafic

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Brand New programming language and one solution OR …

Brand New programming language and one solution OR Two existing programming languages, one solution for EACH? I understand that there is no right or wrong. It all depends on your software architecture, team structure, team skills and other factors, but I still want to explain the scenario as it may look familiar to some. Let me explain. Let’s assume that you have microservices and common libraries in two major programming languages. You have some teams who are experts in one and some teams experts in the other programming language. Now you need to come up with a solution for a scenario that all teams will need to leverage. Let’s assume that your cloud platform has an off-the-shelf approach for this but it is supported by a 3rd programming language that your teams do not have much experience in. What is the right thing for your organization and not just from the technical point of view? A) Do you embrace what your cloud platform gives you off the shelf and implement thi...

Architecture Diagram for ...

ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM representing interactions of your family of microservices is one of many important things to achieve the enterprise-level microservice architecture and microservices. After going through the design and contract definitions of your APIs/microservices, your team needs to put together a single diagram that explains the interaction among microservices (owned by your team) and how these microservices interact with other teams’ microservices. This is basically the blueprint for your team’s work and this picture needs to be constantly updated as you are evolving your services. What does this give you? It gives you the big picture view and it allows you to detect good or bad patterns that you cannot see when you are deep in your code. For example, you may be able to see that you are doing too many direct API calls for something that could be done with pub/sub approach. Almir Mustafic

AWS CodeStar — this is how the cloud computing will work in the future

AWS CodeStar service ?? AWS launched two new important services: * AWS CodeStar * AWS Cloud9 IDE After AWS Re:Invent, I spent some time setting up AWS Cloud9 service. I was a user of Cloud9 before Amazon acquired them. I really like the IDE and I was wondering how it integrates with the rest of the AWS services. Then I did some more learning and setup and here are the results: You can use AWS CodeStar service as an orchestrator/workflow that allows you to: (1) Code an application (different templates with different languages) using AWS Cloud9. (2) Manage the source code via AWS CodeCommit. (3) Deploy it using AWS CodeDeploy. All of this is managed through the AWS CodeStar dashboard. As part of creating a project within AWS CodeStar, I had an option to set it up with just one EC2 or with Elastic Beanstalk. For simplicity I chose the EC2 flavor and successfully deployed the “Hello World” Python Flask application using AWS CodeStar. After I deployed ...

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