Building Async and Cloud Native organizations - Issue #2

Thanks again for taking the time to read to my collection of interesting topics and links. Touching the web, the cloud, tooling and software development in general. If you have any suggestions or improvements, then do reach out to me!

REST and APIs

Wanna learn more about API Management in combination with GitHub workflows, then have a look at this excellent hackathon material:

The hackathon uses GitHub Actions to create a complete CI/CD workflow for APIs deployed in Azure API Management. The following image illustrates the conceputal architecture.

The latest release of Azure API Management includes a new policy called validate-azure-ad-token which is ideal for validating a Json Web Token before it reaches your backend. Read more in the release notes:

Repository with Azure API Management release notes. - Release Release - API Management service: October, 2022 · Azure/API-Management

Some while back I posted a thread about returning collections of data from a REST API, have a look for some options:

Coding

Good old times of styling websites using tables or div elements...nowadays it is the flexbox that can be used. So much flexibility, so have a look at this interactive guide on how to use it properly:

Flexbox is a remarkably powerful layout mode. When we truly understand how it works, we can build dynamic layouts that respond automatically, rearranging themselves as-needed. This demo is heavily inspired by Adam Argyle’s incredible “4 layouts for the price of 1” codepen.

When you use CosmosDB, you will have to pick a good partitionkey. What if that was in retrospect not the best one and you need to change it? The article below will give you some pointers on how to change them:

When using Cosmos DB, it is critically important to choose a good partition key strategy. Partitions in CosmosDB can hold a maximum of 20GB of data - including indexes (this used to be 10GB). If you get it wrong, you might fill up a partition and break things in production.

GitHub

You moved your Git repo from Azure DevOps to GitHub, but still have not migrated your pipelines? You can now signup for the GitHub Actions importer, which should be able to migrate Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins, and Travis CI pipelines into GitHub:

Introducing GitHub Actions Importer

Security of software supply chain systems like GitHub stays a big issue. The below article describes some common attach vectors and how to guard against them:

This article is part of a series about the security of the software supply chain. Each article will be analyzing a component of the Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) model in depth, from the developer’s workstation all the way to the consumer side of the chain.

Two variable, open source fonts from GitHub.

Nice addition by GitHub to show the date that a repo was archived on top of the page so you no longer has to deduce that from the last commits.

Repository archive date now shown in UI

Computing

See how Bare Metalsson rejects the cloud. Unfortunately we still run into those kinds of guys...

I m always cautious about measuring things as it can be used wrongly (Goodhart's law). But the below article describes some interesting metrics to keep track of to see if you are improving or not:

Castor is a modern data catalog. And how to go about measuring them

A very fitting one; how often do you make sure your backup strategies still work?

Helpers

A free online avatar generator for anyone to make their beautiful personal avatar easily!

Computer Laws

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

- C.A.R. Hoare

Closing off this newsletter and hope to reach you again next time!

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