3 Terraform Features to Help You Refactor Your Infrastructure Effortlessly

Ever created an app, like a website? You create the app and get everything working. But when you go to make a change the thought scares you to death.

Does this sound like you? I’ve been in that very same position, too. Writing code that’s flexible and malleable to change isn’t easy. When it comes to writing infrastructure that’s flexible that’s where a tool like Terraform can help us out.

Terraform

If you’re not already familiar with Terraform, don’t worry, you’re in safe hands! Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code  tool with some awesome features that allow us to write infrastructure code that’s flexible to change.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand what Terraform is, why it’s a great first infrastructure-as-code tool to learn and how the main features help you to write infrastructure that’s easy to refactor. 

4 Signs You Should Break Your App Into Microservices

Microservices have been talked about a lot in the last few years. And it’s commonly accepted practice that applications should start as monolithic applications before being broken down into Microservices. In fact that’s exactly how we made Splitoo.

Earlier in 2019 I made a commitment to improve some technical aspects of Splitoo. One of which aspect you could call Microservices. At Splitoo since we’re a small team, we made some fairly intuitive decisions to break down the application into Microservices based on some tell-tale signs that it needed it.

What we realised is that our decisions to break down the app came from getting more intuitive about the tell-tale signs that an application is getting too big, and could benefit from being broken down into microservices. And that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

By the end of this article you should know four tell-tale signs that an application could benefit from being architected with a Microservice approach.

Your personal AWS setup (and how to not get hacked)

Avoid huge bills and getting locked out of your account

In 2016 hackers compromised my personal AWS setup. Within a matter of hours I received an AWS bill for $3000 dollars 😱😱.😱.😱.

When you’re a Cloud Native Engineer one of the best ways we can learn is through experimenting directly on cloud platforms, like AWS. But, doing so can be fraught with difficulties if you’re not careful when you setup and use your cloud account. An incorrectly setup account is vulnerable to hackers and you could even end up with a massive bill!

By the end of this article you’ll know all the steps to take before accessing your AWS cloud account so that you can experiment and learn about AWS.