Author: Korbinian Kuhn, Steffen Mauser

Blockchain – Revolution or hype?

~ Korbinian Kuhn, Steffen Mauser

Welcome to our journey through the blockchain, since the emergence of Bitcoin, one of the most trending topics of the global digital village. After reading this blog post, you’ll have a basic understanding of the technology, a wide overview of future use cases and are able to differentiate between realistic potential and hype.

In the first part we explain the blockchain technology, for everybody who’s not that deep in the topic or needs a quick recap:
What is an transaction?
What’s inside a block?
How does the merkle tree work?
Why do we need a proof of work?

In the second part we take a closer look on the future of the blockchain:
What are Proof-of-Stake, Casper and Algorand?
What are the risks and opportunities of the technology?
Where are the future uses cases of the blockchain?
Is there a blockchain revolution or just another hype?
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Microservices – Legolizing Software Development V

~ Korbinian Kuhn, Steffen Mauser

Welcome to the final part of our microservices series. If you’ve missed a previous post you can read it here:

I) Architecture
II) Caching
III) Security
IV) Continuous Integration
V) Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

Respect for Stumbling Blocks

Hopefully you have enjoyed our blog posts and have learned a lot. We answered following questions in our last four posts

  • How to build a microservices architecture?
  • How to use the advantages of caching with microservices?
  • How to secure microservices and handle authentication between them?
  • How to set up a seamless Continuous Integration workflow for microservices combining Jenkins, Git and Docker?

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Microservices – Legolizing Software Development II

~ Korbinian Kuhn, Steffen Mauser

Welcome to part two of our microservices series. If you’ve missed a previous post you can read it here:

I) Architecture
II) Caching
III) Security
IV) Continuous Integration
V) Lessons Learned

Caching

The microservice structure can generate a heavy communication between many services. Worst case scenario is a long tail of dependencies, resulting in a high latency of the response for the initial request. This can get even worse, e.g. if the services were running on different servers placed in various data centers. Even if some requests can run parallel, the response time for the initial requested service will take at least the answering time of the tail it depends on.

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Microservices – Legolizing Software Development I

~ Korbinian Kuhn, Steffen Mauser

Welcome to our five-part series about microservices and a legolized software development. We’d like to share our lessons learned about architecture, development environment and security considerations with you. We will also explain some issues we stumbled over and what solutions we chose to solve them.

I) In the first part, we present an example microservice structure, with multiple services, a foreign API interface and a reverse proxy that also allows load balancing.

II) Part two will take a closer look on how caching improves the heavy and frequent communication within our setup. [read]

III) Security is a topic that always occurs with microservices. We’ll present our solution for managing both, authentication and authorization at one single point. [read]

IV) An automated development environment will save you. We explain how we set up Jenkins, Docker and Git to work seamlessly together. [read]

V) We finish with a concluding review about the use of microservices in small projects and give an overview about our top stumbling blocks. [read]

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