News Aggregator


Integrating AI-Enhanced Microservices in SAFe 5.0 Framework

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 20:16:33

Abstract The integration of AI-enhanced microservices within the SAFe 5.0 framework presents a novel approach to achieving scalability in enterprise solutions. This article explores how AI can serve as a lean portfolio ally to enhance value stream performance, reduce noise, and automate tasks such as financial forecasting and risk management.  The cross-industry application of AI, from automotive predictive maintenance to healthcare, demonstrates its potential to redefine processes and improve outcomes. Moreover, the shift towards decentralized AI models fosters autonomy within Agile Release Trains, eliminating bottlenecks and enabling seamless adaptation to changing priorities. AI-augmented DevOps challenges the traditional paradigms, offering richer, more actionable insights throughout the lifecycle. Despite hurdles in transitioning to microservices, the convergence of AI and microservices promises dynamic, self-adjusting systems crucial for maintaining competitive advantage in a digital landscape.

View more...

What Actually Breaks When LLM Agents Hit Production — And How Amazon's Agent Core Fixes It

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 19:16:33

LLM agents are fantastic in demos. Fire up a notebook, drop in a friendly "Help me analyze my cloud metrics," and suddenly the model is querying APIs, generating summaries, classifying incidents, and recommending scaling strategies like it’s been on call with you for years. But the gap between agent demos and production agents is the size of a data center.

View more...

Designing Chatbots for Multiple Use Cases: Intent Routing and Orchestration

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 18:16:33

Organizations today want to build chatbots capable of handling a multitude of tasks, such as FAQs, troubleshooting, recommendations,  and ideation. My previous article focused on a high-level view of designing and testing chatbots. Here, I will dive deeper into how strong intent routing and orchestration should figure into your chatbot design. What Is a Multi-Use Chatbot? A multi-use case chatbot supports several distinct tasks, each with different goals, performance needs, and response styles.  For each use case, LLM parameters are fine-tuned around its goals. For example, a factual FAQ flow might use a low temperature for consistency, while a recommendation flow might use a higher one for creativity. Similarly, top p-values, frequency, presence, and max token penalties are also adjusted based on the use case.

View more...

Reducing the Cost of Agentic AI: A Design-First Playbook for Scalable, Sustainable Systems

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 17:16:33

Agentic AI is no longer a research concept or a demo-only capability. It is being introduced into production systems that must operate under real constraints: predictable latency, bounded cloud spend, operational reliability, security requirements, and long-term maintainability. Autonomous agents that can reason, plan, collaborate, and act across distributed architectures promise significant leverage, but they also introduce a new cost model that many engineering teams underestimate. Early implementations often succeed functionally while failing operationally. Agents reason too frequently, collaborate without limits, and remain active long after decisions have been made. What starts as intelligent autonomy quickly turns into inflated inference costs, unpredictable system behavior, and architectures that are difficult to govern at scale.

View more...

The Art of Idempotency: Preventing Double Charges and Duplicate Actions

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 16:16:33

Hey everybody, let’s talk about a silent crisis that has probably plagued every developer who has ever worked on a backend system. You know the story: a user clicks “Submit Payment,” the spinner spins… and spins… then a timeout error occurs. The user, unsure, hits the button again. What unravels next? In a poorly designed system, this single click can equate to a double charge, a duplicate order, or two identical welcome emails in a user’s inbox. I learned this lesson the hard way early in my career. We had a nice, slick new payment service, and during a period when the network was unstable, we experienced a handful of users being charged twice. It was horrible — user trust was abused, followed by a flurry of manual refunds. That incident was my brutal, and expensive, introduction to the need for idempotency.

View more...

Why Browsers Are the Weakest Link in Zero Trust Architectures

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 15:16:33

Let’s start with a simple fact that cannot be overlooked today: identity is the new perimeter. Following this logic, there exists a simple yet powerful principle of Zero Trust — never trust, always verify. Zero Trust protects architectures by continuously verifying users, devices, and more — whether internal or external — to protect critical resources, sensitive data, and enterprise applications from unauthorized access, insider threats, and lateral movement. Some useful methods within this principle include strong identity verification, multi-factor authentication (MFA), device posture checks, least-privilege access, and continuous monitoring. This significantly reduces the risk of compromise. In theory, leveraging this approach should make breaches almost impossible. However, in reality, high-profile security incidents continue to occur — even in organizations with very robust security controls. One might ask: how is this possible? The gap lies in the methods of implementation. Attackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and simple safeguards such as authentication, device compliance, and network controls alone are not sufficient. These controls can be easily bypassed by attacking one element in the technology ecosystem that is most often implicitly trusted — the web browser. Browsers are the face of the internet. They exist as the primary interface between users and applications, executing untrusted code, loading third-party scripts, and interacting with countless external domains. Without any protection mechanisms in the browser, attackers can hijack sessions, manipulate tokens, or exploit extensions. This stark difference between the promise and reality of the humble browser makes it the weakest link in modern Zero Trust security architectures.

View more...

Unit Testing SQL Queries Across Multiple Database Platforms

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 14:16:33

Testing SQL queries in production environments presents unique challenges that every data engineering team faces. When working with BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Athena, or Trino, traditional testing approaches often fall short: Fragile integration tests that break when production data changes Slow feedback loops from running tests against full datasets Silent failures during database engine upgrades that change SQL semantics No type safety between SQL queries and Python code Database migration challenges where SQL syntax differs across platforms Complex setup requirements with different mocking strategies for each database These challenges led to the development of SQL Testing Library - an open-source Python framework that enables fast, reliable unit testing of SQL queries with type-safe data contracts and mock data injection across BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Athena, Trino, and DuckDB.

View more...

How to Secure a Spring AI MCP Server with an API Key via Spring Security

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 13:16:33

Instead of building custom integrations for a variety of AI assistants or Large Language Models (LLMs) you interact with — e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, or any custom LLM — you can now, thanks to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), develop a server once and use it everywhere.  This is exactly as we used to say about Java applications; that thanks to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), they're WORA (Write Once Run Anywhere). They're built on one system and expected to run on any other Java-enabled system without further adjustments.

View more...

Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Agentic AI: Harnessing Elasticsearch Vector Databases for Enterprise AI Systems

Aggregated on: 2026-01-14 12:16:33

Large Language Models (LLMs) have changed how we think about automation and managing knowledge. They show strong skills in synthesis tasks. However, using them in crucial business areas like FinTech and healthcare reveals their underlying limitations. It is clear that while LLMs can generate language well, they lack the structural strength needed to serve as reliable knowledge systems or to act as independent, responsible decision-makers in real-world situations.

View more...

Revisiting the 7 Rs of Cloud Migration with Real-World Examples

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 20:16:32

With the rapid growth of cloud technologies and data centres, it is no longer a matter of if organizations should move to the cloud — it is a matter of when and how. Cloud migrations become critical in this context, with the need to balance key levers such as speed, cost, risk, and value. Originally popularized by Gartner and AWS, this article takes a look at the 6 Rs of Cloud Migration (with an additional R added to the traditional model), along with illustrative real-world examples, to help teams make informed cloud migration decisions. The 7 Rs — Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire, Retain, and Relocate — provide a structured way to analyze each application in an organization’s portfolio. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, this framework focuses on the notion that different applications and services require different migration strategies depending on business criticality, technical complexity, compliance constraints, and digital transformation goals.

View more...

Architecting a Production-Ready GenAI Service Desk

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 19:16:32

Internal IT Service Desks are the nervous system of any enterprise, yet they are often clogged with repetitive queries. Questions like "How do I reset my VPN?" or "What is the expense policy?" make up the bulk of tickets, distracting engineers from critical infrastructure work. While Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) promise a solution, simply pointing GPT-4 at a PDF repository rarely works in production. The hallucination rate remains high, and specific enterprise context is often lost.

View more...

Architecting Observability in Kubernetes with OpenTelemetry and Fluent Bit

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 18:16:32

In the era of monolithic architectures, troubleshooting was relatively straightforward: SSH into the server, grep the log files, and check CPU usage with top. In the cloud-native world — specifically within Kubernetes — this approach is obsolete. Applications are split into dozens of microservices, pods are ephemeral (spinning up and terminating automatically), and a single user request might traverse ten different nodes. When a transaction fails, where do you look?

View more...

Your Next Customer Is a Bot

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 17:16:32

A customer has a $500 cart on your e-commerce site. They reach the checkout page, see the empty "Promo Code" box, and pause. They open a new tab to search for a discount. They get distracted. They never return. This isn't a rare anecdote; it's a global, systemic failure. E-commerce brands lose a staggering $18 billion in sales revenue annually due to cart abandonment, with "complex checkout" being a primary driver. What's worse, a recent study found that 85.65% of all mobile shopping carts are abandoned.

View more...

Optimizing Financial Data Pipelines: Accelerating OneStream-to-Snowflake Exports by 85%

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 16:16:32

In the world of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), the "Financial Close" is a race against the clock. As an Architect, my goal is to ensure that when the FP&A team finishes their forecast in OneStream, that data is available in our Snowflake Data Warehouse immediately for downstream analytics. Recently, we encountered a significant bottleneck. Exporting a medium-sized forecast dataset (~500K records) from OneStream to Snowflake was taking over 8 minutes. This latency was unacceptable for our executive team, who needed near real-time "What-If" scenario analysis.

View more...

The Timeless Architecture: Enterprise Integration Patterns That Exceed Technology Trends

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 15:16:32

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, the evolution of enterprise systems also leaves its footprint on frameworks with relatively short lifecycles. While previous technological innovations may become obsolete, some architectural patterns remain unchanged. These patterns were developed to address the challenges of distributed systems and have improved architectural integration across different eras — from centralized message brokers to cloud-based microservices. When these patterns are examined, they provide insights into the past and offer a clear roadmap for managing technological evolution in the years ahead. The Dilemma of Continuous Revolution A strange reality is often encountered by enterprise technology leaders: everything seems to change, yet many things remain the same. New technologies emerge — from COBOL to Java to Python, from mainframes to the cloud — but the fundamental problems persist. Organizations still need to connect incompatible systems, convert data between different formats, maintain reliability when components fail, and scale to meet increasing demand.

View more...

MCP servers are everywhere, but most are collecting dust. Here are the key lessons we learned to avoid that.

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 14:16:32

It took a little while to gain traction after Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol in November 2024, but the protocol has seen a recent boom in adoption, especially after the announcement that both OpenAI and Google will support the standard. And it’s simple to understand why. The MCP proposed to solve, with an elegant solution, two of the biggest problems of AI tools: access to high-quality, specific data about your system, and integration with your existing tool stack.

View more...

AI as a Co-Creator, Not Just an Assistant: The Rise of Collaborative Intelligence in Software Development

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 13:16:32

AI has long played the role of an assistant - helping developers autocomplete code or spot syntax errors. But that’s changing fast. Today’s AI systems are becoming co-creators - intelligent agents capable of designing architectures, generating tests, and deploying fully functional applications. This isn’t just an upgrade in productivity; it’s a paradigm shift in how we build software and collaborate as teams.

View more...

Supercharge AI Workflows on Azure: Remote MCP Tool Triggers + Your First TypeScript MCP Server

Aggregated on: 2026-01-13 12:16:32

Introduction The workflow for an agentic app begins when the user interacts with it, presenting a prompt via a chat interface or a form. The agent receives this prompt and analyzes it to determine the user's intent and requirements. It can use an LLM to acquire tasks, clarify details, and break the whole into subtasks. As soon as the agent has a clear understanding of the target, it selects the most appropriate specialized tools or services to achieve the goal. These bring APIs, databases, generative AI (for writing, image generation, etc.), or other partnered systems, and the agent might arrange or put together multiple tool actions, dependent on the difficulty of the job.

View more...

UX Research in Agile Product Development: Making AI Workflows Work for People

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 20:15:03

During my eight years working in agile product development, I have watched sprints move quickly while real understanding of user problems lagged. Backlogs fill with paraphrased feedback. Interview notes sit in shared folders collecting dust. Teams make decisions based on partial memories of what users actually said. Even when the code is clean, those habits slow delivery and make it harder to build software that genuinely helps people. AI is becoming part of the everyday toolkit for developers and UX researchers alike. As stated in an analysis by McKinsey, UX research with AI can improve both speed (by 57%) and quality (by 79%) when teams redesign their product development lifecycles around it, unlocking more user value.

View more...

Kotlin Code Style: Best Practices for Former Java Developers

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 19:15:03

Many Kotlin codebases are written by developers with a Java background. The syntax is Kotlin, but the mindset is often still Java, resulting in what can be called "Java with a Kotlin accent." This style compiles and runs, but it misses the core advantages of Kotlin: conciseness, expressiveness, and safety. Common symptoms include:

View more...

Apache Spark 4.0: What’s New for Data Engineers and ML Developers

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 18:15:03

Undoubtedly one of the most anticipated updates in the world of big-data engines, the release of Apache Spark 4.0 is a big step in the right direction. According to the release notes, this shift involved closing more than 5,100 sprint tickets, facilitated by the negligence of over 390 active contributors. Machine learning and data engineering professionals, the new features of SQL, additional capabilities for Python, management of streaming states, and the newly introduced Spark Connect framework in Spark 4.0 will further reinforce the trend of high-performance, easy-to-use, scalable data analytics.

View more...

The Night We Split the Brain: A Telling of Control & Data Planes for Cloud Microservices

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 17:15:03

You know those pages you receive in the middle of the night? Not a full-blown fire, mind you, but rather a slow-burning panic? Let me tell you one of those stories that changed the way my team built software forever. It was 2 a.m., and the graphs looked bad. Not dead, mind you, but sick. Our microservices were still talking, but P95 latencies were rising high in the sky, like a lazy balloon. And retries were starting to cascade. The whole system felt like it was in a swamp.  So what was the problem? A “safe” configuration change to our API gateway, a new rate limit, and slight change of routing. It turned out that this change and a previous deploy of an unrelated service that occurred at least an hour earlier had collided in some silent serpentine handshake. The result was a slow, luscious, and irresistible drain on performance. 

View more...

Leveraging AI-Based Authentication Factors in Modern Identity and Access Management Solutions

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 16:15:03

It is not an understatement that identity is the new perimeter. With cyberattacks on the rise across industries, from finance and governments to healthcare, the protection of user identities has become more crucial than ever before.  Taking a look at some of the traditional authentication methods — passwords, PINs, security tokens, and basic biometrics, there is a need to innovate within this sphere. Since their inception, all these methods have formed the robust backbone of an effective Identity and Access Management solution. However, it is increasingly important to revamp these methods as cyberattacks become more widespread and increasingly sophisticated.

View more...

Data Lakehouse vs. Data Mesh: Rethinking Scalable Data Architectures in 2026

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 15:15:03

Introduction Over the last decade, the data ecosystem has changed immensely. Data warehouses, the core of analytics, faced issues with unstructured data and scaling. Meanwhile, early data lakes offered some level of flexibility, but poorly governed data and schema drift led to numerous problems. Now, there are two new contenders to the data paradigm: the Data Lakehouse and the Data Mesh. Both are futuristic scalable data architectures, but each has a different approach to the core problem. In 2026, enterprises will continue to face the question of whether to modernize with a centralized Lakehouse or a decentralized Mesh.

View more...

Why PostgreSQL Vacuum Matters More Than You Think

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 14:15:03

Why PostgreSQL Vacuum Matters More Than You Think Keeping PostgreSQL fast and stable is not just about good schema design or indexing. One of the most overlooked pillars of database health is the Vacuum process. It is easy to ignore because it operates quietly in the background, yet it is crucial for long-term performance, storage efficiency, and even preventing database outages. In this article, I will walk through why Vacuum exists, what happens when it is neglected, and when it makes sense to tune or run it manually.

View more...

Pragmatic Paths to On-Device AI on Android with ML Kit

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 13:15:03

There isn’t a single canonical way to add on-device AI to Android apps. Your ideal path depends on latency, privacy, UX, and maintainability. Google’s ML Kit gives you interchangeable building blocks — text recognition, barcode scanning, object/pose detection, translation, and more — that you can compose to fit your constraints. This guide lays out a pragmatic architecture, drop-in code, and a performance checklist you can ship in a sprint. The theme is intentional minimalism: pick one capability, wrap it behind a tiny interface, wire it to CameraX if needed, and iterate with metrics instead of speculative complexity. When ML Kit Is the Smart Choice On-device by default: You get low latency, offline reliability, and strong privacy because images and text don’t need to leave the device for common tasks. This dramatically reduces legal/compliance risk and eliminates network tail latency that can frustrate users during capture flows. Production-hardened models: The bundled models handle rotation, noise, motion blur, and imperfect lighting better than most “roll-your-own” attempts. You benefit from years of tuning without owning a training pipeline. Modular adoption: Add exactly one capability at a time; you don’t need a model server, autoscaling, or a feature-flagged rollout of custom models. That simplicity keeps your blast radius small. Great Android ergonomics: ML Kit works cleanly with CameraX, coroutines, and lifecycle components. That means less boilerplate and fewer foot-guns when you integrate with the camera stack, orientation changes, or backgrounding/foregrounding transitions. Common wins:

View more...

Serverless Spark Isn't Always the Answer: A Case Study

Aggregated on: 2026-01-12 12:15:03

Processing billions of records with strict latency requirements isn't a "pick your favorite database" problem. It's an architectural decision that will define system scalability, team velocity, and operational budgets for years to come. The challenge involves multiple competing constraints: 

View more...

Why Encryption Alone Is Not Enough in Cloud Security

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 20:30:02

It is often assumed that encryption is the gold standard method for securing assets in the cloud. Cloud providers give assurances that all their services are “encrypted by default.” Several regulatory and cloud compliance policies mandate that organizations encrypt data at rest, in use, and in transit. All of this should make cloud environments secure, right? However, the reality is slightly more nuanced. Many breaches occur not because encryption algorithms are weak or because attackers can crack them. They occur because attackers never need to. Instead, attackers exploit other weaknesses. Access may be over-permissive, key governance may be poorly managed, configurations may be exposed, and there may be an overall lack of visibility into how data is actually being used.

View more...

The Rise of Diskless Kafka: Rethinking Brokers, Storage, and the Kafka Protocol

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 19:30:01

Apache Kafka has come a long way from being just a scalable data ingestion layer for data lakes. Today, it is the backbone of real-time transactional applications. In many organizations, Kafka serves as the central nervous system connecting both operational and analytical workloads. Over time, its architecture has shifted significantly — from brokers managing all storage, to Tiered Storage, and now toward a new paradigm: Diskless Kafka. Diskless Kafka refers to a Kafka architecture in which brokers use no local disk storage. Instead, all event data is stored directly in cloud object storage such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage.

View more...

Beyond Extensions: Architectural Deep-Dives into File Upload Security

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 17:30:02

Allowing users to upload files is a staple of modern web applications, from profile pictures to enterprise document management. However, for a security engineer or backend developer, an upload field is essentially an open invitation for an attacker to place an arbitrary binary on your filesystem. When validation fails, the consequences range from localized data theft to a total Remote Code Execution (RCE) scenario, where an attacker gains a web shell and full control over the host. This article explores why standard defenses often fail and how modern architectural patterns — and their flaws — impact the security posture of your application.

View more...

Mastering Fluent Bit: Developer Guide to Telemetry Pipeline Routing (Part 12)

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 16:30:02

This series is a general-purpose getting-started guide for those who want to learn about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project Fluent Bit. Each article in this series addresses a single topic by providing insights into what the topic is, why it is worth exploring, where to get started, and how to get hands-on with learning about the topic as it relates to the Fluent Bit project.

View more...

How to Build and Deploy an AI Agent on Kubernetes With AWS Bedrock, FastAPI and Helm

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 15:30:01

The capabilities offered by AI are no longer limited to large, centralized platforms. Today, engineering teams are increasingly embracing lightweight, specialized AI agents that can be managed, scaled, and deployed just like microservices in a cloud-native environment — whether for summarizing large documents, translation, classification, or other analytical tasks. In this tutorial, you will create, deploy, and run an AI model that provides REST APIs for summarization and translation using AWS Bedrock, FastAPI, Docker, and deployment on Amazon EKS via Helm. This provides a reusable process for integrating AI into operations: one agent, one task, clear boundaries, and full Kubernetes-native visibility and control.

View more...

Multi-Region Apache Kafka using Synchronous Replication for Disaster Recovery With Zero Data Loss (RPO=0)

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 14:30:01

Apache Kafka is the backbone of modern event-driven systems. It powers real-time use cases across industries. But deploying Kafka is not a one-size-fits-all decision. The right strategy depends on performance, compliance, and operational needs. From self-managed clusters to fully managed services and Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) models, each approach offers different levels of control, simplicity, and scalability. Selecting the right deployment model is a strategic decision that affects cost, agility, and risk.

View more...

Essential Techniques for Production Vector Search Systems Part 2 - Binary Quantization

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 14:30:01

After implementing vector search systems at multiple companies, I wanted to document efficient techniques that can be very helpful for successful production deployments of vector search systems. I want to present these techniques by showcasing when to apply each one, how they complement each other, and the trade-offs they introduce. This will be a multi-part series that introduces all of the techniques one by one in each article. I have also included code snippets to quickly test each technique.

View more...

From Code to Runtime: How AI Is Bridging the SAST–DAST Gap

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 13:30:01

Let’s start with two pillars that modern application security teams rely on: Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST). SAST is a method in which source code is analyzed early in the application development lifecycle to identify potential vulnerabilities. On the other hand, DAST is used to test running applications to uncover hidden flaws — specifically from an attacker’s perspective. Both approaches are equally valuable. However, they are often not used together. Security teams juggle multiple point solutions and, on top of that, are overwhelmed by false positives. As a result, they struggle to answer a simple question: Which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in production?

View more...

How AI Is Rewriting DevOps: Practical Patterns for Faster, Safer Releases

Aggregated on: 2026-01-09 12:30:02

DevOps has always sought to deliver software faster without breaking things — a balancing act between velocity and stability. Now, artificial intelligence is dramatically shifting that balance. AI-powered tools and practices are weaving into every stage of the delivery pipeline, helping teams ship code at lightning speed with greater safety. Analysts predict that by 2027, over 50% of enterprise teams will have AI agents in their pipelines to boost speed, quality, and governance. Early adopters are already seeing significant gains; one study found that embedding AI into development led to 20% to 30% faster delivery with 40% fewer defects in releases. These improvements aren’t about traditional automation alone — they’re driven by intelligent systems that learn and adapt. In this article, we’ll explore how AI is rewriting DevOps from an engineer’s perspective. We’ll examine real-world tools and examples, from coding assistants like GitHub Copilot to AIOps platforms, and highlight practical AI-driven patterns that enable faster, safer software releases. This is not just hype or theory; it’s a trend analysis grounded in emerging best practices that advanced engineering teams are adopting today. We’ll look at how AI assists in coding, testing, deployments, and operations, all while keeping quality and security in focus. Let’s dive into the key areas where AI is transforming DevOps and the patterns you can leverage for speed and reliability.

View more...

Speak Their Language: How Communication Profiling Prevents Agile Delivery Breakdowns

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 20:15:01

Agile delivery failures are usually explained with comfortable excuses. The backlog was unclear. The scope changed. The estimates were wrong. The architecture was fragile. The process wasn’t followed closely enough. In real delivery environments, especially complex or hybrid ones, those explanations rarely hold up for long.

View more...

When Services Think for Themselves: Traditional Orchestration vs. Agentic AI Microservices

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 19:15:01

Understanding How Traditional Orchestration Manages Microservices From Netflix to Spotify and Walmart, industry stalwarts across the globe leverage microservices at scale to deliver rapid innovation across their services. Microservices architecture has brought a fundamental shift in the way modern cloud computing drives applications to scale, evolve, and deploy independently. The foundational pillars upon which this innovation rests include orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. These platforms automate the deployment and management of containerized services. As the scope of these services expands, the reliance on human-defined policies, configurations, and operational thresholds has increased. However, such scale must be accompanied by streamlined automation to avoid scaling bottlenecks. As a result, this begets the question: Can a sufficiently autonomous thinking agent take over the operational heavy lifting and make microservices truly self-managing?

View more...

Essential Techniques for Production Vector Search Systems Part 1 - Hybrid Search

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 18:15:01

After implementing vector search systems at multiple companies, I wanted to document efficient techniques that could be very helpful for successful production deployments of vector search systems. I want to present these techniques, showcasing when to apply each of them, how they complement each other, and the trade-offs they introduce. This will be a multi-part series that introduces all of the techniques one by one in each article. I have also included code snippets to quickly test each of the techniques.

View more...

Telemetry-Driven AI Architecture: Closing the Loop from UX to Models

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 17:15:01

Most Android AI features die quietly after launch. You ship a smart recommendation, a ranking model, or an LLM-powered assistant. It works great on your test data, metrics look decent, and then… real users behave differently. Edge cases appear, traffic shifts, product changes. The model slowly drifts out of sync with reality.

View more...

Enterprise Kubernetes Failures: 20 Critical Misconfigurations Guardon Catches Before Outages

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 16:15:01

Kubernetes incidents in large organizations don’t come from exotic zero-days — they come from basic YAML mistakes made thousands of times a year by developers under pressure. While we commonly talk about 15–20 misconfigurations that appear in every enterprise, the truth is much deeper: Kubernetes is an ecosystem of complexity, and prevention requires more than static checks. Guardon, a lightweight, developer-first Kubernetes guardrail extension, helps organizations detect these issues early — but it also does far more. It acts as a standardization layer, a cost-optimization tool, a security enforcer, and a compliance assistant, all directly inside GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, long before code reaches CI/CD.

View more...

Platform Engineering Golden Paths: Stop Building Developer Portals, Start Shipping Code

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 15:15:01

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your platform team is spending 80% of its time building portals and only 20% paving paths, you’re doing platform engineering backward. The revolution isn’t about prettier UIs — it’s about invisible automation that makes the right thing the easiest thing. The Portal Problem Nobody Talks About Platform teams are solving the wrong problem. They’re building museums of infrastructure when developers need highways to production. I’ve seen this pattern repeat at companies ranging from scrappy Series A startups to multinational corporations: hire a platform team, mandate Backstage or Humanitec, spend six months integrating everything, launch with fanfare — and then watch adoption plateau at 30% while developers continue cowboy-coding in production.

View more...

Building a Containerized Quarkus API and a CI/CD Pipeline on AWS EKS/Fargate with CDK

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 14:15:01

In a recent post, I have demonstrated the benefits of using AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service), with Quarkus and the CDK (Cloud Development Kit), in order to implement an API for the customer management. In the continuity of this previous post, the current one will try to go a bit further and replace ECS by EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) as the environment for running containerized workloads. Additionally, an automated CI/CD pipeline, using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild, is provided.

View more...

Secure Log Tokenization Using Aho–Corasick and Spring

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 13:15:01

Modern microservices, payment engines, and event-driven systems are generating massive volumes of logs every second. These logs are critical for debugging, monitoring, observability, and compliance audits. But there is an increasing and hazardous problem: Sensitive data — things like credit card numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, API keys, and session tokens — often accidentally appear in logs. Once it's stored in log aggregators such as ELK, Splunk, CloudWatch, Datadog, or S3, this sensitive data becomes a high-risk liability.

View more...

Managing Changing Hardware/Peripherals in a Robust Point of Sale System

Aggregated on: 2026-01-08 12:15:01

Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.   Another problem with managing hardware interactions is that rapid scanning would generate a burst of requests, and we need a mechanism to handle them all. Failure to do so would result in lost messages, eventually causing poor customer experience or loss to retailers as they would sell items not scanned properly.

View more...

Handling Logging After Migrating UiPath to Automation Cloud

Aggregated on: 2026-01-07 20:15:00

Migrating UiPath Orchestrator from an on-premises deployment to Automation Cloud simplifies infrastructure management, but it also changes how execution logs can be accessed and consumed. Teams migrating existing Splunk-based observability pipelines often discover that familiar on-prem logging patterns no longer apply once workloads move to the cloud. In on-prem environments, Orchestrator and robot logs are typically available as files on the server filesystem, making them easy to ingest into centralized monitoring platforms using standard forwarders. Automation Cloud removes direct access to the underlying infrastructure, forcing teams to rethink how logging should be handled after migration.

View more...

AWS Bedrock vs Azure OpenAI vs Gemini API: A Practical Comparison

Aggregated on: 2026-01-07 19:15:00

Choosing a cloud AI platform isn't just about which has the "best" model — it's about integration, pricing, compliance, and how well it fits your existing infrastructure. After building production systems on all three platforms, here's my engineering-focused breakdown to help you make the right choice.

View more...

Implementing Idempotency in Distributed Spring Boot Applications Using MySQL

Aggregated on: 2026-01-07 18:15:00

Why Idempotency Breaks in Real Systems  Modern distributed systems expose APIs that trigger state-changing operations such as payments, orders, the account acquisition process, or account updates. In such environments, the chance of duplicate transactions being initiated is quite high and unavoidable due to network retries, a Kafka rebalancer issuing multiple requests, load balancers, and other factors. Without proper safeguards, these duplicate transactions/requests can lead to data inconsistency, financial discrepancies, and variations in business invariants.  Idempotency is a well-established technique used to ensure that repeated executions of the same request produce a single, consistent outcome. While idempotency can be enforced at the application level using in-memory caches or request deduplication logic, these approaches would fail for a horizontally scaled microservice architecture, where multiple application instances may process requests concurrently and across numerous different regions.

View more...

How to Send .NET Crash Dumps to Slack From an ECS Fargate Task

Aggregated on: 2026-01-07 17:30:00

Sometimes .NET applications crash in production, and nobody knows why, because logs and metrics are ok. It's quite bothersome and makes debugging very unpleasant. In such cases, memory dumps might simplify debugging and reduce troubleshooting time from days to minutes. This article explains how to configure dumps for .NET applications deployed to AWS ECS Fargate and then forward them to the development team in the most convenient and secure way.

View more...

Automated Deployment Using a CI/CD Pipeline (Mule 4 | CloudHub 2.0)

Aggregated on: 2026-01-07 16:30:00

The purpose of this article is to depict and demonstrate how to automate the build and deployment process using a CI/CD pipeline with CloudHub 2.0 (Mule 4). Prerequisites Anypoint CloudHub account (CloudHub 2.0) app.runtime – 4.9.0 mule.maven.plugin.version – 4.3.0 Anypoint Studio – Version 7.21.0 OpenJDK – 11.0

View more...