Kotlin and Java Loom: structured concurrency for the masses

Java, as slow adopter of new concepts is getting structured concurrency as part of the Loom project. This addition enables native support for coroutines (termed virtual threads) in Java. What does that mean for Java & Kotlin developers? Should we now all transform our existing code bases to support virtual threads? Or even jump back to Java?  We compare two approaches to do structured concurrency on the JVM: Java Loom’s virtual threads and Kotlin’s coroutines. As it turns out, Kotlin coroutines show to be more developer friendly, while Java Loom might have its sweet spot as part of Java libraries and frameworks. Want to know why? Buckle up, as we have a lot to talk about!

Why

Consumer lag is the most important metric to monitor when working with event streams. However, it is not available as a default metric in Azure Insights. Want to have this metric available as part of your monitoring solution? You can set it up with some custom code. In this blog we show you how.

In our previous blog, we shortly touched upon security challenges that we can come upon when working with Terraform on AWS. In this blog we want to dig a little deeper into IAM by explaining 10 pitfalls you should look out for when you configure AWS IAM. Let’s start our journey and tackle them one by one.

So, you want to build your infrastructure in AWS and use Terraform for your Infrastructure as Code? And you want to do it securely? In this blog we highlight three things you should pay attention to from a security perspective: your IAM roles and trust relationships, your Terraform state, and your detection & monitoring. Of course, each of these topics deserve their own in-depth blog, but we’ll start highlighting three key touchpoints.

Over the past years I’ve tried working with lambda functions on and off a couple of times. Each time I got stuck, either clicking in AWS UIs or writing YAML files.

Netlify changes all that by making lambdas easy to use. Below I’ll describe the basics of deploying a function, and I’ll show how the development tools support local development.

The most basic hello world example I could come up with can be found in this repo, tagged basic-javascript-lambda. There’s a simple index.html file (a left over from earlier experiments), and a hallo.js file in src/functions. That’s almost al there is to it, but it needs one specific bit of configuration in a file named netlify.toml, located in the root of the repository.

More

I am done with the whole shift left storyline.

When being part of an enterprise, you will meet different architects on any given day. The first one introduces itself as a solution architect, the other calls itself the enterprise architect, and they both mention a domain architect. It might feel like different names for the same thing, and perhaps even a bigger question, do we even need all of these different architects? Should the team not be able to make all of these architectural decisions by themselves?

So, what is software quality anyways? Let’s shed some light on some schools of thought.

Three Perspectives on Quality

Conformance to specifications

Suppose we have a predefined list of requirements for a product, and all of these requirements are verified and validated throughout the process of constructing that product. When we are approaching a release, we can simply demonstrate the green check marks as the results of the verification and validation activities and be happy. We see this happening all over the place in certification-oriented businesses, but also e.g. in road construction works. It has to do with regulations and with compliance. This is the way space shuttles are built.

Read the full blog here, and find out the Three Perspectives on (Software) Quality

We are on a quest…

As consultants, we are not only challenged by the technical challenges our customers face, but also how it affects the organisational structures and the culture. Based on our experiences, EventStorming is a great technique to expose the underlying cultural aspects of an organisation, while focusing on the value streams and technology. In this post, we are sharing what we have learned, by giving examples from our experiences that hopefully inspire you to use EventStorming as a cultural assessment.

The world around us is changing quickly. Organizations need to rapidly respond to a changing world. In a knowledge intensive world, pressured by hypercompetition, new forms of organization are required to keep up. Especially around the topic of enabling value delivery, organisations need to balance the paradox of steering. Either steering via management (coordination) or empower teams to organise themselves. John Child in his book Organizations describes the concepts of integration and coordination, mechanisms to enable delivery of value.