/2023/06/paved-paths-series-part-5-the-spectrum/the-spectrum-of-platform-engineering-and-paved-paths-cover.png

Paved Paths Series - Part 5 - The Spectrum of Platform Engineering and Paved Paths

Richard Roché published on 2023-06-25 included in Software

In this post, we explore the extremes between a centralised model and a completely democratised model, and we suggest a possible nirvana between the two. Platform Engineering is a hot topic right now - QCon London had an entire track devoted to it in 2023, PlatformCon 2023 saw a massive increase in attendees. It’s seen some huge success in places like Monzo , where the shape of a microservice is strongly defined by a platform team, and engineers use a single CLI command to generate their instance on said platform. This model is great… when it suits your organisation.

Paved Paths Series - Part 3 - Why Paved Paths?

Richard Roché and Chris Tacey-Green published on 2023-05-06 included in Software

There is a tension that is constantly at play in software engineering teams - increase their autonomy to enable them to build without hand-offs, while reducing the same teams’ cognitive load to allow them to focus on delivering value. With cloud computing, shifting left on everything, and maturing practices that enable continuous delivery, teams now have the potential to build, run and operate every aspect of their applications. But with this potential, comes the very real threat of burnout, skill gaps that lead to poor quality products, unwanted risks or slow time to market.

Paved Paths Series - Part 1 - Let's Talk About Paved Paths

Richard Roché and Chris Tacey-Green published on 2023-04-30 included in Software

Paved Paths. Golden Paths. Paved Roads. You’d be forgiven for thinking the industry already had these nailed down, a solved problem that has been spoken about for years in various guises. This is part 1 of a series exploring all aspects of Paved Paths.

Single Sign-On, Azure Static Web Apps and Azure Active Directory

Richard Roché published on 2022-03-01 included in Software

We often build and deploy web applications specifically for users internal to our organisation. Azure Static Web Apps is proving to be an excellent replacement for Azure App Service in these scenarios.

At a high-level the service provides you with a great set of features (outlined in the Azure release notes )

Globally distributed content for production apps
Tailored CI/CD workflows from code to cloud
Auto-provisioned preview environments
Custom domain configuration and free SSL certificates
Built-in access to a variety of authentication providers
Route-based authorization
Custom routing
Integration with serverless APIs powered by Azure Functions
A custom Visual Studio Code developer extension
A feature-rich CLI for local development

The desired experience?

The experience I wanted to achieve was that if one of our internal users browsed to any of our internal apps, they would be able to use SSO across them provided they were a member of the AAD group needed to access the app (or just a member of our tenant for organisation-wide apps) - no login button, just a seamless logged-in user experience.

Bicep Modules: Refactor, Compose, Reuse

Richard Roché published on 2021-07-11 included in Software

In my previous post I touched on the things I learnt while migrating ARM templates to Bicep . Bicep also introduces the concept of modules to enable template reuse. I took some time to refactor a composite application that had already been converted from using ARM to Bicep templates, to use Bicep modules. This post will cover the things that I learnt by working through that process.

Migrating Azure ARM templates to Bicep

Richard Roché published on 2021-06-18 included in Software

You may have heard of Bicep , and you may be wondering how much effort it is going to take to move all your ARM templates to this new way of deploying Azure resources.

I gave migrating from ARM to Bicep a go. This post will cover going from JSON ARM templates to shiny new Bicep templates that have no errors and don’t contain any warnings or linting issues!

Richard "Rick" Roché