Logging and Exception Reporting are two obvious operational features every service must include. As we learned in the last post, Application Support in Docker-based Microservice Environments, building and deploying microservices makes implementing log infrastructure significantly more difficult.

The most difficult problem DevOps . . .

Read More

What is a State Machine?

Finite State Machines (FSM, or in the context of this post, simply "State Machines") are a methodology for modeling the behavior of an entity with an established lifecycle. The lifecycle is defined by an enumerated set of states known at the time of implementation (this is where the term . . .

Read More

A commonly misunderstood concept in Node.js is the difference between setTimeout, setImmediate, and process.nextTick. While all three functions are used to schedule the execution of a function, it is important to understand when Node.js will execute them.

Consider the following example:

setImmediate(() => console.log('Set . . .

Read More

Introduction

Operationalizing microservices is difficult and that difficulty has been exacerbated by how much the landscape has changed over the last 5 years. Personally, I've worked on a few microservice architectures and experienced the evolution of thoughts, patterns, and technologies that have brought us to where we are . . .

Read More

I wanted to quickly mention a trick I use to reduce the boilerplate code you'll often encounter when executing similar test cases. Instead of defining each test separately:

const { describe, it } = require('mocha');
const { expect } = require('chai');

const app = require('../../index.js');
 . . .

Read More

There is a lot of confusion among developers on how to implement updates using a REST API. The tools we are given (PATCH and PUT) don't actually map cleanly to how we would implement an update in our business code. Let's start by considering what those HTTP verbs mean:

PATCH: perform a partial update to a resource, . . .

Read More