CodeIsGo.com

Continuous testing (CT) is the practice of automatically testing software applications and components throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). In DevOps, continuous testing is the practice of integrating testing activities throughout the DevOps pipeline. By Hannah Son.

Continuous Testing differs from traditional testing in that it involves ongoing and automated testing practices that are seamlessly integrated into the DevOps pipeline.

In the blog post:

• How does continuous testing differ from traditional testing?
• How does continuous testing fit into DevOps?
• How to implement a continuous testing strategy into your DevOps pipeline
• How a test management tool can help you successfully implement a continuous testing strategy in DevOps
• Benefits of continuous testing in DevOps
• Challenges of continuous testing in DevOps
• Common continuous testing tools

… and much more. Continuous Testing identifies defects and issues early in the development process, reducing the cost and effort required to fix them. Continuous Testing helps ensure that the software meets user expectations and functions as intended, leading to a positive user experience. Good read!

Azure DevOps pipelines are a great way to automate your CI/CD process. Most often, they are configured on a per project basis. This works fine when you have few projects. But what if you have many projects? In this blog post, we will show you how you can scale up your Azure DevOps CI/CD setup for reusability and easy maintenance. By Jeroen Overschie, Timo Uelen.

Source: https://xebia.com/blog/scaling-up-your-azure-devops-ci-cd-setup/

The article then guides trough these sections:

• Your typical DevOps pipeline
• Growing pains
• Scaling up properly
  • DevOps template setup
  • Passing data between templates
  • Automate using a strategy matrix

All scripts are aslo included in the article. Authors demonstrated how to scale up your Azure DevOps CI/CD setup making it reusable, maintainable and modular. This helps you maintain a good CI/CD setup as your company grows. Nice one!

In most articles author has come across on stateless and stateful services, stateful service architectures are viewed less favorably in contrast to stateless services primarily due to the horizontal scalability challenge they bring along. By Shivang.

Most web services we interact with in our day-to-day lives hold some degree of user state to function effectively, making them stateful. And how we manage the state on the backend ascertains the complexity involved in scaling the service.

Further in the article:

• What is user state?
• Managing user state in a cluster
• The node holding user state goes down
• Replicating user state to a distributed cache
• Storing user state in a database
• Leveraging both the database & the cache for storing user state
• Replication of user state across the cluster
• The stateful node handles requests for a set of users

.. and more. Sticky sessions enable the load balancer to route the user requests to the same cluster node handling that user’s requests. This approach is largely used with stateful applications, including legacy applications that have significant redesigning costs to make them stateless. Nice one!

Build a strong brand architecture that sets your business apart. Discover key strategies in our comprehensive article. Every powerful and enduring brand owes its success to a well-crafted brand architecture. The way master brands and sub-brands are organized profoundly influences a brand’s overall identity, its connection with customers, and its longevity. By @mailchimp.com.

Brand architecture is a strategic framework that profiles a company’s structure, including the arrangement of its different brands and product lines. As a foundational element of brand management, brand architecture helps businesses manage and communicate its brand portfolio to consumers, stakeholders, and employees.

In the article authors describe:

• Types of brand architecture
  • Branded house
  • House of brands
  • Endorsed brands
  • Hybrid brand architecture
• Benefits of a strong brand architecture
• Steps to build a strong brand architecture
• Common mistakes to avoid
• Tools and resources for building brand architecture

Before you start creating your brand architecture, it’s essential to assess your existing brands and their performance. Identify all brand elements, including corporate, product, and sub-brands, to understand their strengths, weaknesses and relationships. Additionally, get insights into how customers perceive your brands by analyzing market perception. Good read!

When creating a strong digital marketing strategy, having a website that engages visitors is essential. But what does that mean? Beyond having a website that looks amazing, it’s important that every element on your website is strategically designed to stop users from clicking away. This is the guiding principle behind UX design. By Claire Grace.

The article explains:

• What is UX design?
• How can UX help your digital marketing?
• 7 UX design components your website needs
  • UX and branding go together like PB&J
  • An effective call to action right on the homepage
  • Content designed to be seen
  • Embrace simplicity while prioritizing the visual experience
  • Give your website life with movement and interactive content
  • Organize content in strategic ways
  • Capture user attention without crowding their view

It takes a true pro to strike just the right balance between stunning, exciting design and functional design. Ultimately, design should never impede usability, but with the right design team who understands your brand, your goals, and what makes your organization unique, you can have a website that pushes the bounds, engages users, and never leaves them feeling frustrated or confused.Nice one!

The topic of AWS Best Practices is huge and would be impossible to distil down to just a few points, so this post covers a few of the obvious choices and how you can find out more information. By Matthew Wilson.

The article then pinpoints few areas for your attention:

• Security
  • Understand the Shared Responsibility Model
  • Secure your Root Account
  • Principle of least privilege (POLP)
  • Handling secrets
  • Encryption
• Cost
• Serverless first
• Master the basics
• Automate everything
• Well Architected Framework

There is also a Well Architected Tool that can help you assess your application against these pillars. It’s important to note that this is not a “checklist” and you should not aim for a “perfect score”. Instead it should be used as a guide to help you identify areas of improvement. Interesting read!

Many AI systems are designed for collaboration: Copilot is one of them. Copilot—powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service—allows you to simplify how you design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot apps and infrastructure from cloud to edge. It utilizes language models, the Azure control plane, and insights about your Azure and Arc-enabled assets. All of this is carried out within the framework of Azure’s steadfast commitment to safeguarding data security and privacy. By Andy Beatman Senior Product Marketing Manager, Azure AI.

The article then captures:

• A brief history of AI collaboration with copilots
• AI at the service of others
• Prioritizing human agency
• Microsoft commitment to responsible AI

With Responsible AI tools in Azure, Microsoft is empowering organizations to build the next generation of AI apps safely and responsibly. Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure AI Content Safety, a state-of-the art AI system that helps organizations keep AI-generated content safe and create better online experiences for everyone. Nice one!

Amazon CloudWatch lets customers collect monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing an easy way to monitor and receive notifications regarding their workload health and often integrate directly with other systems, such as JIRA Service Desk and ServiceNow. By Chaitanya Gummadi.

The CloudWatch alarms feature lets you monitor CloudWatch metrics and receive notifications when the metrics fall outside a certain threshold. This threshold can be a predefined static threshold, an anomaly detection model, metric math expression, and composite alarm. When you create an alarm, you can specify what actions an alarm takes when it changes the state between OK, ALARM, and INSUFFICIENT_DATA states. The most common type of alarm action is to notify one or more people by sending a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic.

Further in the article:

• Solution overview
• Prerequisites
• Creating CloudWatch Alarm (Optional)

As an example, authors provided an overview of how to create CloudWatch Alarm in Sender Accounts(A&B) and centralize it in the Receiver Account© by using CloudFormation to deploy AWS EventBridge Event Buses, Rules and Targets. Good read!

Modern serverless applications on AWS are complex with a lot of moving parts. Mapping a developer workflow onto those applications can be difficult. This article discusses the developer workflow I have developed for complex serverless applications at aleph0, with example CloudFormation template and GitHub Action snippets to illustrate the concepts. By Andy Boothe.

The article then focuses on certain goals for developer workflow and how to architect with this goals in mind:

• An efficient developer workflow compatible with team growth and modern practices, e.g., CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, etc.
• Separate environments for staging, production, etc. are a requirement
• Example architecture
• Tools and techniques
  • Continuous integration and continuous delivery
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Developer workflow
  • Lambda function workflow
  • Step function workflow
  • REST API
  • Promoting to Production

… and more. You will also find example architecture in the article. The architecture uses an API Gateway REST API to define endpoints that use StartSyncExecution to invoke an Express Step Function, which in turn invokes Lambda function(s) and/or other AWS services. There are also examples for both Github actions CD workflow and CloudFormation template for respective workflows. Good read!

In this article authors have compiled a full list of Google algorithm launches, updates, and refreshes that have rolled out over the years, as well as links to resources for SEO professionals who want to understand each of these changes. By @searchenginejournal.com.

Google’s algorithms are a complex system used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking factors to deliver webpages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).

In its early years, Google only made a handful of updates to its algorithms. Now, Google makes thousands of changes every year. Most of these updates are so slight that they go completely unnoticed. However, on occasion, the search engine rolls out major algorithmic updates that significantly impact the SERPs. The article then lists all the main updates together with link to detailed description of the changes. The list is searchable by year. Nice one!