Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing developing trends in the development community and shedding light on Form3's own eng...
Micro service architectures are exploding in popularity, but a tough problem that is often overlooked is to ensure all of the services that depend on each other still work together after a change is made. One solution is to deploy them all to a test environment and run end to end tests which results in very slow feedback cycle and keeps the testing far away from the engineer.
Enter Pact, which solves this problem by enabling you to test dependencies between services as part of your local testing. Pact acts as a super charged mock server, enabling you to test your software functions consumes an API in the way the provider expects. Pact also gives you the ability to test that the provider of the pact (server in this case) is actually serving the API in the way that is it contracted. This end to end testing enables your microservices to change with confidence that everything will work together and it brings the feedback cycle very close to the engineer.
In this episode Yousaf Nabi from Smart Bear talks us through how pact solves all of these problems and how you can also use it to solve other dependencies between software such as events when you have an event driven architecture.
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32:06
EP55 .tech - Automated Cloud Failure Testing at Form3
A common requirement for a modern technology company is to have a DR strategy and to prove that their DR strategy works. Often this is executed using a manual set of tests run annually. This approach has many pitfalls, the biggest of which being that your tests become out of date the minute a change is made to the system.
In this episode our host Kevin Holditch interviewed Viktor Peacock Head: SRE and Mike Tonks: Staff SRE on how Form3 have approached DR testing with their multi-cloud platform. Listen to the episode to find out from Viktor and Mike how Form3 have automated their DR tests, so they can run them nightly, to catch bad changes before they make it to production.
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27:00
EP 54 .tech - Learn to be a tech leader
Tech leadership is often something that people find themselves in because they have excelled as an individual contributor, when people first make the leap it is often very hard for them to adjust to the different work patterns and how to manage a team.
Sean Hawkridge from Makers, runs leadership programs that teach people how to be great tech leaders. In this episode Sean takes me through the common problems that people face when stepping into tech leadership, how people need to think about changing their mindset as they make the transition and if a good leader can be trained?
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29:36
EP 53 .tech - Spacelift
Spacelift is a platform that adds workflows on top of infrastructure as code tooling. One of its USPs is that it is agnostic to the underlying infrastructure as code tool, so it can be used with Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulomi, to name but a few.
This concept becomes super powerful in that you can combine stacks written for different infrastructure as code tools into dependency workflows, for example the output of a cloud formation stack could feed into a stack written in Terraform.
Jean-Marc Fontaine, head of solutions & support at Spacelift, takes us through some of the possibilities that Spacelift enables and the different angle of attack they have in terms of solving infrastructure as code pipelines.
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27:40
EP 52 .tech - The landscape of hacking
Bert Sinnema, expert in defensive security engineering leads us through the hacking landscape today. He answers why hacking groups are starting to target smaller companies and tells us what smaller companies can do to fight back.
Bert takes us behind the curtain, in the arms race between the two sides of the hacking war. In a world where the weapons used by both sides are constantly getting stronger, what can we do to stay safe?
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing developing trends in the development community and shedding light on Form3's own engineering practices.
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