Introducing Kintyre’s Cloud Native Runway
Kintyre is a system integrator firm experienced at providing solutions to clients across diverse business domains, technical stacks, with different requirements and constraints. Our team has been working with cloud-computing infrastructure and platforms, agile methodologies, CI/CD, and advanced configuration management automation since their inception (or even before they were well named and understood). We collaborate with our clients and partners on many different approaches and techniques to develop custom solutions and products. Often, analysis efforts dictate starting product development projects from scratch rather than refactoring existing code-bases based on monolithic designs not suited to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. After working through an iterative delivery process, stakeholders want an assurance the solution will be sustainable in operations, and gracefully support continued feature releases. Over time, Kintyre’s team has built a body of knowledge about what successful, cloud-native application development looks like in practice — what works, what doesn’t, and what mostly gets the job done but doesn’t feel quite right. We’ve taken good notes and produced lots of reusable resources along the way.
After asking ourselves how to best condense our collective experience into something more tangible, reference-able, and shareable, we’ve built a series of blog posts, utilities, and how-to guides, supported by a fully functional reference application to exemplify most of these best practices that we have adopted.
We use these same resources as a repeatable foundation that can quickly get a new project running. Our clients want to work with us to get their figurative plane off the ground. Every plane needs a runway before it can take off! Kintyre’s Cloud Native Runway promotes no bugs, avoids “how did I do that again?” moments, and most importantly, dramatically shortens lead time to a Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
The Cloud Native Runway is based on a number of free, open-source, and popular, affordable commercial components. We’ve done our best to evaluate options we recommend for building blocks, but they are just that — recommendations. We combine the components in as loosely coupled a manner as possible, so if there is something else that you or your organization prefers, our recommendation should be easily swapped. Here are the major components we’ve selected:
The Serverless Application Framework
We have chosen to use The Serverless Application Framework for configuration and deployment considerations of our backend APIs, integrations, and data management components to provide flexibility in the choice of cloud infrastructure and platform provider.
Amazon Web Services
Although one of the architectural goals of our approach is to be as cloud provider agnostic as possible, it is nearly impossible to not acknowledge the market share and incredible pace of innovation at the AWS platform. While other platforms like Azure and GCP are fully featured and gaining momentum, Kintyre’s collective perspective is AWS remains the best of breed cloud infrastructure and platform provider and gets most of our clients' attention. Check out a concise description of why AMS is so highly regarded here: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/
JavaScript/NodeJS
Kintyre has experience across many different programming languages including Python, Java, C#, and others, but for the purpose of cloud-native development, we have committed to JavaScript and NodeJS. Gone are the days of “JavaScript doesn’t belong on the server.” JavaScript is well documented, skills and frameworks are widely available, and it can run across all layers of an application stack providing teams with the flexibility to have developers contribute where the priorities lie.
Auth0
For authentication, access controls, and user management we have chosen to use Auth0 based on a number of considerations. Auth0 implements practically every feature a modern application requires for user management like sign up, sign in (including integrations to social platforms and enterprise-class directories), forgot/reset password, etc. These features can be quickly implemented “out of the box” or customized to any extent desired, all with a reasonable price tag (free for many early-stage applications), a great user experience, and commercial support. Auth0 also provides loose coupling with other components leveraging common standardized protocols and techniques like SAML2 and OAuth.
CodeShip
Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Integration service that scales with your needs. It supports GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab projects. It is very simple to get a basic release pipeline up and running for free, without concern for any infrastructure, and grow as demands for sophistication make sense. Again, as most with most of our choices, CodeShip abstracts CI/CD processes from other specific choices of the architecture.
OpenTelemetry
Kintyre is very excited about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s support to consolidate OpenTracing and OpenCensus, along with the growing commercial from Splunk and SignalFX. OpenTelemetry is now in beta and we developed confident the framework is a smart commitment for cloud-native architectures to provide complete observability into the runtime status of the application workload.
What’s Next?
As we learn new things, leverage new technologies, and document new techniques, these resources will be updated and continue to evolve. For now, we’re happy to share it with you. This blog series guides you through our experiences and distills what we’ve learned along the way so you can develop your own great software. We hope you find it valuable.
In the next post, I will get into the weeds of setting up an optimal hosting environment.
