Modern Digital Business

Welcome to another episode of Modern Digital Business, the podcast that helps you navigate the ever-changing landscape of modernizing your applications and digital business. In this episode, we continue our exploration of modern operations with our special guest, Beth Long. Today's discussion is all about operational ownership and how it plays a crucial role in the success of modern organizations....

Cloud native architectures have revolutionized the way businesses operate their applications and services in the cloud. This shift provides immense benefits, such as increased agility, scalability, and cost savings. However, moving to a&nbs...

Welcome back to another episode of Modern Digital Business! In today's episode, we delve deeper into the world of modern operations with our special guest, Beth Long. We explore the essential role of service level agreements (SLAs) in managing complex, multi-service modern applications. As we unravel the differences between DevOps and SREs (Site Reliability Engineers), Beth sheds light on the orig...

This episode was well received last Halloween when it debuted. In case you missed it, how about a dose of ScaryOps? Here are my 3 scariest mistakes that companies make in the cloud. --- First, there was DevOps. Then, ModernOps and CloudOps. Now, there is ScaryOps. Welcome to the special Halloween Edition of the Modern Digital Business podcast. In this episode, the 3 Scariest Mistakes Companies Mak...

 In today's episode, "Don't Give Special Access," we tackle a crucial question: how can we grant developers and operations engineers the necessary access to our applications without compromising customer data or violating business processes? Clips The Importance of Limiting Access: "Security best practices specify that engineers, both developers and IT operations, personnel, should have as li...

 Welcome to another episode of Modern Digital Business, where we dive into the world of cloud architecture and explore the essential skills required to thrive in this dynamic field. In today's episode, we will uncover the five key skills that all cloud architects must possess to effectively build and operate applications in the cloud. Cloud architecture goes beyond traditional software architectu...

On this episode of Modern Digital Business, host Lee Atchison continues his conversation with guest Beth Long about Stosa, or single team-oriented service architecture. In this episode, they delve into the makeup of healthy Stosa organizations and provide actionable insights and recommendations for business technology leaders and small business innovators in the digital business revolution. They d...

On this episode of Modern Digital Business, we dive into the world of ModernOps and talk STOSA (Single Team Oriented Service Architecture) with Beth Long. This is part 1 of a two part discussion with Beth Long, an operations manager for New Relic, and Jeli.io. She is passionate about the concept of STOSA, which was first introduced in Lee Atchison's highly popular book, Architecting for Scale. Lee...

 On this episode of Modern Digital Business, we dive into the development world and discuss the complexity that comes with low-code platforms. Host Lee Atchison helps unpack the ongoing debate surrounding low code development tools. We explore how standardized coding and software reuse can reduce custom components, decrease change rates, and lower complexity. Additionally, Lee touches on AI enabl...

On this episode of Modern Digital Business, we dive into the complexities of managing configurations in modern cloud-native applications. Hosted by Lee Atchison, we explore the best practices for managing configuration files, maintaining consistency across the system, and reducing complexity. We discuss the importance of using a revision control system, centralizing configurations, and using autom...

On this episode of Modern Digital Business, Lee invites Ken to discuss organizational design principles and the importance of aligning teams and leaders to drive desired outcomes. The conversation covers various topics such as the Kubler-Ross change curve, company culture, and the "Valley of Despair" during a migration or transformation projects. They also share practical guidance on implementing...

In Case You Missed It On this episode of Modern Digital Business, we explore the necessary transition to a digital business model and the challenges that come with it, specifically in the realm of cloud computing. As the leader in enterprise IT, it's important to adapt to newer, more flexible and scalable technologies. The solution? Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence! We dive into the benef...

What is a cloud architect? What does a cloud architect do that’s different from what a developer does? What skills does someone need to have to move from a role as a software developer to a role as a cloud architect? Today we are going to talk about becoming a cloud architect. What does a cloud architect do that’s different from what a typical software developer does? Or a typical operations engin...

Most companies aren't in the billing space, yet they need to deal with pricing and billing as a core piece of technology, whether they want to or not. Stigg is an easy to implement, headless pricing and packaging platform that takes a lot of the hassle out of pricing and billing for your SaaS applications. Stripe integrations just don't give you what you need for modern SaaS application subscripti...

What happens when a web application you depend on goes offline? It can be inconvenient, disappointing, and potentially cause serious problems for you. But what if you find out that the web application wasn’t working  by design  because it was “down for maintenance”? That only makes the situation worse! Your customers expect your application to be operational when  they need it, not...

AutoCloud is an enterprise software platform used by companies to assist in their Infrastructure as Code deployments. Customers using AutoCloud can reduce cloud costs, security risks, complexity, and adoption time for Infrastructure as Code using Terraform in all the major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.  AutoCloud is a critical risk mitigation tool for cyber security, complia...

What happens when observability becomes a commodity and is independently brokered via a third party? My guest today is Jeff Martens, who is the co-founder and CEO of Metrist, an independent third-party observability platform. Today on Modern Digital Business. Useful Links Jeff Martens - LinkedIn Metrist Home - Metrist Atchison Academy - Online courses by Lee Atchison Lee Atchison Website and Conte...

My latest book Overcoming IT Complexity, is now shipping! And how do you manage complex configurations in cloud-native applications? In this episode of MDB Weekly. Today on Modern Digital Business. Useful Links CloudNativeSecurityCon North America | Linux Foundation Events 5 Cloud-Native App Config Management Best Practices - Container Journal Overcoming IT Complexity - O'Reilly Media Book Atchiso...

Modern businesses rely on applications, and they rely on continued innovation in those applications to drive their business. This strive for innovation creates a need for improved techniques for validating that an application will work as expected. But constant innovation means a constant chance for problems, and testing applications at scale is not an easy task. This is where SpeedScale comes int...

Announcing the new Atchison Academy! Lee is live at Predict 2023. How do you give your dev teams choices without introducing too much complexity? Today on Modern Digital Business Weekly. Useful Links Choice vs. Complexity in Cloud-Native Applications - Container Journal TechStrong Research's Predict 2023 Virtual Conference Atchison Academy - Online courses by Lee Atchison Lee Atchison Website and...

Welcome to my first issue of Modern Digital Business Weekly! This is a new format that I’m experimenting with. MDB Weekly will focus on articles, interviews and events of note I’ve released this last week, along with any announcements of new courses and books I’ve released. Additionally, it will contain timely industry news and other information I think you may be interested in. My focus is to mak...

The cloud has enabled a large variety of software and software-enabled infrastructure options for application development. It's hard to get lost in the variety of shapes and sizes of offerings available. ECS EKS, Lambda, Fargate Azure functions, Google Cloud Containers. IT complexity is a real issue. And this means we need better tools to help us simplify our complex cloud infrastructure options....

Creating a secure application requires many actions, but by far the most important are those that involve securing the data in the application; these are the most difficult actions. When it comes to securing application data, there are two unique and distinct types of data that must be secured: Data at rest . This is data that is stored in a datastore, database, cache, or other mechanism. This inc...

This is an encore episode of Modern Digital Business DevOps is now more mainstream. If you and your organization aren’t using DevOps principles, you are at a distinct disadvantage compared to your competition. And, “Doing DevOps” does not mean simply “hiring a DevOps team”. There’s more to it than that. My guest today is Mitch Ashley, the CTO of Techstrong Group. Techstrong is the publishers of De...

Operating a modern digital business means building and operating large, highly-scaled applications that are more and more cloud-native in their architecture and implementation. Observability is critical in maintaining the highly scaled, highly available, highly adaptive nature of these modern cloud-native applications. You just can't keep a large, complex, modern application operating without havi...