C4: Container, Code, Cloud & Context

AWS Fargate is serverless compute for containers—you define tasks and services, and AWS manages the underlying infrastructure. Unlike EC2-backed ECS, there are no instances to patch, scale, or monitor. This guide covers production deployment patterns including load balancing, auto-scaling, secrets management, and cost optimization strategies from running 500+ Fargate tasks in production. ECS Concepts Task […]

.NET 7, targeting November 2022 release, continues the annual release cadence with significant performance improvements, new language features, and enhanced cloud-native capabilities. As an enterprise architect evaluating technology upgrades, this guide focuses on the features that matter most for production systems: performance improvements, Native AOT, rate limiting middleware, and improved minimal API support. Performance: The […]

Azure Durable Functions extends Azure Functions with stateful orchestration capabilities. Unlike Step Functions (JSON-based ASL), Durable Functions uses code—C#, JavaScript, Python, or PowerShell—to define workflows. This code-first approach enables IDE support, unit testing, and complex control flow. This comprehensive guide covers the core patterns: Function Chaining, Fan-Out/Fan-In, Human Interaction, and the Actor Pattern with Durable […]

AWS Step Functions provides serverless workflow orchestration, enabling you to coordinate Lambda functions, ECS tasks, API calls, and human approvals in a visual, maintainable way. Unlike orchestrating via code (calling Lambda from Lambda), Step Functions handles retries, error handling, and state management durably. This guide covers Standard vs Express workflows, advanced patterns like Map and […]

Cosmos DB’s partition key choice determines the scalability and cost of your database. A poor choice leads to hot partitions, throttling, and eventual redesign. Azure recently introduced Hierarchical Partition Keys—multi-level partitioning that distributes load more evenly in multi-tenant and time-series scenarios. This comprehensive guide covers partition key design fundamentals, when to use hierarchical keys, and […]

Java on AWS Lambda has always had an Achilles heel: cold starts. A typical Spring Boot application can take 5-10 seconds to cold start on Lambda—unacceptable for synchronous APIs. AWS Lambda SnapStart, announced at re:Invent 2022 and now generally available, fundamentally solves this problem by taking a snapshot of the initialized JVM and restoring it […]