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 make this available in a variety of easy to consume formats. It’ll be available in written format as an article on my site along with a email newsletter. It’ll also be available in audio format on my Modern Digital Business podcast. You can read or listen in whatever format or location is easiest for you! If this is successful, I will experiment with other formats as well, including video.

Each format will be the same content, optimized for that particular platform.

This format, the audio podcast format, will be a weekly, very short episode on the Modern Digital Business podcast, released on Mondays.

I hope you enjoy this new-for-2023 feature!

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Overcoming IT Complexity—My Latest O’Reilly Book - Lee Atchison | Cloud Strategist, Thought Leader, Author
• Infrastructure Automation Reduces Cloud-Native Complexity - Container Journal
• Lee Atchison Website and Content

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

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.

In this episode, I talk with Tim Holm, CTO of Nitric, a company that is trying to solve this exact problem.

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Tim Holm - LinkedIn
• Nitric Cloud-Native Framework | Get Infrastructure from Code | Nitric
• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

Atchison Academy

What do 100,000 of your peers have in common? They've all boosted their skill set and career prospects by taking one of my online courses.

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 includes data anywhere from the application’s database, to log files, to application and system configuration files. 
• Data in motion. This is data that is being actively accessed and used by the application. Typically from a security standpoint, it refers to data that is being transferred from one part of the application to another part of the application, or between two different applications.

Typically, data at rest is data that is stored in a database, ready to be used by some part of the application, while data in motion is data being sent to another application or service, or is being received from another application or service.

Keeping data safe and secure is critical in most modern digital applications. Virtually every modern business requires safe and secure communications in order to provide their business services. Bad actors abound, so keeping applications—and their data—safe and secure is critical to keeping your business operational.

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

Atchison Academy

What do 100,000 of your peers have in common? They've all boosted their skill set and career prospects by taking one of my online courses.

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 DevOps.com, and other publications. In this episode of Modern Digital Business, Mitch and I talk about the value of DevOps and how it fits into the structure of a modern digital application.

Topics we are discussing include:

• The Value of DevOps
• Continuous Deployment
• Doing DevOps Right
• Devs Don’t Like Ops?
• Modern Applications
• Failure *is* an option
• Techstrong Group and DevOps.com

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Want to hear when new episodes are available? Subscribe here.

Useful Links

• DevOps.com
• Techstrong TV
• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

Architecting for Scale

What does it take to operate a modern organization running a modern digital application? Read more in my O’Reilly Media book Architecting for Scale, now in its second edition.

Architecting for Scale

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 having a solid, modern observability platform as part of your system. And ideally, in today's cloud-native market, you want an observability platform that is based on cloud-native technologies.

Sumo Logic is a leader in cloud-native observability. They not only focus on providing analytics for cloud-native applications, but they themselves also operate on a cloud-native platform. And while Sumo Logic provides tools for improving application reliability and availability, what really sets them apart is their focus on security and compliance in a cloud-native environment.

Bruno Kurtic, founding Chief Strategy Officer for Sumo Logic, today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Bruno Kurtic | LinkedIn
• Cloud Log Management, Monitoring, SIEM Tools | Sumo Logic
• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

Architecting for Scale

What does it take to operate a modern organization running a modern digital application? Read more in my O’Reilly Media book Architecting for Scale, now in its second edition.

Architecting for Scale

Application security is a critical aspect of all application design and architecture. Security best practices specify that nobody should be given universal access to any system or service. Instead, a given service, system, or person should be given only the access required to get the job done, and absolutely no more permissions than that. To give someone more access than they absolutely need is to open a potential security vulnerability.

This security best practice is known as the Principle of Least Privilege.

This is Tech Tapas Tuesday, on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

Atchison Academy

What do 100,000 of your peers have in common? They've all boosted their skill set and career prospects by taking one of my online courses.

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 Make in the Cloud.

It's time to turn our attention to scary things…scary movies, scary TV shows, scary home decorations, scary costumes.

But when it comes to working with customers and clients on their cloud projects, sometimes I get quite scared…and not in a good way.

Working with customers and clients on their cloud projects, what they do can be down right scary. 

I get scared when I hear stories about how a company is preparing to migrate to the cloud incorrectly, or when someone shares a misguided plan about how their organization is going to use the cloud once it is fully migrated. I sometimes hear stories that downright chill me to the bone.

Don’t make yourself the central character in one of these horror tales. Instead, avoid these scariest mistakes that companies make in the cloud.

Here is the countdown of the three scariest mistakes you can make in your cloud migration.

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Cloud Myth: Serverless Solves All My Problems | Lee Atchison Blog
• Don’t stop your migration! | InfoWorld
• 3 Scary Mistakes Companies Make in the Cloud - Lee Atchison Blog
• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

Atchison Academy

What do 100,000 of your peers have in common? They've all boosted their skill set and career prospects by taking one of my online courses.

What do model airplanes have to do with avoiding application failures?

This is Tech Tapas Tuesday, a "little bit of tech".

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

In the past few years, cloud computing has become a dominant trend in enterprise IT. The benefits of moving to the cloud are clear, lower costs, flexibility, and scalability. But as more companies move their infrastructure into public clouds like AWS or Azure, they face a challenge that is often overlooked. How do I transform an organization from a typical on-premise company to a cloud-native cloud-centric organization?

A Cloud Center of Excellence, or a CCoE for short, is an organizational entity that has emerged as a driving influence, enabling the cloud native transformation to accelerate.

As cloud-based applications become ubiquitous and cloud adoption rates continue to grow. CCoEs are becoming more prevalent in many modern organizations. But what does a cloud center of excellence actually look like? And how do they assist in your organization's transformation?

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Useful Links

• LinkedIn Learning: Creating a Cloud Center of Excellence in your Organization - In this LinkedIn Learning course by Lee Atchison, explore typical CCoE organization models and what they can do for enterprise cloud architects. Get recommendations on who should be included within the CCoE to promote inclusion and represent the needs of the entire organization.
• Online courses by Lee Atchison
• Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Media

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

Today on Modern Digital Business, we continue our highly successful series called ModernOps. ModernOps is a series of interviews co-hosted with a good friend of mine, Beth long, who is the head of product at jeli.io, an incident analysis company.

This will be our second in a series of episodes. In the first episode, we talked about how the experience using the cloud varies from large companies to small companies. In this episode, we talk about transferring operational expertise 📍 from an on-premise data center to a cloud centric infrastructure.

Today on Modern Digital Business.

Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, public speaker, and recognized thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His most recent book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee has been widely quoted in multiple technology publications, including InfoWorld, Diginomica, IT Brief, Programmable Web, CIO Review, and DZone, and has been a featured speaker at events across the globe.

Take a look at Lee's many books, courses, and articles by going to leeatchison.com.

Check out Architecting for Scale. Currently in it's second edition, this book, written by Lee Atchison, and published by O'Reilly Media, will help you build high scale, highly available web applications, or modernize your existing applications. Check it out! Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.com or other retailers.

Subscribe here to catch each new episode as it becomes available.

Want more from Lee? Click here to sign up for our newsletter. You'll receive information about new episodes, new articles, new books, and courses from Lee. Don't worry, we won't send you spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Mentioned in this episode:

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Are you looking to become an architect? Or perhaps are you looking to learn how to drive your organization towards better utilization of the cloud? Are you you looking for ways to help you utilize a Cloud Center of Excellence in your organization?

Courses by Lee Atchison

Atchison Academy

What do 100,000 of your peers have in common? They've all boosted their skill set and career prospects by taking one of my online courses.