For our latest episode of Teach your Niche, Taze Miller, Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, is our guest speaker! Jeff Ramsdale, Technical Director at Nortal US, and Josh Goodrich, Solutions Architect at Nortal US host the discussion for an in-depth look at The Principles of Zero Trust best practices and tips for implementation. This podcast is in English. 

Podcast Overview:[0:00-22:22]

• Definition of Zero Trust 
• Infrastructure requirements
• Challenges of implementing Zero Trust 
• Components needed for implementation
• Zero Trust use case  
• How to get started

More Information on Zero Trust by Nortal and AWS

• The Case for Zero Trust by Jeff Ramsdale
• Implementing Zero Trust by Jeff Ramsdale
• Migrating to Zero Trust by Jeff Ramsdale
• Zero Trust architectures: An AWS perspective by Mark Ryland and Quint Van Deman
• How to think about Zero Trust architectures on AWS by Michael Wasielewski

AWS Tools Mentioned:

AWS Identity & Access Management  (IAM)

AWS Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Multi- Factor Authentication (MFA)

AWS IoT Device Management 

YubiKey

Amazon SMS

Amazon Elastic Cloud Computer (EC2)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

In a special edition of Teach your Niche, VP of Technology, Jesse Krautwurst, VP of Client Services, Areos Ledesma, and Torben Giesselmann, a Senior Solutions Architect from Elastic Path. This podcast is in English. 

Podcast Overview: [0:00-22:30]

• Introduction to Elastic Path
• How Elastic Path and Nortal work together 
• Benefits of the Elastic Path and Nortal partnership 
• How headless commerce increases adaptability 
• How Elastic Path and Nortal enabled a highly anticipated telecommunications device launch 
• How headless platforms open up commerce channels
• The importance of system integrators 

Tool Mentioned:

Elastic Path 

In our third and final podcast of the scaling series, VP of Technology, Jesse Krautwurst, Senior Software Engineer, Mike Hitchcock and Lead Software Developer, Josh Buchacher round out the series by focusing on Front End development. This podcast is in English. 

Part 1: Front End Frameworks [0:00-15:45]

• Scaling development 
• Front end team best practices
• Code review process 
• Building an automated system 
• Scaling features
• Feature flags and A/B testing

Part 2: Scaling Load [15:53-36:32]

• Optimizing over-the-wire size delivery to clients
• Server-Side vs. Client-side rendering
• Server interaction through APIs
• Scaling usability of an application
• Application accessibility considerations
• Localization and internationalization
• Responsive development

Tools Mentioned:

Slack
Jira
Build Status
Envision
Mootools
jQuery
Marionette Backbone
Angular
React
Akamai
CloudFront
Chrome Browser Tools
Profiler
W3C
DevTools
Google Lighthouse
Wave
Axe
Tenon.io
JAWs
Aria label
Firefox Gecko
Flexbox

In the second podcast on a series about scaling your technology stack, Chief Architect, Gabe Hicks, Solutions Architect, Nathan Skone, and Director of Technology, Jeff Ramsdale continue the series by talking about different patterns that help with scaling services, or the middle tier. Discussing in detail different patterns, when to use them, and common cases of misuse. This podcast is in English.

Part 1: Overview of Scaling Services [0:00-10:25]

• What is scaling?
• What is horizontal compared to vertical scaling?
• Factors to consider when thinking about scaling.
• The difference between stateless and stateful services.
• Examples of automating horizontal scaling.
• What are other ways to scale compute?

Part 2: Application Architecture [10:35-23:44]

• Microservice pattern versus monolithic architecture.
• How caching can impact scaling: benefits and challenges.
• How queuing is used to scale systems.
• How can the service tier handle the information in the queue? 
• The importance of autoscaling services.

Tools Mentioned:

EC2 Instances

Google Compute Instances

Docker

Kubernetes 

Knative

AWS Lambda

JavaSpaces

Kinesis

In the first podcast of a series on scaling your technology stack, Chief Architect, Gabe Hicks, Solutions Architect, Nathan Skone, and VP of Technology, Jesse Krautwurst kick-off the series by introducing the capabilities of scaling the different types of databases and scenarios for when to apply the different scaling strategies. They also go into detail about the advantages and disadvantages of scaling. This podcast is in English.

Part 1: Introduction to the Scaling Series [0:00-18:42]

• The difference between relational and non-relational databases
• Vertical and horizontal scaling
• What are the principles of databases?
• CAP Theorem overview
• What is the primary/ primary and master/ master approach to databases?
• Scaling with Sharding
• Scaling with Denormalization

Part 2:  Different Types of Databases [18:51-34:02]

• What are the advantages of NoSQL?
• What are the different types of databases?
• What is a key value data store?
• What would a document database look like?
• What are the advantages of Time Series?
• What are graph non-relational databases?
• What are search non-relational databases?
• How would you approach scaling a system?
• How do analytics relate to scaling?

Tools Mentioned:

Cassandra

MongoDB

Amazon Document DB

Influx Time Series DB

Neo4j

ElasticSearch

Lucene

Solr

In our second installment of Teach your Niche, Nortal North America’s Chief Architect, Gabe Hicks and Solutions Architect, Nathan Skone, discuss the capabilities of serverless technology and how it can help your development team. This podcast is in English.

Part 1: How can you effectively leverage serverless? [0:00 - 16:06]

• What does serverless mean to software developers?
• What are the prime use cases of serverless?
• What are some instances where you wouldn’t want to use serverless?
• Project examples of what went well and what didn’t.

Part 2: Where is serverless going? [16:15 - 27:27]

• Why do you think serverless popularity is increasing?
• How serverless can help enterprises. 
• Where do you get started in bringing serverless practices into a company?
• How do you see serverless impacting developers in the future?

Tools Mentioned:

AWS Lambda

Google Cloud Functions

AWS S3

Azure Functions

Git Repository

Hadoop

Apache Spark

SAM Framework

Google Firebase

AWS Amplify

Spring Boot

AWS Redshift

Django

Docker Images

Swift

In a two-part podcast series, Nortal’s Chief Technology Officer Gabe Hicks talks with Jeff Ramsdale, Director of Technology, about CICD automation being a critical piece of delivery now that we are in a remote work situation. This podcast is in English. 

Part 1: The importance of CI/CD automation right now [0:00 - 10:38]

• What does CI/CD automation involve? And what is it?
• Evolution of automation
• Why is automation even more important now, during an economic slowdown, than it has been before? 
• Documentation: How much do you need and ease of accessing software?
• How do you recognize poor automation? 

Part 2: How to get started with automation [10:47 - 25:26]

• Current state of CI/CD: How containers are used in modern build pipelines
• Where l the cloud fits with Continuous Delivery practices
• Should you build automation on your own or start with a third partySaaS product? 
• What will change with CI/CD?

Tools Mentioned:

Jenkins

Maven

Kubernetes

Pub/Sub

Kinesis

GitLab

GitHub