People often say ‘knowledge is power’. I prefer ‘knowledge is strength’: “the strength to bring about positive change”. By looking at what you can do, what you want to achieve and connecting the two, you build a strong position. This is what I mean by connecting ‘know-why’ with ‘know-how’.

Last week, I had an interesting conversation with a customer about how our specialists can connect his business with new IT possibilities by embarking on a ‘journey of discovery’ together. We quickly concluded that this approach could add more value to business performance.

Repeatable delivery

People at AMIS never sit still. There is always something that motivates them to explore possibilities or investigate them further. Last week, my colleague Joost demonstrated this once again through his work on a series of Azure pipelines. These are important tools for professional software development and management. In DevOps environments, new features and improvements need to be introduced as quickly as possible in a controlled way, ensuring that what has been tested is deployed to production in exactly the same way. We work hard to prevent the installation of new software from causing other tools or extensions to fail. If something does go wrong in exceptional circumstances, we can quickly rebuild environments. We call this ‘repeatable delivery’. To ensure that infrastructure, platform and application components are deployed to production correctly, we eliminate as much manual work as possible. We implement improvements through an automated continuous delivery process. In his article, Joost explains how we do this in Microsoft Azure.

Windows Sandbox

Want to try something out without making permanent changes to your PC? I remember when installing and uninstalling tools or applications left so many unnecessary files behind that occasionally reinstalling the entire operating system became necessary. Uninstallers gradually became better at removing files, but some would always remain. Windows Sandbox offers a solution when you want to test something quickly without making permanent changes to your PC. It provides a separate, ‘clean’ environment that you can quickly start and close, and use for testing. Read Lucas’s article to find out how.

AWS Lambda

My colleague Frederique brings ‘Lambda functions’ to the Amazon cloud. These serverless functions automatically scale as more or less capacity is needed and stop running when they are not in use. This makes them a cost-saving option in a cloud environment. You literally pay for what you use. In her article, Frederique explains this using the example of a cash machine. There are many roads to Rome, and software development is no exception. Choosing the right approach is essential, as it can help avoid high costs and performance problems.

Kafka streaming

Lucas has written two articles about Kafka’s streaming mechanism. Streaming is a way of integrating or connecting IT systems, or components that operate largely independently. It revolves around publishing and consuming information. Think of a noticeboard at a supermarket: you post a message, and it remains visible for a period you determine. Who receives the message or what they do with it is irrelevant to the publisher. This approach makes connections between systems developed by different teams or organisations more flexible, as changes require less direct coordination. The recipient uses the content as it is. Want to know how to experiment in a free environment? Lucas’s first article explains exactly how.

Lucas’s second article takes a closer look at the content ‘dashboard’, where you can see what happens to a message, for example. The way ‘Kafka Topic Watcher’ is built allows it to work with various external tools.