Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of recording the desired state of your infrastructure using a declarative language. In this article, I’m going to assume that your team is starting from scratch. Maybe some of your build process has been scripted, and maybe there is some manual testing and quality assurance work happening. Many readers will find that they are midway through the IaC adoption journey I’ll describe, or that they have missed some steps.

In my interactions at industry events like AWS re:invent and KubeCon, I talk with a lot of developers. Devs often tell stories of things that prevent them from working quickly and efficiently. Many involve frustrating interactions with sys admins, SREs, or DevOps colleagues. One story I have heard several times involves a conversation like this: dev: Hey, SRE team. My build is failing and I don’t know what’s happening with the app in the build node.

Modern software development increasingly relies on distributed, service-based architectural patterns to achieve scalability, reliability, and rapid build, test, and release cycles. Two of the most popular service-based approaches are service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. In this article, we will examine both approaches to identify their similarities and differences as well as some use cases for each.

Kotlin is one of the most versatile programming languages available, in large part because of the Kotlin team’s focus on bringing it to as many platforms as possible. It is the primary language for developing Android applications and is popular for JVM backends. Kotlin also features targets for native binary compilation with Kotlin/Native, and for web through Kotlin/JS. One of its most promising features is the ability to target multiple platforms it compiles to.