A Java geek

A couple of years ago, I developed an app that helped me manage my conference submission workflow. Since then, I have been a happy user of the free Heroku plan. Last summer, Heroku’s owner, Salesforce, announced that it would stop the free plan in November 2022. I searched for a new hosting provider and found Scaleway. In this post, I’d like to explain my requirement, why I chose them, and my experience using them. The context I’ve already described the app in previous blog

Security in one’s information system has always been among the most critical Non-Functional Requirements. Transport Secure Layer, aka TLS, formerly SSL, is among its many pillars. In this post, I’ll show how to configure TLS for the Apache APISIX API Gateway. TLS in a few words TLS offers several capabilities: Server authentication: the client is confident that the server it exchanges data with is the right one. It avoids sending data, which might be confidential, to the wrong ac

Most inter-systems communication components that use REST serialize their payload in JSON. As of now, JSON lacks a widely-used schema validation standard: JSON Schema is not widespread. Standard schema validation allows delegating the validation to a third-party library and being done with it. Without one, we must fall back to manual validation in the code. Worse, we must keep the validation code in sync with the schema. XML has schema validation out-of-the-box: an XML document can declare a gr

Lots of companies are eager to provide their identity provider: Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. For smaller businesses, not having to manage identities is a benefit. However, we want to avoid being locked into one provider. In this post, I want to demo how to use OpenID Connect using Google underneath and then switch to Azure. OpenID Connect The idea of an authorization open standard started with OAuth around 2006. Because of a security issue, OAuth 2.0 superseded the initial version. OAuth 2

Last week, I wrote about putting the right feature at the right place. I used rate limiting as an example, moving it from a library inside the application to the API Gateway. Today, I’ll use another example: authentication and authorization. Securing a Spring Boot application I’ll keep using Spring Boot in the following because I’m familiar with it. The Spring Boot application offers a REST endpoint to check employees' salaries. The specific use case is taken from the Open

Before moving to Developer Relations, I transitioned from Software Architect to Solution Architect long ago. It’s a reasonably common career move. The problem in this situation is two-fold: You know perfectly well software librariesYou don’t know well infrastructure components It seems logical that people in this situation try to solve problems with the solutions they are most familiar with. However, it doesn’t mean it’s the best approach. It’s a bad one in most ca

Last week, I was at the FOSDEM conference. FOSDEM is specific in that it has multiple rooms, each dedicated to a different theme and organized by a team. I had two talks: Practical Introduction to OpenTelemetry Tracing, in the Monitoring and Observability devroomWhat I miss in Java, the perspective of a Kotlin developer, in the Friends of OpenJDK devroom The second talk is from an earlier post. Martin Bonnin did a tweet from a single slide, and it created quite a stir, even attracting Brian Goe

API Gateways are critical components in one’s infrastructure. If an attacker could change the configuration of routes, they could direct traffic to their infrastructure. Consequences could range from data theft to financial losses. Worse, data theft could only be noticed after a long time by mirroring the load. Hence, protecting your API Gateway is of utmost importance. In this short blog post, I’ll list a couple of ways to secure your Apache APISIX admin access. Change admin toke

When I started working on this post, I had another idea in mind: I wanted to compare the developer experience and performance of Spring Boot and GraalVM with Rust on a demo HTTP API application. Unfortunately, the M1 processor of my MacBook Pro had other ideas. I'm trying to compile a *very* simple #SpringBoot #Kotlin webapp with #GraalVM native image. I'm using Liberica NIK via Docker on a M1 Mac. Compilation seems to be stuck. Anybody has a clue about what happens/how to pinpoint the i

Since I started working for Apache APISIX, I have tried to deepen my understanding of REST via various means. Did you read my review of API Design Patterns book? In the current literature, REST is generally promoted as the best thing since sliced bread. Yet, it comes with lots of challenges. In 2010(!), Martin Fowler wrote a post on the glory of REST. He lists three steps for an API to become truly REST: In each of these steps, issues lurk. This blog post focuses on listing some of them an