In this post we’ll install and use the MetalLB L2 load balancer for Kubernetes.

Baking your own AWS EC2 images means you can launch fully prepared instances within seconds instead of configuring each one from scratch.

Kubernetes clusters are constantly generating events, but none of that activity reaches you unless you go looking for it.

Adding translation to an application used to mean wrestling with dictionaries or third-party services of uneven quality.

Validating a JWT on every request is exactly the kind of work you’d rather not push down into your backend.

Putting a login screen in front of an internal service usually means baking authentication into the service itself.

Datadog is great for the metrics it gathers on its own, but sometimes the numbers you really want to track are your own.

DynamoDB will happily throttle your writes once you push past the provisioned capacity, so it pays to react before that becomes a problem.

Prometheus does a great job of collecting metrics, but reaching those metrics from a phone, with proper authentication in front, takes a bit of glue.

In this post I’ll walk through building a simple REST backend with Java Spring and JDBCTemplate.