
Cloud Articles
We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.
SEP Named a Winning Company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards
Westfield, IN - January 2022, SEP, a software product design and development firm has been announced as a winning company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards. This recognizes SEP as one of the best tech companies to work for in…
Read More

The world of software and software development moves at lightning speed. Every day, new tools are introduced. Languages and frameworks are upgraded. App store requirements change. Operating systems are updated. New hardware is announced. So, what happens if the software world evolves but your software codebase doesn’t? Development Tools Chain Reaction Development tools continue to […]
Read More

Using Azure Functions to Deliver REST API
This is a follow-up to my previous post about hosting a simple React App in Azure. I would like to begin with the caveat that both posts are meant to be used as steps to deploy to Azure as quickly as possible. Production-level apps will need to address other concerns such as custom domains, scaling, […]
Read More

Hosting a React Web App in Azure with CI/CD in Five Easy Steps
There are a few blog posts out there that already show you how to do this, but since I encountered a few issues, I thought I’d document what worked for me. These are the very simple steps I followed to set up my web app in Azure, with continuous integration and deployment. Step 1: Create […]
Read More
Automated Testing for CloudFormation Templates
CloudFormation is a powerful tool that allows you to define your AWS infrastructure as code. And like any piece of software, testing is an important part of the software development lifecycle. This is especially important when practicing continuous delivery or continuous deployment. In this post, I will walk through a working example of a CI/CD […]
Read More

Total Cost of Ownership: Choosing Between On-Premise vs. Hybrid / Pure Cloud
Inconsidering a deployment strategy a new development effort, two potential solutions should be evaluated: Deployment of software on client-controlled hardware residing on the corporate intranet A Cloud-based approach using Amazon Web Services Both approaches have their pros and cons and I’ll outline those in this post, but let’s start with a real client example first: […]
Read More

Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part Two
In the previous post, I went into depth about our migration from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS by containerizing our CI/CD using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and the Amazon EC2 Container Service Plugin for Jenkins. This allowed us the flexibility of defining all of the different types of build agents we required as […]
Read More

Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part One
In a recent blog post, I spoke about a migration from Heroku to AWS that Todd Trimble and I did for a client project. If you are interested in some of the backstory of this migration, you should check that out. In this post I would like to dive into what we did to move […]
Read More
Transitioning from Heroku to AWS
In June of 2017 I was asked to evaluate AWS for one of our major client programs. The client was utilizing Heroku for their Cloud solution and at our urging, as well as other external influencers, leaning more towards AWS. We setup a test account under SEP’s AWS account and from there setup a mock […]
Read More
Cleaning Up Left-over Docker Resources
After spending some time hacking with Docker for a blog series, I found that I had a lot of unused Docker containers and images lying around. As part of cleaning up after that, I thought I’d share a few one-liners to remove Docker resources. Before getting to the one-liners, a quick warning: The commands below […]
Read More