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 Best Places to Work Company for 14th Consecutive Year

SEP has once again been recognized as one of Indiana’s Best Places to Work for the 14th year consecutive year.  The statewide survey and award program evaluates participating organizations and honors those with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and…
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Is a Lift and Shift Migration the right fit for your cloud project?

Picture this: Your team has been wrangling databases, applications, and web servers hosted and run on hundreds of VMs for years now. You have workarounds for some of the most egregious limitations, but alas… you know the time has come to replace your VMs with cloud hosting. You know that the inefficiencies and security concerns […]
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Think Software Maintenance is Expensive? Here’s Why It’s Worth the Investment.

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 […]
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Using Azure Functions to Deliver REST API: A Step-by-Step Guide, 2/2

This is a follow-up to my previous post about hosting a simple React App in Azure, and now we’ll cover using Azure Functions to deliver REST API. 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 […]
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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 host a React web app in Azure, 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 […]
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Check Out Automated Testing for CloudFormation Templates That’s Not Boring

tCloudFormation 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 present a working example of a CI/CD pipeline for […]
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Exploring AWS IoT Analytics

You may have heard of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which can call to mind “smart light bulbs” or “smart electrical outlets” or “smart doorbells”. Usually when consumers talk about IoT they talk about Home Automation, which is only a single application of IoT. The patterns can be used for massive problems, like Smart Grid […]
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Analyze the Crap Out of Your Apple Health/HealthKit Data

As a recent iPhone + Apple Watch convert (see ya, Android and FitBit) my fitness tracking data lives in Apple Health. I want to make charts and graphs and see trends over time (you get the idea, I’m an engineer, I wantneed to engineer and analyze my fitness data). Problem is, there’s not a great way […]
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Success! 🙌 Finishing the Migration from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS

In Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part One, I went into depth about our migration. We containerized 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 required types of build agents as different […]
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How to Migrate from Heroku Continuous Integration (CI) to Jenkins on AWS Like a Pro

In a recent blog post, I spoke about a migration from Heroku to AWS. I discussed the solution that Todd Trimble and I did for a client project. If you are interested in the backstory of this migration, you should check that out. In this post, I would like to dive into what we did […]
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Load Balancing with Nginx and Docker

The previous post showed how to use Nginx as a reverse proxy to an ASP.NET Core application running in a separate Docker container. This time, I’ll show how to use a similar configuration to spin up multiple application containers and use Nginx as a load balancer to spread traffic over them. Desired architecture The architecture […]
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