James Burns
From network load balancers to FPGAs to ASICs to embedded security to cloud ops at scale, James has seen how systems work but, more interestingly, how they fail. He is passionate about sharing what he's learned to level up teams, make developers happier, and improve customer experiences.
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Migrating to Microservices: Worst Practices
James Burns | Apr 28, 2020The reality is that most migrations bog down quickly. This worst practices guide will tell you how you too can end up with a distributed monolith at the end of a multi-year long slog.
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Want to Reduce Service Cost and Resource Waste? Start Squeeze Testing
James Burns | Mar 25, 2020This article will discuss the practice of “squeeze testing” exists to keep information about the performance requirements of a service up to date for a given traffic load.
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It’s Not Technical Skill That Matters Most for Platform Teams — It’s Empathy
James Burns | Nov 17, 2019Sometimes platform teams get created as a place to dump all the toil. Other times they’re created to collect systems expertise. However, the true purpose of a platform team is to increase development velocity and improve the developer experience.
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Why You Should Have a Platform Team
James Burns | Oct 30, 2019Platform teams are force multipliers, by reducing cognitive load for developers and making it easier to ship, allowing them to focus on feature velocity.
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How to Build a Platform Team
James Burns | Oct 21, 2019Platform teams enable developers to work more quickly and efficiently, but only when they’re closely aligned with and feel empathy for developers.
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Kubernetes Logs and Services: Beware These Pitfalls
David Klein, James Burns | Aug 15, 2019So, you’ve gone “cloud native” … you’re running apps in containers, you’re scheduling them with Kubernetes, and now you’re trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It’s the third time in a month where your customers are seeing two minutes of...
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Why Working on Monoliths is Bad for Your Career
James Burns | Aug 6, 2019Microservices are not a magic dust of success, but, all things being equal, you will grow more, learn more, become a better developer, and be more successful at more successful businesses by choosing to work in environments embracing microservices.
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Kubernetes Observability for Contrarians
James Burns | Jul 28, 2019So, maybe you’ve heard of this Kubernetes thing? As Kubernetes continues to pick up steam as the best platform to run your cloud native applications questions continue to be raised about how to make it observable.
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Development Time: The Only Cost That Matters
James Burns | Jul 10, 2019This article discusses the impact of lost development time, lost customer feedback on new features, operational issues — these all pale before the long-term impact of making developers scared to develop and deploy.
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Lightstep sounds like a lovely idea
Monitoring and observability for the world’s most reliable systems
