Microservices

Over the last few years, our industry has moved away from monolith architectures to microservice architectures. For a good number of reasons, this trend continues to remain strong. One issue you may encounter with creating microservices if you are not using a monorepo is that you may have to build a new project whenever you need to add a new microservice to your app ecosystem. Creating a new project may include creating new repositories in Bitbucket/Github, configuring a continuous integration pipeline, adding build/deploy scripts, building the project based on some folder structure that has been determined by the team....

Recently I was asked to review a Web API written in Node.js. The API exposes an authentication endpoint, this authentication endpoint must be highly available, responsive, and it cannot become a bottleneck, otherwise, the user experience is severely impacted. Unfortunately, the endpoint had become a bottleneck and was impacting the overall performance of the application. Upon further review, it was determined that the problem was coming from a hashing function that takes the user’s password, hashes it, and compares the result with the stored hashed password from the database....