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2023

  • in DevOps
  • 10 min read

Safely Deliver Large Scale Feature Migration With Feature Toggle

Large-scale Change (LSC) within software development often presents massive challenges. It's a scenario that needs careful planning to meet the need for stability. As DevOps philosophy evolves at a rapid pace, seamless implementation, testing, and release of these changes becomes necessary. This is why feature toggles emerge as a valuable tool, offering a variety of strategies to manage, test, and deploy large-scale changes effectively.

In this article, we will mainly describe how to develop, test, and release an LSC safely with feature toggles. Starting from the definition of LSC, why it needs help from feature toggle, and what kind of LSC can be covered. Next, we will introduce what kind of toggle we will use, and brief the migration schedule. Finally, we will show what to do with the code and toggle settings during the development, testing, and release stages with an easy demo. Let's begin!

How to design an efficient Idempotent API

Idempotency API means that the data/ system state will be the same no matter how many times the API is successfully called with the same request body/parameter.

For a well-follow-principles RESTful API, besides the POST and PATCH, all other methods are idempotent. But in some particular circumstances (e.g. create a payment, upload files, microservice communication...), it is essential to implement idempotent if we want to make an API more robust.

In This article, we will propose an idempotency mechanism that is also focus on the API performance. The topics we will cover are as follows:

Three Ways to Solve CORS Issue in the Embed Swagger Page in Backstage

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As we mentioned in this article before, centralizing all the needed knowledge in one developer portal is a big improvement in daily working experience and convenience.

But we face a CORS problem when sending requests by an embedded swagger page in the API definition. this problem will significantly reduce the functionality of the Swagger page, so this article proposes three ways to solve it:

  1. allow the App to cross-origin for your Backstage domain
  2. provide modified plain-text open API JSON and add proxy
  3. change the server URL when rendering pages and add proxy
  • in DevOps
  • 9 min read

Easier, Flexible, and Lower Resource Cost Deployment Strategies by Feature Toggle

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Having different deployment strategies is essential to ensure that the new version of the software is delivered to users in an efficient and robust way. After reading other articles, we can organize the following insight of deployment-strategies( If you are not familiar with deployment strategies, please see deployment-strategies or deployment-strategies-6-explained-in-depth to get a comprehensive explanation).

Centralize All Needed Knowledge in One Developer Portals Through Spotify Backstage

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A developer portal is designed to enhance the developer experience by uniting all the essential knowledge required for development, maintenance, monitoring, and more, into a single platform. Backstage fulfills this objective through its core features, which include:

  • Software catalog: This feature allows users to define relationships between systems, components, and APIs, while also providing API definitions.
  • Kubernetes: Backstage enables developers to check the health of target services within the Kubernetes cluster.
  • Software template: Backstage offers a variety of templates that empower developers to initiate new projects swiftly, incorporating all necessary implementations such as CI/CD templates, company policies, and guidelines.
  • TechDoc and Searching: Backstage integrates all relevant markdown documents, effectively centralizing them and eliminating scattering across GitHub README, company Wiki, company blog, etc.