James Greenfield

What happens when you apply Engineering principles to go-to-market strategy? I'm about to find out firsthand as the new Cloud Solutions Architect at DEDICATTED. The mission: systematically engineer how we connect world-class DevOps capabilities and proven Cloud & AI expertise with the Canadian and international businesses and public sector organizations that need them most. Working directly with AWS Canada, we're building the blueprint for how technical excellence translates into transformational business outcomes. The hardest engineering problem isn't always technical. Sometimes it's engineering the bridge from capability to customer value. Let's build something remarkable. 🚀 #Dedicatted #AWSCanada #CloudCommunity #GenerativeAI #DevOps

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One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a Sr. Engineer at Google about designing for failure was this: “A resilience that you don’t practice is a resiliency that you don’t actually have.” Yesterday, half of the internet was down for hours due to a single DNS issue. A single DNS issue, just a name that wouldn’t resolve, took down apps, login flows, even doorbells and games. It was not because AWS didn’t have backups or regions, or fancy diagrams. But because too many teams believe redundancy on paper means resilience in reality. What happens when the main database endpoint is gone? What if your code only knows one region, one address, one set of credentials? What if everything you rely on, feature flags, logins, and user IDs, vanishes with a single cloud hiccup? Most teams hope they’ll fail over. Most teams assume their system will just work in a disaster. But hope is not resilience. Assumptions are not resilience. Pretty diagrams are not resilience. Resilience is built when you simulate failure for real. Resilience is built when you break things in staging, on purpose, and learn what dies. Resilience is built when you practice what to do when the map you drew is wrong. If you’ve never pulled the plug on your main region, you don’t know what breaks. If you’ve never lost your trusted config store, you don’t know how lost your app really gets. If you’ve never watched your fallback routines kick in, you’re betting on hope, not engineering. This is what separates textbook architects from true engineers: – They rehearse the worst day, not just plan for it. –They discover the ugly gaps before customers do. –They don’t just design for “up”, they practice surviving “down.” There’s a chance, no matter how small, that: - Every cloud will fail. - Every network will stall. -Every dependency will have its bad day. The only question is: Will you find out how brittle your design is in a quiet test run…or when the world is watching? Practice failure. Make it boring and routine. —-  P.S. Follow me for more system design insights and check out Layrs - the Leetcode of system design: layrs.me Built to help you crack interviews with: - 60+ problems - Interactive canvas - Instant feedback - Easy-to-hard learning flow Join our Discord:https://lnkd.in/gccq4Xrx

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July 19, 2019, an outside individual gained unauthorized access about Capital One credit card customers This event affected ~100 million individuals in the United States and ~6 million in Canada How to beef up Authentication Process Solution: Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) It's a Two-Step Verification Process     - First, you provide something you know (your password) - Second, you provide something you _have_ (a time-based code from your phone or a physical key). Here’s how it works, 1. User enters username and password 2. System validates credentials against database 3. If valid, system generates a unique verification code 4. Code is sent to user's registered device (SMS/email/app) 5. User enters the code to complete authentication 6. System grants access only after both factors are verified 🤔 over to you, what to do if 2FA device is lost? Let me know in the comments! 👇 --- You've got System Design skills but showcasing them in 60 minutes interview is a completely different challenge for e.g. where to start? How much time to spend on HLD vs LLD etc Let me share a FREE 7-day email course that provides a step-by-step framework for acing your 60-minute System Design interview 📣 Join 1700+ subscribers and sign up for the course to learn time allocation to demonstrate full range of design skills (link in comments 👇)

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New year, and two new posts for my blog: In yesterday's post, I look the at the role of versioning in reducing coordination in distributed database systems: https://lnkd.in/gx9PQuxG. Reducing coordination helps latency, throughput, scalability, and availability, so this is a big win. In today's post, I look at a weird database isolation edge-case called Fekete's anomaly, and explore what it can tell us about isolation and coordination in database systems: https://lnkd.in/ge_XREph As I wrote these posts, I thought they would benefit from SQL syntax highlighting. I had no idea how to do it, and set myself a time budget of 5 minutes to figure out an OK solution. I asked Nova (via Amazon Bedrock), and got a simple recipe that works well in less than 60 seconds. Little things like this are the sweet spot of AI for me - I really enjoy being able to make things better with nearly zero effort.

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🗣️ "By leveraging Debezium and Kafka Connect, we were able to stream real-time database changes efficiently without writing a single line of application code" Always loving to read a good report of folks using Debezium in production. Nice one, by Daniil Roman 👍. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eHemsnCF

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I don't allow my teams to use the AWS SDK in application code. Ever. This might sound extreme, but it's essentially Open/Closed Principle thinking applied to system architecture. Every direct SDK call tightly couples your software to the underlying cloud provider. The Open/Closed Principle states that software entities should be **open for extension, closed for modification**. In practice at the system level, this means isolating change to extension points rather than core logic. **Here's my approach:** Use Kubernetes as the abstraction layer. Applications know nothing about cloud APIs—or even Kubernetes APIs. Need secrets? They're injected as environment variables. Your app never knows if they came from AWS Secrets Manager, Vault, or a config file. Need storage? Volumes are mounted at deployment time. Your app just reads from `/data`—it doesn't care if that's EBS, GCP disks, or local storage. Need messaging? Standard interfaces, swappable backends. Terraform and Helm codify all this infrastructure-as-code, sitting right alongside the app repos. **The practical benefit:** When we want to switch from AWS to GCP, that's a plugin configuration change, not a code modification. The applications remain completely unchanged. Yes, this binds us to Kubernetes. But here's the real benefit: when AWS updates their SDK or changes endpoints—which happens constantly—I update one plugin configuration, not dozens of applications. Commercial vs GovCloud deployments? Different regions? API versioning? All handled at the infrastructure layer, once. Teams using direct SDK imports are updating dependencies across their entire codebase every few months. I'd rather work at the plugin infrastructure layer one time for all apps than update SDK versions many times everywhere. Build systems that bend, don't break, when requirements change. Open/Closed thinking isn't just about clean code—it's about architectural independence. **Questions for you:** - Do you abstract cloud APIs or call them directly from application code? - What's your experience with Kubernetes as a vendor abstraction layer? - Where do you see the biggest OCP violations in modern cloud architectures? *Day 2 of 5: SOLID principles for cloud architecture. Tomorrow: Liskov Substitution Principle.*

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Yesterday in my celebration of Confluent Freight Clusters becoming generally available in AWS, I covered Virtual Consensus—today, let’s dive deeper into a crucial distinction: 👉 Failure-free ordering vs. Fault-tolerant consensus Decoupling these concepts can change how we think about consensus protocols. This is another one for those nerds that like replication protocols 😄 https://lnkd.in/d4nqJfsy

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