Bertrand Florat Tech articles Others articles Projects Cours et papiers CV Contact

  Hi ! This is my personal page and blog. You will find here some articles or projects I'm involved in and a few thoughts (mainly about IT).

I design, code and integrate large IT projects. I like to work in agile environments to bring as much value as possible to my customers, while dealing with budgets and timelines. My main current positions are Software and infrastructure architect on the first side of the coin, DevOps engineer on the other. I also teach various IT subjects including architecture at the university of Nantes (France).

Last technical articles :

Upside-down house

This article has also been published at DZone.

Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.") is a well-known adage, especially in engineering circles. However, its implications are often misunderstood, especially by the general public. It's not just about the universe conspiring against our systems; it's about recognizing and preparing for potential failures.

Many view Murphy's Law as a blend of magic and reality. As Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), we often ponder its true nature. Is it merely a psychological bias, where we emphasize failures and overlook our unnoticed...

Upside-down house

As a Product Owner (PO), your role is crucial in steering an agile project towards success. However, it's equally important to be aware of the pitfalls that can lead to failure. In this blog post, we'll explore the actions that should be avoided to ensure your agile project stays on track and delivers valuable outcomes. It's worth noting that the GIGO (Garbage In - Garbage Out) effect is a significant factor: no good product can come from bad design.

This article has also been published at DZone.

On Agile and Business Design Skills

Lack of Design Methodology Awareness

One...

Upside-down house

This article has also been published at DZone.

In this article, I'll refer to a 'job' as a batch processing program, as defined in JSR 352. A job can be written in any language but is scheduled periodically to automatically process bulk data, in contrast to interactive processing (CLI or GUI) for end-users. Error handling in jobs differs significantly from interactive processing. For instance, in the latter case, backend calls might not be retried as a human can respond to errors, while jobs need robust error recovery due to their automated nature. Moreover, jobs often...

Datasets staticity level

[Article also published on DZone.]

A common challenge when designing applications is determining the most suitable implementation based on the frequency of data changes. Should a status be stored in a table to easily expand the workflow? Should a list of countries be embedded in the code or stored in a table? Should we be able to adjust the thread pool size based on the targeted platform?

In a current large project, we categorize datasets based on their staticity level, ranging from very static to more volatile:

Level 1 : Very static datasets

These types of data changes always involve business...

Architecture as Code with C4 and Plantuml

Illustration

(This article has also been published at DZone)

Introduction

I'm lucky enough to currently work on a large microservices-based project as a solution architect. I'm responsible for designing different architecture views, each targeting very different audiences, hence different preoccupations:

  • The application view dealing with modules and data streams between them (targeting product stakeholders and developers)
  • The software view (design patterns, database design rules, choice of programming languages, libraries...) that developers should rely upon;
  • The infrastructure view (middleware, databases, network connections, storage, operations...) providing useful information for integrators and DevOps engineers;
  • The sizing view dealing with performance;
  • The security...

Designing Human-Targeted Random IDs

Article also published on DZone.


ℹ️ NOTE We don't deal here with technical ID used as primary keys in relational databases. See my previous article here if you seek a great way to generate them.


Context

During one of my recent projects, I have been asked to design a scheme of IDs highly usable by humans. The business requirement was mainly to create pseudo-random values that can't be inferred or guessed in order to be used as a secret token printed on some official documents for future controls.

Later on, we had a similar requirement with lower security concerns: generating...

(This article has been also published at DZone)

How to Do UUID as Primary Keys the Right Way

UUID

TL;DR: UUID V4 or its COMB variant are great to mitigate various security, stability, and architectural issues, but be aware of various pitfalls when using them.

Why Do We Need Technical IDs in the First Place?

Any properly designed relational database table owns a Primary Key (PK) allowing you to uniquely and stably identify each record. Even if the primary key can be composite (built of several columns), it is a widespread good practice to dedicate a special column (often named id or...

(This article has been also published at DZone)

Sahara and sandbox

In most organizations, developers are not allowed to access the production environment for stability, security, or regulatory reasons. This is a quite good practice (enforced by many frameworks like COBIT or ITIL) to restrict access to production but a major drawback is a mental distance created between developers and the real world. Likewise, the monitoring is usually only managed by operators and very little feedback is provided to developers except when they have to fix application bugs (ASAP, of course). As a matter of fact, most developers have...

Four years after the first release of a template in French, we release a revisited English version.

This architecture template is applicable to most management IT projects, regardless of the general architecture chosen (monolithic, SOA, micro-service, n-tier, …​). It has already been used on several important projects including large organizations. It is maintained on a regular basis.

Discover it at GitHub.

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