Tech Directory (By Category)

Dec 21, 2020
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Table of Contents

API Management and Integration

  • Amazon API Gateway: Amazon API Gateway offers typical endpoint management capabilities such as authentication, monitoring and so on. It supports mutual TLS (mTLS).  (01/04/2018)

  • Apigee: Apigee, a Google company, focuses primarily on a SaaS API Mangement model. It is known both for its appealing dashboards and, sometimes, shocking bills.   (01/01/2018)

  • BizTalk: Microsoft’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) suite.  (01/02/2018)

  • CA API Gateway: CA API Gateway is a rebadged product formerly produced by a company called Layer 7 (acquired by CA). Although it was originally sold primarily as an appliance, today it is often deployed as a self-contained VM image both in cloud and on-prem scenarios. It is also increasingly offered on a SaaS basis.  (01/07/2018)

  • Gloo: A Kuberentes/Envoy/Ingress-based API Gateway which provides rate limiting, circuit breaking, retries, caching, external authentication and authorization, transformation, service-mesh integration, and security.  (23/04/2020)

  • IBM DataPower: Although IBM DataPower is often referred as the product that created the API Gateway market, and it is still being updated, it is often considered today a rather legacy product from a bygone SOAP era. It is offered both as an physical appliance and as a virtual machine image.  (01/04/2018)

  • Loopback: A JavaScript-based framework to create API endpoints against databases (or other API sources) with little or no coding.  (16/09/2020)

  • Mulesoft: Mulesoft started off as traditional ESB vendor. Its current product suite offers APIM capabilities but they are typically used in the context of a larger and richer, ESB-esque MuleSoft stack rather than as standalone, lightweight API-centric component. It is often considered a more thicker and less encapsulated solution than the competition given its Java-style platform pedigree.  (01/02/2018)

  • Swagger: Smartbear Swagger is an end-to-end solution for documenting, defining schemas, and testing APIs. It is based on ideas such as contract-first APIs and the publishing of rich, intuitive API service definitions to make developer on-boarding easier.  (01/01/2018)

  • Traefik: A so called “edge router” that can work as a Kubernetes Ingress controller but also independently.  (15/05/2020)

API Types

  • GraphQL: GraphQL is a specifications that allow the definition of APIs with “query” semantics. This is in contrast with the “one API per function” model typical of text-book REST web services.  (01/05/2018)

  • REST: REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used when creating HTTP-based web services.  (01/01/2018)

  • SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is an XML-based message encoding format typically used by legacy web services.  (01/02/2018)

Application Runtime Platform

  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk: ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.   (01/02/2018)

  • AWS Lambda: Lambda is the name given by Amazon to their Function as a Service (FaaS) offering.  (01/01/2018)

  • Kubeless: Kubeless runs on top of Kubernetes and provides a FaaS / Serverless experience to the developer.  (01/07/2018)

Architectural Principles and Design Patterns

  • API Design: Links Not Keys: A comprehensive account on the use of links (rather than keys) in API payloads. See also HAL and HATEOAS.  (17/11/2020)

  • API Design: REST, OpenAPI and REST comparison: Guidelines for choosing the most appropriate API type for a given project.  (17/11/2020)

  • Best practices for Unicode: Blog post explaining how Unicode works in layman terms.  (01/04/2018)

  • BFF: Backends for Frontends (BFF) is a paradigm in which each user experience channel has its own API set. This is in opposition to the traditional paradigm in which a homogenous set of APIs serves multiple channels.  (06/09/2020)

  • C4: A model for visualising software architecture based on the notions of contexts, containers, components and code.  (05/09/2020)

  • Cache-aside Pattern: Also known as lazy caching, it is a pattern in which data is retrieved from the data story only if absent in the cache, at which time the cache is populated.  (03/09/2020)

  • CAP Theorem: The CAP (Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance) theorem establishes that in the presence of a network partition, one has to choose between consistency and availability.  (04/09/2020)

  • Cattle vs Pets: A metaphor by Bill Baker, former Microsoft employee that says that servers in a scale-out system should be like cattle: “you number them and when they get sick, you shoot them” rather than pets: “You name them and when they get sick, your nurse them back to health."  (01/03/2018)

  • CRDT: A conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) is a data structure which can be replicated across multiple computers in a network, where the replicas can be updated independently and concurrently without coordination between the replicas, and where it is always mathematically possible to resolve inconsistencies that might come up.  (28/10/2020)

  • Design Patterns for Microservices: Collection of design patterns for microservices.  (30/08/2020)

  • Doherty Threshold: The statement, attributed to IBM’s Walter Doherty, that an application’s response time that is below 400ms increases productivity. It has been popularised by the AMC Studio’s TV show called Halt and Catch Fire.  (19/10/2020)

  • DORA Metrics: The DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA) metrics include Deployment Frequency (DF), Mean Lead Time for changes (MLT), Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), and Change Failure Rate (CFR).  (16/11/2020)

  • HAL: Hypertext Application Language (HAL) is an Internet Draft standard convention for defining hypermedia such as links to external resources within JSON or XML code. It is relevant in the HATEOAS paradigm.  (16/11/2020)

  • HATEOAS: Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS) is a paradigm which involves sending related actions (complete URIs) along with data in REST responses.  (16/07/2020)

  • IDEALS: IDEALS (Interface segregation, Deployability, Event-driven, Availability over consistency, Loose coupling, Single responsibility) is a set of design principles for microservices.  (06/09/2020)

  • Local-First Software: A set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.   (19/10/2020)

  • Monolith First: Martin’s Fowler’s observation that almost all successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up whereas almost all the cases where a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble.  (16/09/2020)

  • Observer Pattern: A software design pattern in which an object, called the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes.  (18/09/2020)

  • Reversibility: An architectural principle that states that aspects of a system that are hard to change should be identified early on so that they can be made more flexible.  (15/09/2020)

  • SAGA: A pattern for distributed, long-lived transactions.  (25/06/2020)

  • SOLID: SINGLE (Single responsibility, Open/closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, Dependency inversion) is a set of design principles for the software based on the OOP paradigm.  (10/08/2020)

  • STRIDE: A threat model based on the following dimensions: Spoofing identity, Tempering with data, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of privilege.   (09/11/2020)

  • Terrifically Simple JSON: Three conventions to use JSON in Web APIs in the simplest and most regular way possible.  (17/11/2020)

  • The 4+1 View Model of Software Architecture: A model for describing the architecture of software-intensive systems, based on the use of multiple, concurrent views (local, process, physical, development) plus scenarios (or use cases).  (14/10/2020)

  • The Twelve-Factor App: The Twelve-Factor App is a methodology for “software as a service” applications published by Heroku in 2011 which describes the best practices for software written against their platform. Many in the industry equate 12 Factor App with Cloud Native but the former is silent on many aspects intrinsic to modern cloud native architectures such as immutability, zero down-time deployments, self-healing and so on.  (01/08/2018)

  • Trunk Based Development: A source-control branching model, where developers collaborate on code in a single branch called trunk.  (17/08/2020)

  • Uncle Bob’s Clean Architecture: Separation of concerns between enterprise business rules, application business rules, interface adapters, and frameworks.  (22/06/2020)

  • Write-behind Cache Pattern: A pattern for caching in which, unlike a write-through cache, updates are not immediately propagated to the data store flushed to it asynchronously at a later time.  (03/09/2020)

Architecture Tooling

  • Structurizr: A tool for generating C4-based documentation programatically using Java, C#, Mermaid, PlantUML, and others.  (04/10/2020)

AWS Concepts

  • Amazon Region: A Region is a geographical location (typically a city such as London) in which AWS deploys infrastructure within two or more Availability Zones.  (01/02/2018)

  • Amazon VPC: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is AWS' capability to configure custom (and potentially segregated) logical networks including IP ranges, subnets, route tables and so on.  (01/01/2019)

  • Availability Zone: An Availability Zone, in AWS, is a Data Centre that does not share any common single point of failure (e.g. power supply, network, etc.) with other Availability Zones.  (01/04/2018)

  • AWS Edge Location: An Edge Location is an endpoint that AWS uses for caching content (as of today using CloudFront’s CDN capabilities). There are more Edge Locations than regions since a tiny subset of AWS infrastructure is required to support CDN capabilities.  (01/10/2019)

  • AWS Shared Responsibility Model: Amazon’s model based on the idea that Security and Compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer.  (01/03/2018)

AWS Services

  • A History of AWS Services: A list containing the announcement and release date for nearly all of AWS services.  (01/05/2018)

  • Amazon AppFlow: An integration service to securely transfer data between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and ServiceNow, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, using a GUI.   (24/04/2020)

  • Amazon Database Migration Accelerator: A solution that brings together AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT), and AWS database experts to migrate away from traditional commercial databases such as Oracle and MS SQL Server.  (03/07/2020)

  • Amazon Direct Connect: Amazon Direct Connect is a solution to integrate an on-premise network with AWS.  (01/01/2019)

  • Amazon EventBridge: A solutions that delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources, such as Zendesk, Datadog, or Pagerduty, and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. It also manages the serialisation/schema of events to facilitate conversion to language-level abstractions (e.g. objects in Java)  (05/10/2020)

  • Amazon FSx for Lustre: A high-performance file system that integrates with S3.  (15/07/2020)

  • Amazon GameLift: Amazon GameLift is a platform to run multi-player game server backend software. It integrates with the likes of Unreal and Unity but also provides support for bespoke programming.  (01/03/2018)

  • Amazon Kendra: A search service that uses nature language thanks to machine learning.  (11/05/2020)

  • Amazon Lightsail: Amazon Lightsail may be thought as AWS' response to traditional fixed-price virtual server offerings such as those provided by the likes of Digital Ocean. Underneath, the same EC2 infrastructure is used but management and billing are simpler.  (01/07/2018)

  • Amazon Personalize: This service uses machine learning to create recommendations for websites and applications similarly to Netflix or Amazon’s own product recommendations.  (12/06/2020)

  • Amazon SWF: Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) helps build, run, and scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps. It is more appropriate for non-Lambda use cases.  (01/03/2018)

  • AWS Backup: A tool to manage backups in a central fashion across an AWS estate (EBS, EFS, DynamoDB, RDS, etc).  (15/01/2020)

  • AWS Batch: Batch is an AWS capability for running long-lived batch processes that free up resources (and thus cost) once completed.  (01/05/2018)

  • AWS Budgets: A solution to set custom budgets to track AWS cost and usage and receive alerts via email or SNS notification when configured thresholds are exceeded.  (21/10/2020)

  • AWS Chat Bot: A service to monitor and interact with AWS resources in Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms.  (23/04/2020)

  • AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK): An open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages.  (01/08/2020)

  • AWS Compliance Centre: Compliance resources across the various geographies in which AWS operates.  (01/04/2018)

  • AWS Data Exchange: This service allows finding and subscribing to thierd party data in the cloud. Data is normally made available through a S3 bucket.  (14/01/2020)

  • AWS DeepComposer: A service to learn machine learning through music, in a hands-on fashion (actually playing a keyboard).  (01/08/2020)

  • AWS Elemental Link: An appliance that connects a live video source, like a camera or video production equipment, to AWS Elemental MediaLive.  (16/11/2020)

  • AWS IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows configuring access security (users, group, permissions, etc.) for AWS services and resources.  (01/08/2018)

  • AWS Local Zones: An AWS data centre capability that satisfies latency-sensitive applications by placing workloads and data closer to end-users. Only a handful of services are available compared to fully fledged AWS Regions, but more elaborate use cases can be addressed compared to AWS Edge Locations.  (01/12/2020)

  • AWS Network Firewall: A managed service to deploy rule-based network protections across multiple VPCs.  (02/12/2020)

  • AWS Nitro Enclaves: A service to create highly isolated and secured VMs that can’t even be accessed via SSH.  (02/11/2020)

  • AWS ParallelCluster: A management tool to facilitate the deployment and management of High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud.  (15/08/2020)

  • AWS Solutions Constructs: AWS Trusted Advisor is a solution that analyses one’s AWS environment to provide recommendations in terms of cost optimisation, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits.  (19/06/2020)

  • AWS Step Functions: AWS Step Functions helps organise AWS Lambda functions as a state machine-based, pictorial workflow. This helps provide a share “business process” view among different stakeholders.  (01/02/2018)

  • AWS Systems Manager: AWS Systems Manager is primarily an Ops monitoring and governance tool for compute and storage resources.  (01/07/2019)

  • AWS Transfer Family: A service that provides seamless file transfer in and out of Amazon S3 using SFTP, FTPS, and FTP.  (23/04/2020)

  • AWS Trusted Advisor: Vetted architecture patterns, available as an open-source extension of the AWS Cloud Development Kit, that can be assembled to create a production-ready workload.   (01/01/2018)

  • AWS Wavelength: AWS infrastructure deployments that embed AWS compute and storage services within communications service providers (CSP) datacenters at the edge of the 5G network, so application traffic from 5G devices can reach application servers running in Wavelength Zones without leaving the telecommunications network.   (22/08/2020)

  • Gateway Load Balancer: A solution to manage (distribute traffic, scale, etc.) multiple third-party network virtual appliances from the AWS marketplace.  (16/11/2020)

  • Serverless Bot Framework: A template that includes Lambda functions, Amazon Lex, and other resources to build an end-to-end chatbot experience.  (01/06/2020)

Azure Services

  • Azure Private Link: Azure Private Link provides private endpoint to connect to a resource found in Azure, a customer-owned network, or Microsoft partner services.   (15/02/2020)

Backing Services (Replication)

  • Attunity Replicate: A data replication solution supporting multiple database systems (MS-SQL, DB2, Oracle, AWS, etc.)  (01/01/2018)

  • AWS DataSync: A software agent to move large amounts of data online between on-premises storage and Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.  (18/08/2020)

  • Oracle Active Data Guard: The de facto data replication solution for Oracle databases.  (01/04/2018)

  • StreamSets: A cloud-centric data sync solution.  (13/08/2020)

Backup and Restore

  • Amazon Glacier: Amazon Glacier is a durable, low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup.  (01/05/2019)

Big Data and Analytics

  • Amazon EMR: Amazon EMR provides BigData frameworks such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink in a managed basis. It is setup to interact with data stored in S3 and DynamoDB out-of-the-box.  (01/10/2019)

  • Apache Arrow: A language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic operations on modern hardware like CPUs and GPUs. It provides binding for most mainstream languages such as Java, C#, Python, etc.  (30/07/2020)

  • Apache Flink: Apache Flink is a framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams.  (07/11/2020)

  • Apache Spark: Apache Spark, similarly to Hadoop, is a distributed computing solution but focuses on the compute, rather than on the storage, aspect. Unlike solutions based on the MapReduce model, Spark allows defining iterative programs, using a functional/higher-order model, that allows, among others, visiting data multiple times.  (01/02/2018)

  • AWS Lake Formation: An accelerator to set up and secure a data lakes. It is based on the orchestration of AWS primitives such as S3, Redshift, Athena, EMR, and Apache Spark.  (03/10/2020)

  • Azkaban: Azkaban is a batch workflow shceduler created at LinkedIn to run Hadoop Jobs.   (01/03/2019)

  • BigQuery Omni: A multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.) solution based on Google Anthos to access and analyse data using the BigQuery user interface.   (18/10/2020)

  • DataProc: A platform to run open source data and analytics workloads (Apache Spark, Hadoop, etc.) in GCP.  (25/10/2020)

  • Hadoop: Apache Hadoop is an open source BigData suite based on the MapReduce programming model. It was design for massive distributed storage and processing. Its core component is the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) which provides sharding and replication. HDFS is typically accessed through APIs but may be mounted as a regular file system with some limitations.  (01/03/2018)

  • Qubole: Qubole is essentially a managed (SaaS) Hadoop offering (on top of AWS) with additional bells and whistles.  (01/11/2018)

  • Snowflake: A cloud-based data lake and analytics suite.  (25/06/2020)

Blockchain

  • Amazon Managed Blockchain: A service to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.  (02/10/2020)

  • Amazon QLDB: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority. It provides a SQL-like API, a flexible document data model, and full support for transactions.   (02/10/2020)

  • Corda Enterprise: A private permissioned blockchain platform that enables businesses to transact directly and in strict privacy with one another using smart contracts. It is available both in open source and commercial forms.  (09/11/2020)

  • DLT: Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) serves to implement a ledger based on the notion of a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions.  (05/11/2020)

  • Stellar: An open-source network for currencies and payments. It makes possible to create, send and trade digital representations of all forms of money-dollars, pesos, bitcoin, etc.  (16/11/2020)

Business Continuity Concepts

  • RPO: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum targeted period in which data (transactions) might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident.  (01/03/2018)

  • RTO: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.  (01/07/2019)

Business Models, Frameworks, and Tools

  • 50 Cognitive Biases: Pictorial summary of the most common cognitive biases.  (11/05/2020)

  • Beachhead Strategy: A military strategy that consists on winning a small border area (the beachhead) that becomes a stronghold, and from which one can advance to the rest of the territory.  (16/11/2020)

  • Conway’s Law: An adage which states that organisations design systems which mirror their own communication structure.  (01/08/2018)

  • IT as an Investment Portfolio: A model by MITSloan Management which identifies four asset classes in IT: transactional, informational, strategic, infrastructure. It serves to reason about IT investments in a more objective fashion.  (05/11/2020)

  • Johari Window: A tool for illustrating and improving self-awareness, and mutual understanding between individuals within a group.  (30/10/2020)

  • MECE: Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE) is a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets.  (01/12/2019)

  • OODA Loop (Situational Awarness): Observe–Orient–Decide–Act (OODA) is a military concept that is now applied in business settings.  (01/03/2018)

  • RACI Matrix: A RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) Matrix describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project or business process.  (01/09/2020)

  • RAID Log: A RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Decisions) log helps capture critical information that emerges over the life cycle of a project.  (14/09/2020)

  • RAPID: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide (RAPID) is a model for fast decision making.  (01/01/2019)

  • SIPOC: Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Output, and Customers (SIPOC) is a method to describe the transformation process within a company that offers products and/or services.  (01/02/2018)

  • Situation-Complication-Resolution: McKinsey’s narrative model to describe an accomplishment or introduce a business case  (01/04/2018)

  • Sun Tzu’s 5 Factors: Five principles from the Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” reinterpreted in a business context: Tao/Dao, Meteorology, Topography, Commander, Transparency, System.  (01/04/2018)

  • SWOT Analysis: A model to find out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) that are to be expected in a project or in a business venture.  (01/01/2018)

  • Toyota 3M Model: The Toyota 3M (Muda, Muri, Mura) focuses on reducing efficiency by addressing waste, overburden, and unevenness, respectively.  (01/04/2018)

  • Wardley Map: The structure of a business or service, mapping the components needed to serve the customer or user.   (01/12/2019)

  • Weak Verbs: Six weak verbs: think, need, want, guess, hope, and suppose.  (01/12/2020)

Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow

  • Amazon MWAA: Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is a managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow.  (01/12/2020)

  • Apache Airflow: A Python-based workflow engine which allows workflows to be expressed directly in Python code, rendering them more flexible and easier to version control.  (21/07/2020)

  • Camunda BPM: A Java-based workflow/BPM solution which includes a BPMN 2.0 designer implemented as a fat client (GUI).  (21/07/2020)

Capability (Application)

  • API Management: API Management (APIM) include API Gateways (to publish and secure APIs), subscription, publishing and “marketplace” features (pay per use billing, etc) as well as monitoring.  (01/04/2018)

  • Artifact Repository: An Artifact Repository stores higher level assemblies such as JAR files as opposed to text Java classes. The difference between an SCM such as Git and an artifact repository is that the latter typically offer binary-level compliance with approved versions, thread analysis and so on.  (01/01/2019)

  • Container Orchestration: The ability to run and scale containers as well as control their health and life cycle.  (01/04/2018)

  • Container Registry: A repository that allows pushing (storing) and retrieving (pulling) container images, typically Docker ones.  (01/01/2018)

  • Data Serialisation: Data serialisation allows an application to encode data so that it can be decoded by other applications written in the same or different languages. Data serialisation mechanisms usually make a trade off between speed, encoding/decoding speed, integrity, and human readability.  (01/03/2018)

  • Dynamic HTTP Processing: Dynamic processing of HTTP requests via CGI, embeded servers (microservices), application servers, etc.  (01/03/2018)

  • Messaging System: A messaging system typically (but not necessarily) allows message producers and consumers to be decoupled through a brokerage system.  (01/01/2018)

  • Secrets Management: Secrets Management solutions help store and provision confidential configuration data (e.g. MySQL passwords) in a secure manner.  (01/08/2018)

  • Service Mesh: A service mesh is a layer for providing layer 7 (e.g. HTTP) capabilities (logging, routing, circuit breaking, etc) to applications by running a side car component next to them as opposed to adding additional code.  (01/09/2019)

  • Single Page Application (SPA) Technology: Single Page Applications (SPA) frameworks provide a variety of features such as easier interaction with the web browser’s DOM, a component model, and the implementation of patterns such as MVC, MVVC and so on.  (01/11/2018)

  • Static HTTP Processing: Static serving of HTTP resources.  (01/05/2019)

Capability (Backing Services & Data)

  • Asynchronous Replication: Asynchrnous replication copies a backing service instance’s data into another instance without locking the source instance.  (01/03/2018)

  • IMDG: An In-Memory Distributed Cache (IMDG) allows using the computer memory of one or more computers to store application data. Most solutions store and retrieve data by key and allow specifying a time-to-live (TTL) setting per object or groups of objects.  (01/02/2018)

  • Relational Database (SQL): A Relational Database offers unmatched functional (as opposed of performance) ease in the querying and viewing of data.  (01/07/2019)

  • Synchronous Replication: Synchronous replication copies a backing service instance’s data into another instance sequentially, in lock step with every insert/update/delete query.  (01/03/2019)

Capability (Banking)

  • Open Banking: Open Banking, part of the EU PSD2 regulation in Europe, requires banks to release their data in a secure, standardised form, so that it can be shared more easily between authorised organisations online.   (01/01/2018)

  • PSD2: The Payment Services Directive version 2 (PSD2) is an EU Directive to regulate payment services and payment service providers.  (01/01/2019)

  • SCA: Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a EU PSD2 requirement that ensures that electronic payments are performed using multi-factor authentication.  (01/04/2018)

  • STP: Straight-Through Processing (STP) is an automated process done purely through electronic transfers with no manual intervention involved. It commonly applies in the payments and securities banking domains.  (15/10/2020)

Capability (Data)

  • DLM: DLM (Data Life Cycle Management) is a policy-based approach to managing the flow of an information system’s data throughout its life cycle: from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted. See also ILM.  (04/10/2020)

  • ILM: ILM (Information Life Cycle Management) is an approach to data and storage management that recognises that the value of information changes over time and that it must be managed accordingly; for example, by establishing policies to migrate and store data on the appropriate storage tier and, ultimately, remove it altogether. See also DLM.  (04/10/2020)

Capability (General)

  • Backing Service: Backing service technology include relational, key/value, graph, column and other database management system paradigms.   (01/04/2018)

Capability (Identity & Security)

  • DAC: Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is a scheme where the actor can influence policies within its assgined scope. A typical example is allowing read access to “others” by the owner of a UNIX file. It is normally (but not necessarily), the opposite of MAC.  (01/10/2019)

  • Directory Service: A directory service typically provides a user/password database together with authentication and authorisation capabilities. Most implementations are wire-compatible with the LDAP protocol.  (01/03/2018)

  • Identity Federation: Identity Fedartion allows a user’s single authentication ticket, or token, to be trusted across multiple IT systems or organisations. It is normally a capability required by SSO in complex multi-site deployments.  (01/03/2018)

  • IdP: An Identity Provider (IdP) is typically a trusted provider that lets users authenticate using single sign-on (SSO).  (01/11/2018)

  • MAC: Mandatory Acess Control (MAC) constraints the ability of a actor to access or perform an action against a given object. It is the opposite of DAC.  (01/05/2018)

  • OAuth: The OAuth authorisation framework enables third-party applications to obtain limited access to a web service.  (01/08/2018)

  • PDP: A Policy Decision Point (PDP) is a system entity that makes authorisation decisions for itself or for other system entities that request such decisions.   (01/12/2019)

  • PEP: A Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) is a network device on which policy decisions are carried out or enforced.  (01/04/2018)

  • RBAC: Role-Based Access control (RBAC) allows restricting system access to authorised users. It is a policy-neutral mechanism based on the concepts of roles and privileges.  (01/01/2018)

  • SSO: Single-Sign On (SSO) allows user to log in with a single ID and password to gain access to any of several related systems. It enhances usability by reducing password fatigue.  (01/02/2018)

Capability (Integration)

  • Adaptation: Adaptation, in the context of API Integration, is the ability to connect to a vast array of backend systems including both protocol-level (e.g. MQ) as well as business-level semantics (Salesforce API).   (01/02/2018)

  • Aggregation: Aggregation, in the context of API Integration, is the ability to aggregate the responses from different service providers.   (01/10/2019)

  • BPM (Software): BPM (Business Process Management) is a category of enterprise products that allows defining processes using a UI as opposed to code. It fell out of fashion, as an approach to produce executable software, with the rise of CI/CD and TTD where code-first approaches are preferred.  (01/02/2018)

  • Workflow: Workflow, in the context of API Integration, is the ability to implement processes that require human assistance via a UI.  (01/03/2018)

Capability (Network)

  • Content Delivery Network (CDN): A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes content (e.g. static data such as HTML, PNG images, videos, applications, etc) from an origin server to a location closer to the user’s region in order to reduce latency and bandwidth costs. It may work both on a passive cache-aside basis but also as an active on-push system.  (01/04/2018)

  • Delimitarised Zone (DMZ): A DMZ is a physical or logical subnetwork that exposes an organisation’s external-facing services to an untrusted network, usually the Internet.  (01/12/2019)

  • DNS Load Balancing: A technique for load distribution, load balancing, or fault-tolerance implemented, in its simplest form, by resolving DNS entries to multiple hosts.  (01/07/2019)

  • Forward Proxy: A forward proxy acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers.  (01/03/2018)

  • HTTP URL Redirect: The ability to redirect to a website (normally using a 3XX HTTP code).  (01/05/2019)

  • Layer 4 Load Balancer: A Layer 4 load balancer operates at the general TCP/IP level and is unable to get health status other than by using the likes of ICMP (ping).  (01/03/2018)

  • Layer 4 Sticky Sessions: Layer 4 sticky sessions normally rely on the originator’s IP address or MAC address (in a LAN scenario).  (01/01/2018)

  • Layer 7 Load Balancer : A Layer 7 load balancer is aware of the application protocol’s semantics. For example, a HTTP-aware load balancer can use HTTP codes for health status as well as providing HTTP-level routing and reverse proxying.  (01/02/2018)

  • Layer 7 Stick Sessions: Layer 7 sticky sessions rely on assumptions about the application protocol’s semantics. For example, in the case of HTTP, URL fragments or Cookies may be used to determine unique sessions.  (01/04/2018)

  • Reverse Proxy: A reverse proxy retrieves resources on behalf of a client from one or more servers.   (01/11/2018)

Capability (SDLC)

  • App Store Publishing: The ability to publish a mobile application to an app store such Apple’s App Store or Google Play  (01/04/2018)

  • Apple App Build: The ability to build applications for the MacOS ecosystem (iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, etc.). This capability typically involves running XCode on Apple hardware.  (01/01/2018)

  • Automated Browser Testing: Automated browser testing allows testing a website on a wide variety of web browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.)  (01/09/2019)

  • Automated Mobile App Testing: Automated mobile app testing allows testing a mobile app on a variety of device make and models (as well as OS versions).  (01/02/2018)

  • Automated Testing: Automated testing is typically run by a CI/CD orchestrator upon a commit to a Source Code Management (SCM) system such as Git.  (01/03/2018)

  • CI/CD: Continous Integration & Continuous Delivery/Deployment  (01/08/2018)

  • Manual Testing: Manual testing may involve scripts and coded test cases but is typically triggered through an IDE or a command line interface.  (01/01/2019)

Capability (Security)

  • ALPN: Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation Extension (ALPN) is a TLS extension, used in the HTTP/2 protocol, that helps decreasing website load times and encrypt connections faster by avoiding additional round trips.  (01/06/2020)

  • Anti-Virus Scanning: The ability to scan for known worms, trojans, and other threats.  (01/08/2018)

  • Backup and Restore: The ability to backup data, and restore relevant systems that rely on such data, in the event of a disaster, respectively.  (01/01/2019)

  • Backup and Restore (Long term): The ability to preserve (and restore) data for a long term (months or years), typically using tape technology, and geographically distributed sites.  (01/03/2018)

  • Container Security: The ability to scan container images (as well as live running containers) for security threats.  (01/04/2018)

  • Denial-of-service (DoS): A type of attack that seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.   (01/03/2019)

  • Disk Encryption: The ability to protect data at rest.  (01/02/2018)

  • Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS): Similar to a DoS attack except that the incoming traffic originates from many different sources.  (01/04/2018)

  • IDS: An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations.   (01/01/2018)

  • IPS: A Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is an enhanced form of IDS which adds the ability to block or stop malicious activity.  (01/12/2019)

  • Key Management: The ability to generate, exchange, store, use, and destroy cryptographic keys.  (01/05/2019)

  • One-way TLS termination (TLS): This is the capability used for most public-facing Internet websites.  (01/10/2019)

  • OS Patching: The ability to patch an OS and its packages to mitigate vulnerabilities and bugs.  (01/03/2018)

  • Post-Quantum TLS: A project to make TLS resistant to future attacks from quantum computers.  (01/10/2020)

  • Private CA: Similar to a Public CA but applicable in the context of private networks/intranets without access to the public Internet.  (01/07/2019)

  • Privileged Access Management (PAM): A set of cybersecurity strategies and technologies for exerting control over the elevated (“privileged”) access and permissions for users, accounts, processes, and systems across an IT environment.  (20/07/2020)

  • Public CA: A Certificate Authority (CA) typically generates, issues, and manages public and private SSL/TLS certificates for publicly accessible websites.  (01/02/2018)

  • Rating / Limiting (e.g. max TPS): CA-API-Authn  (01/11/2018)

  • Stateful Firewall: A statefull firewall is TCP-aware and does not require the specification for outbound access for the likes of HTTP, SSH, etc.  (01/12/2019)

  • Stateless Firewall: A stateless firewall operates at the raw IP packet level and requires the specification of both inbound and outbound access for “duplex” protocols like HTTP, SSH, etc.  (01/01/2018)

  • Two-way TLS termination (mTLS): This capability requires clients to be authenticated with the server as well. It is typically used in B2B scenarios.  (01/03/2018)

Capability (Storage)

  • Block Storage: The abstraction used for most file systems to interact with storage interfaces (SCSI, SAN, etc.) and their underlying media.  (01/10/2019)

  • NAS: Network-Attached Storage (NAS) provides file-level (as opposed to block-level) storage to a heterogeneous group of clients.   (01/11/2018)

  • Object Storage: The ability to store structured and unstructured data objects directly (images, documents, etc.) without (necessarily) the use of a hierarchical file system.  (01/03/2019)

  • SAN: A storage area network (SAN) provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage.   (01/01/2018)

Certificate Management

  • AWS Certificate Manager: AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) provisions and deploys public and private (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and internal connected resources.   (01/12/2019)

CI/CD Tooling

  • Amazon CodeGuru: Automated code reviews. Initially centred on Java.  (07/02/2020)

  • Amazon OpsWorks: AWS OpsWorks is essentially a managed Chef or Puppet solution.  (01/03/2018)

  • AWS CodeBuild: AWS CloudBuild is a continuous integration solution. It’s Amazon answer to Jenkins.  (01/04/2018)

  • AWS CodeCommit: AWS CodeCommit is a SCM solution based on private Git repositories. It’s AWS answer to private GitHub.  (01/09/2019)

  • AWS CodeDeploy: AWS Deploy is a solution to automate deployments to compute platforms such as EC2, Lambda and so on.  (01/05/2018)

  • AWS CodePipeline: AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery solution.  (01/02/2018)

  • AWS CodeStar: AWS CodeStar is a solution to manage, develop, build and deploy applications.  (01/08/2018)

  • Bamboo: Atlassian Bamboo is a CI/CD suite that is convenient for organisations that are already invested in the Atlassian ecosystem (e.g. Confluence, JIRA, etc.)   (01/04/2018)

  • BuildKite: BuildKite is a SaaS CI solution that differentiates itself from other similar managed solutions by providing “build agents” that run locally on one’s machines (Linux, MacOS, etc) as opposed to the build process itself running in the cloud.  (01/01/2018)

  • Checkmarkx Software Security Platform: An integrated security suite including SAST, SCA, and IAST capabilities.  (14/02/2020)

  • CircleCI: CircleCI is a CI/CD solution primarily consumed in a SaaS form, although an on-prem version is also available. It is liked by developers due to its simple YAML-based configuration. It supports a limited number of languages out-of-the-box.  (01/01/2019)

  • Codacy: A static code analysis tool that supports more than 30 different languages and file formats.  (15/02/2020)

  • CodeScan: An end-to-end static code analysis solution built exclusively to maintain quality and security for the Salesforce platform.   (17/10/2020)

  • CodeShip: CloudBees CodeShip is a cloud-based CI/CD solution. Although CloudBees is the commercial wing for Jenkins, CodeShip is the result of an acquisition. It is not managed Jenkins.  (01/02/2018)

  • DeepCode: DeepCode is an advanced semantic code analyser (automated “code reviews”) based on AI technology. It supports Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python.  (19/02/2020)

  • Fortify Static Code Analyzer: Fortify checks code written in most major languages (Java, C#, JavaScript, Swift, C, etc.) for security vulnerabilities.  (01/11/2018)

  • Gitlab: An end-to-end CI/CD SaaS solution that capitalises on its association with Git.   (01/12/2019)

  • GoCD: GoCD is a CI/CD tool with special focus on Continuous Delivery (CD), hence the name. It was originally developed by ThoughtWorks and it is now published under the Apache 2.0 licence.  (01/04/2018)

  • Jenkins: Jenkins was one of the first CI tools and it is therefore a relatively modern “legacy” in numerous organisations. Its infamous nature (relative to the competition) was due to its sluggish MVC interface and the use of external build scripts rather than a simpler declarative/descriptive approach. Jenkins has evolved and corrected most of its historical drawbacks but the competition has caught up long before.  (01/02/2018)

  • Muse: A SAST solution that covers a range of bug categories including performance, reliability, security, and style/standards and is especially focused on finding deep inter-procedural bugs.  (17/10/2020)

  • NextGen Code Analysis: ShiftLeft NextGen Static Analysis (NG SAST) is a solution based on the notion of a workflow that inserts into pull requests and enables developers to find and fix vulnerabilities without ever leaving their development environment.   (17/10/2020)

  • Polaris: The Synopsis Polaris Software Integrity Platform is an end-to-end SDLC, DevSecOps solution which includes IDE plug-ins, SAST and IAST tools, and integration with popular CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, etc.  (17/10/2020)

  • Rapid Deploy: MidVision Rapid Deploy is a tool for release automation, orchestration, and management. Unlike other tools, it does not try to cover the end-to-end CI/CD pipeline and focus on the release aspect only, hopefully well.  (01/12/2019)

  • Secure Code Warrior: A platform that trains and equips developers to think and act with a security mindset as they build and verify their skills, gain real-time advice and monitor skill development. This is different from the approach taken by SAST tools that apply only after the code is written.   (17/10/2020)

  • Sigrid: A software assurance platform which uses code analysis based on ISO 25010.  (22/05/2020)

  • SonarCloud: SonarCloud is SonarQube’s SaaS version.  (15/02/2020)

  • SonarQube: SonarQube checks code written in most major languages for code smells, bugs and security vulnerabilities.  (01/03/2018)

  • TeamCity: A CI tool by the creators of IntelliJ IDEA. Popular in Java and Kotlin shops where JetBrains products are liked.  (17/03/2020)

  • Thunderscan: DefenseCode Thunderscan SAST is a solution that, in addition to static code analysis of the selected code base, it also scans dependencies for known vulnerabilities and associated CVE entries. It has a focus on compliance including PCI-DSS and HIPPA, among others.  (17/10/2020)

  • TravisCI: TravisCI is similar to CircleCI in that is is based on a lightweight YAML syntax and has a snappier feel compared to the likes of Jenkins. It supports more languages out-of-the-box than CircleCI, but, at the time of writing, the cost of the enterprise licence seems to be higher.  (01/07/2019)

  • UrbanCode Deploy: IBM UrbanCode Deploy is a deployment and release management suite popular in IBM shops and/or organisations who prefer big vendor, commercially supported software.  (01/01/2018)

  • Veracode: A platform that includes security feedback in the IDE as well as an end-to-end stack consisting of SAST, DAST, SCA, as well as manual penetration testing capabilities, all in one centralised view.  (17/10/2020)

  • WebScanner: DefenseCode WebScanner DAST is solution for security audits of active web applications (websites). WebScanner will test a website’s security by carrying out attacks (SQL Injection, XSS, etc.) including OWASP Top 10.  (17/10/2020)

  • Xanitizer: A SAST solution that performs security analysis directly on one’s GitHub repository provides the results on GitHub’s ecurity tab.  (17/10/2020)

CI/CD Tooling (Databases)

  • Flyway: A database migration tool that differentiates itself from Liquibase by using plain SQL statements rather than XML.  (01/03/2019)

  • Liquibase: Liquibase is library for tracking, managing and applying database schema changes. It is particularly popular in Agile/DevOps environments in which schema changes need to be a seamless aspect of the build/deploy process.  (01/05/2019)

Cloud

Cloud (Hybrid)

  • Anthos: A hybrid multi-cloud/on-prem solution based on Kubernetes and Knative by Google.  (01/11/2018)

  • Arc: A hybrid multi-cloud/on-prem solution based on Kubernetes by Microsoft.  (01/03/2019)

  • Cloud@Customer: Oracle’s flavour of an on-prem based, private cloud solution.  (14/07/2020)

  • IBM Cloud Paks: A control plane on top of Red Hat OpenShift with meant to make easier the deployment of analytics workloads across a multi-cloud estate.  (09/01/2020)

  • KubeVirt: Virtual Machine Management on Kubernetes  (05/01/2020)

  • Outposts: Amazon Outposts is a solution to extend AWS capabilities into the data centre using either AWS hardware or VMWare.  (13/01/2020)

Cloud Fast Lane Network Application Access

  • AWS Global Accelerator: A service that uses the AWS global network to optimise the path from your users to your applications, improving the performance of your traffic by as much as 60%.  (25/06/2020)

  • Azure Front Door: A hybrid web exposure service including global network acceleration, SSL termination, web application firewalls capabilities and much more.  (29/06/2020)

Cloud Management and Operational Tooling

  • Cloudockit: Clodockit allows to generate and edit technical diagrams for cloud infrastructures. It supports AWS, GCP, Azure & Alibaba.  (01/02/2018)

  • Diagrams as Code: A tool that allows to draw a cloud system architecture in Python code.  (22/05/2020)

Cloud Migration

  • Application Discovery Service: AWS Application Discovery Service gathers information on-premises data centres to plan the migration of their deployed resources to AWS.  (01/08/2018)

  • Atrio: A tool to discover the most optimal environment (out of on-prem and various cloud vendors) to run a given type of workload.  (01/04/2018)

  • AWS App2Container: A tool for modernizing .NET and Java applications into containerized applications which produces ECS Task definitions and Kubernetes Pod manifests.  (01/07/2020)

  • AWS Cloud Optimizer: A service that recommends optimal AWS EC2 resources to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics.  (05/01/2020)

  • AWS Database Migration Service: AWS Database Migration service provides a homogenous (e.g. Oracle to Oracle) as well as heterogeneous (Oracle to Aurora) migration solution using a “hot” mechanisms. The solution may also be used for disaster recovery/high availability purposes.   (01/12/2019)

  • AWS Migration Hub: AWS Migration Hub helps track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions.  (01/02/2018)

  • AWS Server Migration Service: AWS Server Migration Service is an agentless solution to replicate live server volumes and create Amazon Machine Images (AMI). It is, essentially, a “compute” migration tool.  (01/12/2019)

  • Cloud Genera: Cloud Genera analyses a portfolio of existing applications and provides recommendations as to what to do next (retain, migrate, etc.) and which is the most appropriate landing site from a range of options (AWS, Azure, Monolithic Docker, etc). It ingests pricing information from the marketplace automatically so it helps form a budget picture about the end state of the migrated portfolio.  (01/02/2018)

  • Cloudability: A SaaS tool to understand how much a business is spending on cloud computing services using dashboards, alerts, etc.  (01/03/2018)

  • CloudEndure Migration: An agent-based solution which continually replicates source machines into a staging area in AWS without causing downtime or impacting performance. When ready to launch the production machines, CloudEndure Migration automatically converts the machines from their source infrastructure into the AWS infrastructure so they can boot and run natively in AWS.  (01/06/2020)

  • Corent: Corent “cloudifies” an application so that it can be run in a SaaS model. The scope includes the entire application’s stack (database, application server, etc.)   (01/07/2019)

  • Densify: Densify helps optimise run costs in the large cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) by analysing applications' resource consumption and suggesting rationalisation alternatives.  (01/01/2018)

  • Device42: A discovery and asset management for data center and cloud based on agentless technology.  (27/07/2020)

  • DMS: Database Migration Service (DMS) is a service to migrate on-prem legacy databases to GCP’s Cloud SQL.  (14/11/2020)

  • V-Migrate: V-Migrate migrates applications from old versions of Windows (e.g. 2003) to newer ones (e.g. 2016) by isolating dependencies and creating a soft container layer to host them in the new environment.  (01/11/2018)

Cloud Paradigms

  • FaaS: Function as a Service (FaaS) is a more extreme take on the PaaS paradigm since it not only assumes a given programming language but it also abstracts away from the program’s entry point. For example, in a regular PaaS, the programmer has to provide the embedded HTTP server for a microservice, whereas in a FaaS platform, the HTTP is implemented by the platform.  (01/01/2019)

  • HCI: Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is characterised by being fully software-defined and by virtualising all elements of the stack (compute, storage, etc.). It is a term increasingly used by Cloud vendors to define their on-prem solutions wherein “convergence” is, naturally, with their cloud native offerings.  (06/01/2020)

  • IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) abstracts away from the hardware (blades, racks, storage devices and so on) but it typically leaves operating system installation and further software-related concerns to the customer.  (01/12/2019)

  • PaaS: A Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering typically involves an application server (or runtime environment) so that the customer is only responsible for providing high-level software artefacts such as JAR files in Java or DLL assemblies in .NET. It is appropriate for monoglot teams targeting one of the PaaS' supported languages who write functionally-rich rather than performance-tuned code; this is because compiling custom kernels or tuning the underlying runtime environment (e.g. JVM heap settings) is typically beyond the intended level of abstraction conceived under the paradigm.  (01/02/2018)

  • SaaS: Software as a Service (SaaS) typically refers to third-party services that can only be used in a cloud fashion, such as SalesForce or Expensify, or that offer a choice between SaaS and custom installation (be it on-premise or in the cloud) such as Atlassian Confluence. In this sense, SaaS is a model for third-party vendors for offering one’s software to customers rather than a workload abstraction level such as IaaS, Paas, and FaaS.  (01/10/2019)

Cloud Physical Appliance

  • Amazon Snowball: Amazon Snowball is a service to get data in and out of AWS by means of a physical, encrypted storage device that is shipped to customers. It is also bundled with a file transfer utility since the encryption mechanism does not allow interacting directly with the hardware.  (01/05/2018)

  • AWS Snowcone: The smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices, weighing roughly 2kg.   (18/06/2020)

Cloud Vendors

  • Aiven: A vendor that offers open source backing stores (Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, etc.), across major public clouds, in a SaaS/managed basis.   (07/10/2020)

  • Amazon Web Services: Amazon Web Services (AWS), started in 2006, was the first hosting company that took the concept of elasticity to the extreme that created a new industry altogether: the cloud. Although today AWS faces competition from a number of challengers, it still offers the largest number of “as a service” products.   (01/04/2018)

  • Azure: Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services division, may appear to be a cloud for “Microsoft Windows” software but this is a misconception since it has a clear Linux-first strategy. Examples are the Azure Container Service (AKS) which runs on Kubernetes, the native Linux support in .NET Core and the availability of “as a service” products typical of Linux ecosystems such as Redis.  (01/03/2018)

  • Digital Ocean: A challenger cloud vendor which offers a VMs, managed Kubernetes, and a PaaS at rock-bottom prices.  (08/10/2020)

  • Google Cloud Platform: Google’s cloud platform focuses on Google-specific “as a service” offerings primarily in the ML/AI space. One of its key services is Spanner; a geo-distributed SQL database that relies on atomic clocks for its transactional guarantees. Like AWS and Azure, it also offers the typical compute, storage, and networking, software-defined services but it focuses more on Kubernetes and Google App Engine for PaaS/FaaS workloads.  (01/11/2018)

  • IBM Cloud: IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix) is attractive not necessarily to “IBM legacy shops” but to those organisations that expect intense use of IBM cloud offerings such as Watson.  (01/05/2019)

  • Mesosphere DC/OS: Mesosphere DC/OS is a private cloud environment based on Apache Mesos aimed at running multiple-paradigm workloads (e.g. vanilla Linux, VM-based, vanilla Docker, Kubernetes/Docker, etc)  (01/03/2018)

  • OpenShift Online: RedHat OpenShift Online is a heavily customised managed Kubernetes service that, similarly to what Samsung does to Android, tries to impose a variety of lock-in inducive proprietary services. For example, most DockerHub public images (e.g. Nginx) fail to run because RedHat wants images to run under an random user id rather than root.  (01/08/2018)

  • Rackspace: Rackspace was a traditionally hosting provider that is trying to reinvent itself as a cloud alternative to the big three.  (01/01/2018)

  • RedHat OpenShift: OpenShift is RedHat’s answer to the need of a commercially supported Kubernetes implementation for on-premise (private cloud) use cases. Other than commercial support, a number of features are added such as VM orchestration, dashboards, installation of backing services using a “push button” approach and so on.  (01/09/2019)

Cognitive (Machine Learning, AI, etc.)

  • Amazon Forecast: A machine learning service that combines time series data with additional variables to build forecasts. Based on the same technology as Amazon.com.  (07/08/2020)

  • Amazon Lex: Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces (namely chatbots).  (01/01/2018)

  • Amazon Monitron: An end-to-end system that uses machine learning (ML) to detect abnormal behaviour (using sensors to capture vibration and temperature data from equipment) in industrial machinery, enabling to implement predictive maintenance and reduce unplanned downtime.  (01/12/2020)

  • Amazon Rekognition: Amazon Rekognition provides out-of-the-box image and video analysis (identification of text, people, objects, etc.) capabilities.  (01/12/2019)

  • Amazon SageMaker: Amazon SageMaker is a managed machine learning (ML) solution offering frameworks such as MXNet, TensorFlow, and Chainer, among others.  (01/05/2018)

  • AWS Deeplens: AWS DeepLens is a computer vision (deep learning, model training, etc.) service.  (01/12/2019)

  • AWS Panorama: A machine learning appliance and Software Development Kit (SDK) to bring computer vision (CV) to on-premises cameras to make predictions locally with high accuracy and low latency.   (01/12/2020)

  • Document AI: A machine learning platform to analyse and get insights from documents.  (09/11/2020)

  • Google AI Platform: A platform to train machine learning models at scale, by hosting trained models in the cloud, and using said models to make predictions about new data.  (01/10/2020)

Compliance

  • AML: Anti-money laundering (AML) refers to the laws, regulations and procedures intended to prevent criminals from disguising illegally obtained funds as legitimate income.   (05/11/2020)

  • CDD: Customer Due Dilligence (CDD) information comprises the facts about a customer that should enable an organisation to assess the extent to which the customer exposes it to a range of risks. These risks include money laundering and terrorist financing.   (11/11/2020)

  • Dodd Frank: The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, enacted in 2010, created financial regulatory processes to limit risk by enforcing transparency and accountability.   (14/09/2020)

  • GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data pertaining protection, privacy, and its transfer outside the EU and the EEA.   (10/11/2020)

  • KYC: Know Your Customer (KYC) is a series of guidelines in financial services that require institutions to verify the identity, suitability, and risks involved with maintaining a business relationship. The procedures fit within the broader scope of a bank’s AML policy.  (05/11/2020)

  • NYDFS: The New York State’s Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) came into effect 2017. It requires all financial services companies that fall under NYDFS supervision to implement security measures in order to protect themselves against cyber attacks.  (14/09/2020)

  • PCI DSS: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an information security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes. It is in effect since 2004.  (14/09/2020)

  • Personal Data: Information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual. Information which has had identifiers removed or replaced in order to pseudonymise the data is still personal data for the purposes of GDPR.  (09/11/2020)

  • PII: Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is the term used in the United States for what is referred as personal data in Europe within the context of the GDPR legislation.  (09/11/2020)

  • PSD2: The PSD2 (Payments Service Providers Directive Version Two) is a European regulation for electronic payment services enacted in 2013. It seeks to make payments more secure via the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirement, and boost innovation and help banking services adapt to new technologies, via the Open Banking requirement.  (14/09/2020)

  • SAR: A Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) is a document that financial institutions, and those associated with their business, must file whenever there is a suspected case of money laundering or fraud.  (12/11/2020)

  • SOX 2002: The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 s a law the U.S. Congress passed on that year to help protect investors from fraudulent financial reporting by corporations.  (14/09/2020)

Compute Virtualisation Platform

  • Amazon EC2: Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is how AWS refers to their virtualisation capabilities.  (01/12/2019)

  • Compute Engine: Google’s capability for launching and managing VMs.  (13/10/2020)

Container and Artifact Repository

  • Amazon ECR: Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is Amazon’s own container registry, which integrates with the rest of its ecosystem including Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and AWS Fargate.  (01/12/2020)

  • Amazon ECR Public Gallery: A platform to share and deploy container images, publicly and privately, similar to Docker Hub.  (01/12/2020)

  • Artifact Registry: Google’s de facto service to manange to store and manage language packages (such as Maven and npm) as well as container images.  (01/12/2020)

  • Artifactory: The artifact repository which is popular with companies who were not tied up to Nexus in the first place.  (01/11/2018)

  • AWS CodeArtifact: A fully managed software artifact repository that works with commonly used package managers and build tools such as Maven and Gradle (Java), npm and yarn (JavaScript), pip and twine (Python).  (12/06/2020)

  • Docker Hub: The canonical public container registry for Docker images. It also supports private repositories.  (01/12/2020)

  • Nexus: Nexus started off initially as a Maven repository but today it covers a diverse number of artifact types including Docker images.  (01/02/2018)

  • Perforce Helix Core: Helix Core is a artifact repository (and management) solution that supports numerous build artifacts: Maven, Ivy, Docker, Bower, NuGet, and npm.  (01/09/2019)

Container Technology

  • 50 Days from Zero to Hero: Kubernetes Learning Path 2.0 by Microsoft.  (01/04/2018)

  • Apache OpenWhisk: A solution to provide a DIY lambda platform supported by containers using Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, or Docker Compose.  (24/01/2020)

  • Buildpacks: Buildpacks specify a container’s build steps for runtime use (as opposed to the Docker approach in which the result is crystalised in a Docker image). Buildpacks were first conceived by Heroku in 2011. Since then, they have been adopted by Cloud Foundry and other PaaS such as Google App Engine, Gitlab, Knative, Deis, Dokku, and Drie.   (07/10/2020)

  • Cloudstate: A specification, protocol, and reference implementation for providing distributed state management patterns (CQRS, ES, CRDTs, etc) suitable for Serverless computing.   (27/10/2020)

  • Docker: Docker is the world’s most popular container technology. Docker today, unless otherwise specified, typically refers to the Docker “image format” rather than the Docker Runtime offered by Docker Inc.  (01/01/2018)

  • Gremlin: Chaos Engineering for Kubernetes and Cloud (serverless, etc.) platforms.  (01/07/2018)

  • Helm: A package manger for for Kubernetes artifacts.  (01/12/2019)

  • Jib: A Maven/Gradle plug-in that builds optimised Docker and OCI images for Java applications without a Docker daemon and without in-depth Docker expertise.  (02/11/2020)

  • Juju: A framework to write and deploy universal operators for K8s as well as traditional Linux and Windows apps on bare metal, VMWare and IAAS. Operators help set up complex services such as backing stores (e.g. RabbitMQ, PostresSQL). A curated list of operators are provided at charmhub.io  (15/11/2020)

  • Kata Containers: An open source project to run containers in isolated VMs whilst maintaining compatibility with the traditional Docker ecosystem by implementing the Open Container Initiative (OCI) interface. It is the result of merging two projects: Intel Clear Containers and Hyper runV.   (03/11/2020)

  • Keptn: A Kubernetes event-based control plane for continuous delivery and automated operations for cloud-native applications.  (17/07/2020)

  • Knative: Knative allows to push code directly onto a Kubernetes cluster so that it will be compiled and matched with its dependencies automatically (similarly to PCF’s build packs). It is also described as a means to provide FaaS capabilities to Kubernentes.  (01/02/2018)

  • Kubectl Tree: Visualisation of Kubernetes object dependencies as a tree.  (13/01/2020)

  • Kubeless: Another FaaS (Function as a Service) a.k.a. Serverless framework that runs on top of Kubernetes.  (24/01/2020)

  • Kubernetes: Kubernetes is a container orchestration software open sourced by Google in 2015 that is today managed by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Every large cloud provider has a managed implementation of it (e.g. EKS, AKS, GKE)  (01/12/2019)

  • Kubernetes Ingress Controllers: Detailed explenation of various Kuberentes Layer-7 services (Nginx, HAProxy, etc.), including the vanilla Kubernetes Ingress conroller itself.  (01/04/2018)

  • Mesos: Apache Mesos is a high level management level for orchestrating VMs, Containers and bare software. It was one of the most visible container orchestration contenders before the rise of Kubernetes.  (01/01/2019)

  • Nomad: Nomad, an alternative to Kubernetes, is an orchestrator that enables to deploy, manage, and scale any application, containerised, legacy or batch jobs, across multiple regions, on private and public clouds.   (26/03/2020)

  • OPA: Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across cloud native stacks. It is a CNCF project and geared primarily at Kubernetes use cases.  (13/10/2020)

  • Podman: Podman allows running Docker images without the need for a Docker deameon.  (01/08/2018)

  • Shipa: A solution to organise Kubernetes resources into application landing pads so that it is easier for developers and administrators alike to manage related components in a uniform manner.  (04/09/2020)

  • Skupper: Multicloud communication for Kubernetes: A solution for Kubernetes federation.  (08/01/2020)

  • Squash: A tool to debug applications as they run in a Kubernetes cluster.  (01/02/2018)

  • Stern: Tailing of multiple Pods and Containers in a centralised fashion.  (01/05/2018)

  • Tanzu Application Catalogue: A solution to manage curated, vulnerability-scanned, private Docker images and Heml charts.  (25/03/2020)

  • WeaveFlux: A tool that facilitates applying GitOps principles to Kubernetes clusters  (02/01/2020)

Container Technology (Federated Kubernetes)

  • Appvia Kore: A management platform to allow teams to work with Kuberentes more effectively.  (17/07/2020)

  • Rafay: A solution for multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments across multiple cloud managed services and on-prem stacks.  (13/01/2020)

  • Rancher: Rancher is a management layer to deploy and manage Kubernetes across various private and public environments.  (01/05/2018)

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

  • Akamai: Akami introduced a CDN offering to the marketplace years before cloud computing (e.g. AWS) was a reality. Today it suffers from extreme competition from vendors that also are strong in their security offering like Cloudflare as well as from the convenience of using CDN services native to a given cloud such as Amazon CloudFront.  (01/02/2018)

  • Amazon CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront is the default option for AWS-based services since it can be instrumented programatically. However, in a multi-cloud or public/on-premise scenario, it may be a less attractive option.  (01/12/2019)

  • Cloudflare CDN: Cloudflare is one of the most rapidly growing CDN vendors with backing from Microsoft, Google & IBM. Although cloudflare is primarily an internet security service (e.g. prevention from DDoS attacks), integrating security and caching is convenient since it reduces the number of roundtrips to the origin servers.  (01/04/2018)

  • CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront is AWS' de facto CDN and is available at numerous edge locations across the world.  (01/05/2019)

Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • Django: A fully configurable CMS written in Python. A hybrid between Ruby on Rails and WordPress.  (15/01/2020)

  • Ghost: A modern CMS written in Node.Js that claims to be 20 times faster than WordPress.  (15/01/2020)

Data Science (Python Frameworks)

  • Flyte: A Python-based DSL to create concurrent and scalable workflows for machine learning and data processing.  (08/01/2020)

  • Keras: A Python API to experiment with neural networks that runs on top of either TensorFlow, Theano, or CNTK.  (02/01/2020)

  • Matplotlib: A Python library for data visualisation (bars, pies, plotting, etc.)  (02/01/2020)

  • Numpy: A Python library for numerical computing (arrays, matrices, etc.)  (02/01/2020)

  • Pandas: A Python library for data computation and analysis, a.k.a. “Excel for Python”.  (02/01/2020)

  • PyTorch: A Python framework for machine learning that is typically considered a friendlier alternative to TensorFlow.  (14/01/2020)

  • Scikit-Learn: A Python machine learning framework based built on NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib which implements typical algorithms such as classification, regression, clustering, etc.  (18/10/2020)

  • Scipy: A Python library for scientific computing (signal processing, integration, solving ODEs, linear algebra, etc.)  (02/01/2020)

  • TensorFlow: A Python framework to build Machine Learning (ML) models   (02/01/2020)

Data Serialisation

  • ASN.1: A formal notation used for describing data transmitted by telecommunications protocols, regardless of language implementation and physical representation of these data, whatever the application, whether complex or very simple.  (18/08/2020)

  • Avro: Avro is a binary data serialization system which is characterised by encoding the schema together with the message. This avoids the burden of stub/skeleton generation stages.  (01/09/2019)

  • ORC: Apache ORC is a self-describing, type-aware columnar file format for Hadoop workloads. It is optimised for streaming reads, but with integrated support for finding required rows quickly.  (10/01/2020)

  • Parquet: A a columnar storage format available for the Hadoop ecosystem.  (10/01/2020)

  • Protocol Buffers: Protocol Buffers is Google’s answer to the need for a binary data serialization system. It relies in a custom schema language and static generation of code from it to target languages such as C++, Java, C#, Python and so on. Its main goal is interoperability among all the supported languages.  (01/03/2018)

  • Thrift: Thrift is Facebook’s answer to the need for binary data serialization system. Like Google’s Protocol Buffer, it relies on a schema and code generation paradigm. It is arguably distinguished by official support for a wider number of programming languages such as OCaml, Smalltalk, and Haskell.  (01/07/2019)

  • TLV: TLV (Type-Length-Value) is an encoding scheme used in data communication protocols.  (05/09/2020)

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

  • Amazon QuickSight: A Business Intelligence (BI) service to build visualizations and perform ad-hoc analysis from data.  (01/08/2018)

  • Amazon QuickSight Q: A machine learning (ML) powered capability that uses natural language processing to answer business questions upon data.  (01/12/2020)

  • Amazon Red Shift: Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing solution (analytics, business intelligence, etc) for big data sets stored using a column-oriented DBMS principle. Its current implementation is based on PostgreSQL.  (01/01/2018)

  • Athena: Amazon Athena is an serverless, interactive query service to analyse data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.  (01/12/2019)

  • AWS Data Pipeline: AWS Data Pipeline is a web service to process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources, at specified intervals.   (01/01/2019)

  • AWS Glue: AWS Glue is a managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service based on Apache Spark.  (01/03/2018)

  • AWS Glue Elastic Views: A capability to create materialised views from multiple data sources using SQL and without the need of writing custom, application-level code.  (01/12/2020)

Development Paradigms

  • ATDD: Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) is an approach to testing based on the idea that requirements should be formulated in the form of an acceptance test that can be automated. Unlike BDD, it is not necessarily concerned with business domain aspects.  (01/05/2018)

  • BDD: Behavioural-Driven Development (BDD) applies ideas from Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to the checking of software properties. BDD may be considered a level of abstraction higher than TDD wherein the context is the business domain and the properties to be verified are expressed in human terms; this is typically achieved using a DSL such as Cucumber.  (01/03/2018)

  • DevSecOps: DevSecOps is a paradigm in which developer, security and operations members of staff form part of one single team without a “hand off” process. Informally, DevSecOps embeds CI/CD practices and tooling.  (01/02/2018)

  • Kabnan: Kanban is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing based on the Toyota just-in-time manufacturing (JIT) principles that has been adopted by the software community as another answer to the software crisis. Kanban, at its core, is essentially about aligning inventory levels with actual consumption and identifying bottlenecks.  (01/10/2019)

  • Lean Software Development: Lean Software Development (LSI) is another software development methodology transplanted from the manufacturing industry (The Toyota Production System). It is based on the seven principles: eliminate waste, amplify learning, decide as late as possible, deliver as fast as possible, empower the team, build integrity in, see the whole.  (01/11/2018)

  • SCRUM: One of the most popular “Agile” methodologies with a rich business ecosystem including trainers, certifications and so on.  (01/04/2018)

  • TDD: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development paradigm which holds a a central belief that all software requirements must be expressable in the form of test cases. Software development progress is measured in terms of how many test cases have “passed”.  (01/02/2018)

Development Tools

  • Asciicast2gif: A a tool for generating GIF animations from asciicast files recorded by asciinema.  (22/05/2020)

  • Asciinema: A tool to record and share terminal sessions in a structured format so that code can be copy-pasted.  (22/05/2020)

  • Cloud 9: Cloud 9 is a cloud/web-browser based IDE. Its main benefit is that it is integrated with Lambda and its supported languages so that the entire SDLC can take place entirely in the cloud.  (01/12/2019)

  • IDEA: IntelliJ IDEA is, arguably, the most popular IDE in the JVM ecosystem. This has been largely due to its constant improvement over the years whilst Eclipse has stagnated.  (01/04/2018)

  • Make: Traditional UNIX build tool  (01/05/2018)

  • MS Build: Microsoft Build Tool for .NET projects  (01/01/2018)

  • Vagrant: HashiCorp Vagrant is a tool to create disposable development environments on local machines by hiding the VM orchestration boiler plate from the developer.  (01/03/2019)

  • Visual Studio: Microsoft Visual Studio is a complex, multi-platform (Windows, Android, iOS, etc.) IDE that, in spite of being the de facto .NET development platform, it supports a wide number of third party languages and landing environments.  (01/02/2018)

  • Visual Studio Code: Visual Studio Code may be considered Microsoft Visual Studio Lite but its monthly release cycle and a rich plug-in ecosystem is gradually turning it into one of the most flexible IDEs in the marketplace. Its multi-platform support (Windows, Linux, MacOSX) is also another of its key differentiating properties. Critics argue over its use of Electron (a Chrome-based web framework) rather than native GUI rendering capabilities.  (01/12/2019)

Directory and Identity Services

  • Amazon Cognito: Amazon Cognito provides user sign-up, sign-in, and access control web and mobile application. It supports social identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.  (01/03/2018)

  • AWS Directory Service: AWS Directory Service is, essentially, Microsoft Active Directory on a managed basis with built-in integration with AWS products.  (01/02/2018)

Distributed Application Coordination

  • Etcd: Etcd is a distributed, consistent key value store that, like most solutions in its category, gracefully handles leader elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the leader. Its flagship users are Kubernetes and CloudFoundry.  (01/05/2019)

  • ZooKeeper: ZooKeeper is a centralised service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.   (01/05/2018)

DNS

  • Amazon Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is AWS' de facto DNS service.  (01/07/2019)

Dot Net Modernisation

  • Porting Assistant for .NET: An analysis tool that scans .NET Framework applications and generates a .NET Core compatibility assessment for the purpose of porting .NET applications to Linux.  (14/07/2020)

  • Try-Convert: A simple open source tool to help in migrating .NET Framework projects to .NET Core.  (02/11/2020)

Enterprise Collaboration

  • Amazon WorkMail: Amazon WorkMail is a email and calendar solution similar to Outlook 365 or Google Mail/Calendar that offers both a web-based interface and fat client support (i.e. IMAP.)  (01/03/2018)

  • Chime: Amazon Chime is a video and audio conference system similar to WebEx or Zoom.  (01/08/2018)

  • Chime: A SaaS project and task management solution.  (09/08/2020)

  • Slack: Slack is a social collaboration tool that is popular in the startup scene.  (01/04/2018)

  • Trello: Trello is a social collaboration tool with focus on Agile project management (Kanban boards, etc.)  (01/02/2018)

Enterprise Customer Support

  • Amazon Connect: Amazon Connect helps businesses create an end-to-end customer service capability including contact flows, telephony integration, human and non-human touch points, among others.  (01/01/2019)

  • Amazon Connect (Contact Lens): A machine learning-based service that helps contact center supervisors understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations using NLP/speech-to-text capabilities.  (20/08/2020)

Enterprise Desktop

  • Amazon WorkSpaces: Amazon WorkSpaces is a remote desktop solution (VDI) that supports both Windows and Linux.   (01/05/2018)

  • AppStream: Amazon AppStream is similar to a remote desktop solution (VDI) except that it is able to project discrete applications directly rather than entire desktops. Applications are also typically launched directly on the web browser without the need of a fat client.  (01/02/2018)

Enterprise Software

  • iServer Portal: Orbus iServer Portal is a web-based repository for Enterprise Architecture (EA) assets  (01/02/2018)

Enterprise Software (Banking)

  • 10x Banking: A modern, cloud-native platform for core banking.  (17/07/2020)

  • Backbase: Backbase is an omni-channel digital banking solution.  (01/11/2018)

  • Lending DocAI: A solution to automate mortgage document processing powered by Google Cloud’s OCR and natural language processing capabilities.  (24/10/2020)

  • OpenSpan: OpenSpan (Vasco) is an identity and authentication suite for banks (MFA hardware authenticators, mobile-based ones, etc.)  (01/12/2019)

  • Temenos: Temenos is an all-round banking suite including modules for different functions such as core banking, payments, wealth management, etc.  (01/01/2018)

Enterprise Software (Payments)

  • Finastra GPP: Finastra Fusion Global PAYplus (GPP) is one the largest enterprise payment platforms. It is preferred mainly by traditional banks.  (10/11/2020)

  • Sila: An API for banking, digital wallet & ACH payments.  (09/11/2020)

  • Tink: A payments and personal finance platform for European banking that is fully open banking compliant (PSD2). It also has account aggregation and data enrichment capabilities.  (19/10/2020)

  • Velo: A cloud native payments solution for high volume, low value, irregular payments.  (18/08/2020)

  • Volante: A payments platform supporting numerous payment rails (ACH, SEPA, SWIFT, etc),   (09/11/2020)

Enterprise Storage

  • SwiftStack: SwiftStack helps create a hybrid pool of storage consisting of local resources and public cloud storage such as Amazon S3 and/or Google Cloud Storage.  (01/02/2018)

Financial Data Exchange Standards

  • FIX: The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) is a non-proprietary, free and open standard protocol used by buy and sell-side firms, trading platforms and regulators to communicate trade information.   (20/10/2020)

  • FpML: Financial products Markup Language (FpML) is the open source XML standard for electronic dealing and processing of derivatives. It establishes the industry protocol for sharing information on, and dealing in, financial derivatives and structured products.   (20/10/2020)

  • ISO 15022: The predominant securities standard in cross-border settlement, reconciliation and corporate action processing.   (20/10/2020)

  • ISO 20022: A single standardisation approach (methodology, process, repository) to be used by all financial standards initiatives.  (20/10/2020)

  • ISO 8583: The standard used by nearly all credit and debit card transactions, including ATMs.   (20/10/2020)

  • SWIFT MT: The standard for messaging in correspondent banking, foreign exchange and documentary credits.   (20/10/2020)

Formal Methods

GCP Services

  • 12 Factor App on GCP: Concrete application of 12 factor app principles in GCP.  (01/12/2019)

  • Certificate Authority Service: A solution to automate, and customize the deployment, management, and security of private certificate authorities (CA).  (25/10/2020)

  • Gcloud Cheat Sheet: PDF document that contains the most used gcloud (the GCP’s command line utility) arguments.  (14/12/2019)

  • Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Network Topologies: Architectural patterns these topologies are best suited for, and best practices for implementing them by using Google Cloud.  (15/06/2020)

  • Stackdriver Trace: Stackdriver Trace analyzes applications' traces to generate latency reports to surface performance degradations. It can capture traces from all of your VMs, containers, or App Engine projects.  (15/02/2020)

General Tooling

  • Alacritty: GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.  (01/03/2018)

  • Dust: Dust allows to discover the disk space taken by each directory and file using a tree-like presentation.  (01/09/2019)

  • Hyperfine: Benchmarking tool for command line programs.   (01/02/2018)

  • JQ: JQ allows to query JSON documents using a JSON Query-like syntax.   (01/05/2018)

  • mdcat: MDCat renders markdown documents on the terminal.  (01/03/2019)

  • Syncthing: An open source alternative to Dropbox for file synchronisation between computers  (01/02/2018)

Go Microservices

  • Fiber: An Express inspired web framework written in Go.  (17/07/2020)

Google Cloud

HTTP Servers and Routers

  • Apache: The Apache HTTP server, launched in 1995, used to be one of the most popular web servers until the emergence of Nginx.  (01/03/2018)

  • Caddy: An open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.  (22/05/2020)

  • Nginx: Nginx is one of the most popular web servers. It is known for its speed and low footprint.   (01/10/2019)

  • Squid: Squid is a caching proxy HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and other Internet services.   (01/04/2018)

Image & Document Manipulation

  • Apache FOP: Apache Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) is a Java based tool that generetes PDF files based on XSL definitions.  (01/05/2018)

  • ImageMagick: ImageMagick is one of the oldest and still most popular tool to convert and edit bitmap images from and into a over 200 formats (PNG, PDF, TIFF, etc). It supports bindings to most popular languages, including Java, Python, Perl, .NET and more.  (01/01/2018)

In-Memory Data Grid

  • Apache Ignite: Apache Ignite is an up and coming open source IMDG whose key differentiating aspec is that it can act as a regular SQL database using standard JDBC/ODBC/.NET drivers.  (01/11/2018)

  • Hazelcast: Hazelcast is a commercial (support & premium features) but otherwise open source IMDG written in Java that differentiates itself from the likes of Redis in terms of in-grid computational capabilities and advanced sharding and replication mechanisms as well as special focus on making redundant other “glue” messaging solutions.  (01/03/2018)

  • In-Memory Data Grid: An in-memory data grid (IMDG) is an extended distributed cache that features compute capabilities as opposed to simply data storage. In general, IMDGs is a term used by commercial vendors to distinguish themselves from supposedly simpler open source alternatives.  (01/01/2019)

  • Oracle Coherence: Oracle Coherence was one of the first “big vendor” caching solutions that made the IMDG concept popular. It is, arguably, a product neglected by Oracle and is often seen as a legacy product for which a migration strategy is recommended.  (01/01/2018)

In-Memory Distributed Cache

  • Amazon Elasticache: Amazon ElastiCache is a set of in memory data store and cache service that includes the likes of Memcached and Redis.  (01/02/2018)

  • Memcached: Memcached was one of the first key/value distributed caches to gain mass adoption that is still actively maintained. Although Redis is arguably a more popular choice today, Memcached’s simplicity may outweight Redis' features in the case of simple projects.  (01/03/2018)

  • Memorystore: A fully managed in-memory data store service for Redis and Memcached.  (22/04/2020)

  • Redis: Redis is an open source distributed cache known for its rich feature set compared to simpler solutions like Memcached: built-in replication, disk-based restart from cold, complex data structures, and advanced queries rather than just key/value operations.  (01/05/2019)

Infrastructure-as-Code Tools

  • Amazon SAM: The Amazon Serverless Application Model (SAM) allows defining complete serverless applications (e.g. DynamoDB tables, APIs, etc.) in a declarative manner. It is an extension to CloudFormation.   (01/12/2019)

  • Ansible: Ansible is a OS-level configuration tool that differentiates itself from others by “SSHing” into remote hosts rather than requiring the installation of agents on client machines. For this reason, Ansible is very popular to “boot strap” systems such as Kubernetes clusters. Scripts are written in YAML.  (01/03/2018)

  • Chef: Chef is a master-slave (requiring an additional workstation to control the master) configuration management system. Configuration is expressed, arguably, in a more imperative style than other similar solutions. Scripts are written using a Ruby-based DSL.  (01/07/2019)

  • CloudFormation: AWS CloudFormation is a solution to orchestrate resources (e.g. scaling) using a declarative approach. In essence, CloudFormation is Amazon’s realisation of the Infrastructure as Code paradigm.  (01/03/2018)

  • Packer: HashiCorp Packer is a tool for building virtual machine images in pretty much every single format: VMWare, Amazon AMI, etc.  (01/02/2018)

  • Pulumi: Pulumi, like Terraform, allows defining infrastructure as code on any cloud but with the advantage of using a general-purpose language (e.g. Python, JavaScript, etc.) rather than a proprietary configuration format.  (14/02/2020)

  • Puppet: Puppet is a configuration management solution that uses a client/server model and attempts to describe OS configuration in a declarative basis. Scripts are written in JSON.  (01/03/2018)

  • Salt: Salt is a modern contender to the established configuration management solutions. It supports both an agent-less model like Ansible as well as an agent model (agents are called minions). Scripts are written using a Pyhton-based DSL.  (01/08/2018)

  • Serverless Framework: The Serverless Framework has the objective of writing Cloud vendor-agnostic serverless applications. To achieve this purpose, it provides a declarative language similar to AWS SAM (which is then translated to the vendor’s proprietary declaration scheme), an event gateway, and a dashboard.  (01/08/2018)

  • Terraform: HashiCorp Terraform is solution to define interoperable infrastructure as code so that the same scripts can be used across heterogeneous platforms (AWS, VMWare, etc.)  (01/02/2018)

Integration

  • Apache Camel: A Java-based open source framework to create code-based (via XML, a DSL or Java) data integration and transformation pipelines.  (22/05/2020)

  • Fiorano ISO 20022 Accelerator (FIA): A solution to mao and transform legacy message formats (e.g. SWIFT MT) to ISO 20022.  (16/11/2020)

  • Spring Data Flow: Spring Data Flow takes a Java-centric approach to building ESB/ETL type of transformation pipelines with connectors to pretty much every Java-supported API (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ) and the flexibility to implement transformation steps in a microservices-friendly fashion.  (01/09/2019)

  • Transformer: A message transformation and mapping solution geared toward messaging standard used in financial services (SWIFT MT, ISO 20022, etc.)  (28/08/2020)

Internet of Things (IoT)

  • Amazon FreeRTOS: Amazon FreeRTOS is an operating system for low-power microcontrollers based on the open source operating system of the same name.  (01/01/2018)

  • AWS Greengrass: AWS Greengrass is a solution to develop IoT software with emphasis on the ability of pushing new releases from the cloud whilst letting devices work off-line without a constant connection to the cloud once updated.  (01/12/2019)

  • AWS IOT Device Management: AWS IoT Device Management helps onboard, organise, and monitor, remote IoT devices.  (01/05/2018)

IT Auditing

  • Amazon CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail is a service to track and audit the activities of users for governance, compliance, and auditing purposes.  (01/05/2018)

J2EE Application Servers

  • JBoss EAP: RedHat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) is a J2EE server known for its heavy footprint and slow startup time.  (01/02/2018)

  • Tomcat: Tomcat is the reference implementation for the J2EE spec (Serverlets, JSP pages, etc.)  (01/12/2019)

  • WebLogic: Oracle WebLogic was the “ferrari” of J2EE application servers once upon a time, but it is today a costly and clunky legacy product that enterprises are better off without.   (01/05/2018)

  • WebSphere AS: IBM WebSphere Application (Server) is a J2EE server commonly found in IBM-centric ecosystems. Similarly to WebLogic, it is another legacy from from a bygone era.  (01/03/2019)

Java Build

  • Ant: Apache Ant was one of the first frameworks to automate the compilation and building of Java libraries. It is known for its imperative, task-oriented, nature as well as its (much despised) XML-based configuration.   (01/05/2018)

  • Gradle: Gradle is supposed to improve over Maven shortcomings; in particular, being able to override conventions in a more user-friendly manner and supporting more languages other than just Java.  (01/08/2018)

  • Maven: Apache Maven is the de facto Java build tool. It is known for its convention-over-configuration philosophy and declarative approach which results in less boilerplate compared to Ant.  (01/02/2018)

Java Circuit Breaker

  • Hystrix: Hystrix includes both Java client libraries with Spring Boot integration and a central dashboard for monitoring and control.  (01/01/2018)

Java Configuration

  • Java Properties : The default Java properties mechanism can be used to load externalised configuration that has been mounted in a virtual file system as provided by Kubernetes' ConfigMap service.  (01/12/2019)

  • Spring Cloud Config: Spring Cloud Config includes both a configuration server and client libraries to obtain the configuration from the server and inject it into variables.  (01/10/2019)

Java Database Libraries

  • Hibernate: An Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) library and database abstraction layer.  (18/08/2020)

  • MyBatis: A SQL-centric abstraction layer for SQL databases.  (18/08/2020)

Java Distribution

  • Amazon Corretto: A no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK)  (17/08/2020)

  • OpenJDK: The OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE)  (17/08/2020)

  • Oracle Java: The official, closed source, commercial Java distribution from Oracle Corporation.  (17/08/2020)

Java Microservices

  • Axon: A Java framework for event-driven microservices using techniques such as DDD, CQRS and Event Sourcing.  (17/09/2020)

  • Helidon: A collection of Java libraries for writing microservices that run on a fast web core powered by Netty.  (28/06/2020)

  • Micronaut: A JVM-based, full-stack framework for building modular, microservice and serverless applications with ease of testability in mind.  (20/05/2020)

  • Quarkus: A Kubernetes native Java stack tailored for OpenJDK HotSpot and GraalVM with focus on fast startup time and low memory consumption.  (19/05/2020)

  • Spark: Spark differentiates itself from Spring Boot by offering a less verbose approach to writing microservices that takes advantage of Java 8’s functional syntax as well as the Kotlin language.  (01/03/2018)

  • Spring Boot: Spring Boot is an improvement over the traditional XML-orientated way of creating Spring-based applications. It provides out-of-the-box support for writing RESTful microservices based on the use of annotated Java methods.  (01/02/2018)

Java Service Discovery

  • Netflix Eureka: Eureka is a Java-based server with which microservices and other components register their endpoints and status.  (01/02/2018)

  • Netflix Ribbon: Ribbon is used to implement client-side load balancing capabilities. An application implementing Ribbon typically obtains its target endpoints from Eureka.  (01/05/2018)

Java Templating

  • Apache FreeMarker: A Java template engine to generate text output (HTML web pages, e-mails, configuration files, source code, etc.) based on templates and changing data.  (02/12/2020)

Java Tracing

  • Open Tracing API: The Open Tracing API publishes trace information compatible with the Open Tracing aggregator.  (01/03/2018)

  • Spring Cloud Sleuth: Spring Cloud Sleuth helps publish trace information in a variety of formats (e.g. Zipkin) in a transparent, implicit manner in the case of Spring-based applications.  (01/11/2018)

Key Generation and Management

  • AWS CloudHSM: AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) to generate encryption keys. It integrates with industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11, Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE), and Microsoft CryptoNG (CNG) libraries.  (01/07/2019)

Kubernetes Platforms

  • AKS: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) the de facto managed Kubernetes service offering the Microsoft’s ecosystem.  (14/10/2020)

  • EKS: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem and its primitives, especially IAM.   (14/10/2020)

  • GKE: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is one of the first and still the industry’s reference managed Kubernetes implementation.  (14/10/2020)

  • Karbon: A solution to deploy and manange Kubernetes on-prem by Nutanix, VMWare’s number one competitor.  (07/12/2020)

  • MicroK8s: A lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Canonical (Ubuntu) that runs on all mainstream operating systems as well as IoT platforms (ARM) including the Raspberry Pi.  (01/11/2020)

  • VMWare Tanzu: Boring VMWare farms become Kuberentes ones, plus multi-cloud support via PKS (Pivotal)  (31/12/2019)

Language and Translation

  • Amazon Comprehend: Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NPL) service.  (01/12/2019)

  • Amazon Polly: Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that aims to achieve human-like voice.  (01/01/2019)

  • Amazon Transcribe: Amazon is a speech recognition (speech-to-text) service.  (01/03/2018)

  • Amazon Translate: Amazon Translate provides language translation capabilities using a neural network machine.  (01/01/2018)

Layer 4 Security

  • AWS Shield: AWS Shield is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that is enabled by default in a standard form. Fore more advanced use cases, Amazon offers an advanced billable version.  (01/02/2018)

Layer 7 Protocols

  • GRPC: GRPC is a RPC cross-language library that uses Google Protocol Buffers as its underlying transport protocol.  (01/03/2018)

  • REST: Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style based on the principle that HTTP is an application protocol rather than a dumb transport layer. For example, a REST-based web service is supposed to use the HTTP Delete action to remove an entity rather than implementing it using the regular GET one. Having said this, REST is silent on the encoding of the body.  (01/08/2018)

Layer 7 Security

  • AWS WAF: AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a HTTP-level application firewall to protect applications from attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting.  (01/12/2019)

Low Code and No Code

  • Amazon Honeycode: A SaaS service to build and web and mobile apps using a drag and drop UI interface.  (03/07/2020)

  • Appian: A “full stack” low code platform which includes RPA, BPM, Case Management, AI, and Business Rules capabilities.  (16/11/2020)

  • Google AppSheet: A SaaS service to build apps primarily within the Google Cloud ecosystem.  (17/09/2020)

  • Mendix: A low code platform geared at power users and use cases in complex enterprise environments.  (16/11/2020)

  • Microsoft Power Apps: A SaaS service to build apps primarily within the Office 365 ecosystem.  (03/07/2020)

  • Outsystems: A low code platform whose flagship feature are a rich, WYSIWYG native application composer and support for several data sources.  (10/11/2020)

  • Unqork: A strict “no code” platform for rapid enterprise application development.  (10/11/2020)

Media Processing

  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder: Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a scalable media (audio and video) encoding/decoding service.  (01/01/2018)

Messaging, Event, and Streaming

  • Advance Message Processing System (AMPS): AMPS is a commercial messaging system developed by 60East Technologies that is essentially presented as a faster and better RabbitMQ. The company backs such claims on the basis on Kernel-level optimisation, and the full leverage of multi-core CPU architecture, among others.  (01/11/2018)

  • Amazon Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis is a real-time collection, processing, and analysis solution for video and data streams.  (01/03/2019)

  • Amazon MQ: A managed service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ.  (09/11/2020)

  • Amazon MSK: Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data.   (31/01/2020)

  • Amazon SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a message queuing service. It comes in two versions: standard and FIFO. The standard version provides high-throughput but does not guarantee order and messages may be, occasionally, delivered more than once. The FIFO version, instead, guarantees that messages are processed exactly once (and in order) and in exchange for lower throughput.  (01/05/2018)

  • Apache Pulsar: A scalable, low-latency messaging platform that runs on commodity hardware and provides both publish-and-subscribe and queue semantics. The advantages over Kafka is that compute and storage scaling are decoupled and that it is possible to define multiple subscribers without the need for multiple partitions.  (28/10/2020)

  • CDF: Cloudera DataFlow (CDF) is a scalable, real-time streaming data platform with an emphasis on streaming analytics.   (01/12/2020)

  • IBM MQ: IBM MQ is the de facto messaging queue product in IBM-centric ecosystems. It is commonly used to interact with IBM mainframes.  (01/02/2018)

  • Kafka: Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that differentiates itself from traditional message brokers in that message storage is durable. It is an appropriate foundation for an architecture based on the concepts of CQRS and Event Sourcing (ES).  (01/05/2019)

  • ksqlDB: Event-streaming database that brings discrete events and materialised views under one unified system, using a familiar SQL-oriented approach. It is a Confluent product that runs on top of Kafka.   (08/11/2020)

  • RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ is a an open-source message broker that implements AMQP, an open wire protocol for messaging. It is typically used to replacement legacy JMS-based providers such as TIBCO EMS.  (01/03/2018)

  • Streaming gRPC: A server-streaming RPC is similar to a unary RPC, except that the server returns a stream of messages in response to a client’s request.  (09/10/2020)

Mobile Application Development

  • AppSync: AWS AppSync updates the data in web and mobile applications in real time, and that for offline users, as soon as they reconnect. It spares the developer from creating a complex custom bespoke update and sync solution considering the differences between on-line and off-line use cases.  (01/01/2018)

  • AWS Amplify: AMS Amplify is an accelerator to provide AWS capabilities to mobile applications using iOS, Android, Web, and React Native platforms without the need to build bespoke data exchange scaffolding.  (01/05/2018)

  • Batch: A platform/library to implement push-notifications in mobile apps plus analytics and others bells and whistles.  (22/04/2020)

Mobile Application Development (Native)

  • Flutter: A Google’s UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile (iOS and Android), web, and desktop from a single codebase.  (21/08/2020)

  • React Native: A React-based (JavaScript framework) for building native apps for Android and iOS.  (21/08/2020)

  • Xamarin: An app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#.  (21/08/2020)

Mobile Application Development (Web Technology)

  • Cordova: Cordova is a framework to build iOS and Android apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  (01/03/2018)

Mobile Application Testing

  • Cypress: An open source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps on iOS, Android, and Windows.  (21/06/2020)

Network File Systems

  • Amazon EFS: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable file system implemented as NAS whose volumes can be mounted concurrently on multiple compute instances.  (01/02/2018)

Networking and Security

  • CIDR: Classless InterDomain Routing (CIDR) is a method for fine-grained IP allocation ,using variable-length subnet masking (VLSM), that replaces the original classful network architecture which consists of classs A, B and C. The old classful architecture was too abrupt in its addressing range; for example, whether class C only allowed addressing 254 hosts, class D allowed 65,534 with no room for more specific ranges.  (01/12/2019)

  • MFA: Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a means to authenticate user using at least two different mechanisms (e.g. a password and a SMS code)  (01/10/2019)

NoSQL Databases

  • Amazon Dynamo DB: Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures.  (01/08/2018)

  • Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra): A serverless (pay-per-use), wire-compatible Cassandra service that allows using existing Cassandra Query Language (CQL) code, Apache 2.0-licensed Cassandra drivers, and standard developer tools.  (24/04/2020)

  • Amazon Timestream: A serverless time series database service for IoT and operational applications.  (01/10/2020)

  • Apache Hbase: An open-source, Java-based column database, modelled after Google’s Bigtable. It runs on top of HDFS or Alluxio.  (15/10/2020)

  • Bigtable: A managed, column-based database in the GCP ecosystem. It is wire-compatible with HBase.  (15/10/2020)

  • Cassandra: Cassandra is a multi-master column database focused mainly on ensuring AP properties (Availability and Partition Tolerance) over C (Consistency). Cassandra is written in Java and offered in two versions: An open-source, Apache licencesed one, and a commercial one provided by DataStax  (01/05/2018)

  • FaunaDB: A globally distributed, ACID, serverless GraphQL database.  (17/07/2020)

Notification and E-mail Systems

  • Amazon Pinpoint: A campaign and engagement solution that provides email, SMS, and mobile push message capabilities.  (01/03/2018)

  • Amazon SES: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is an email sending capability that offers both SMTP and API invocation routes.  (01/07/2019)

  • Amazon SNS: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a pub/sub messaging and mobile notifications service for coordinating the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints and clients.  (01/01/2018)

Object Storage

  • Amazon S3: Amazon S3 is a the de facto blob storage solution in AWS. Volumes in S3 are called Buckets.  (01/01/2019)

Online Learning

  • Katakoda: An online learning platform for CLI-centric tools such as Kubernetes which allows setting up fully capable virtual environments.  (22/05/2020)

  • QwickLabs: A Google-owned, hands-on, lab-based learning platform focused mainly on Cloud training.  (22/05/2020)

Ops, Monitoring, and Application Performance Management

  • Amazon CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch is AWS' de facto monitoring and management solution that is highly integrated with all of its services.  (01/11/2018)

  • AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry: An AWS-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project that integrates with the AWS ecosystem (EC2, ECS, EKS, etc.) and sends the resulting telemetry on CloudWatch and X-Ray for analysis and visualisation.  (28/10/2020)

  • AWS X-Ray: AWS X-Ray is an application introspection (i.e. debugging) solution with tracing capabilities for distributed applications.  (01/02/2018)

  • Datadog: Datadog is a SaaS monitoring solutions marketed to developers rather than just Ops people.  (01/03/2019)

  • Dynatrace: Dynatrace is a commercial hybrid (cloud / datra centre) enterprise tracing solution with agent-based instrumentation. It supports low-level tracing semantics in Kubernetes and other modern application environments.  (01/07/2018)

  • Grafana: Grafana is primarily a dashboard to query, visualise and alert metrics (e.g. PagerDuty) from various sources such as Prometheus, CloudWatch and so on.  (01/07/2019)

  • Graphite: Graphite store numeric time-series metrics and renders graphs of this data on demand.  (01/02/2018)

  • Jaeger: A distributed tracing system released as open source by Uber Technologies. Libraries for Go, Java, Node, Python and C++.  (01/03/2018)

  • Kali: This tool helps understand the structure of a service mesh by inferring the topology. It also provides the health of the mesh.  (06/02/2020)

  • Kuberhealthy: Kuberhealthy is an operator for running synthetic checks on Kubernetes resources. It integrates well with Prometheus too.  (01/05/2020)

  • Linux Systems Performance: Low-level tools and techniques for Linux performance monitoring.  (01/04/2018)

  • M3: A solution by Uber Labs to scale Prometheus’ storage backend from a single node default configuration to one that supports several petabytes of data.  (16/10/2020)

  • New Relic: New Relic is a SaaS-based turn-key monitoring solution with both on-prem and cloud support.   (01/01/2018)

  • OpenTelemitry: A holistic observability framework for cloud-native software in the form of a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces). Broad language support including Java, C#, Go, and more.  (28/10/2020)

  • OpenTracing: Vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing. Support for Go, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective-C, C++, C#.  (01/05/2019)

  • Prometheus: Prometheus is an open source, pull-based metrics monitoring solution that includes a time series database and an expressive query language.  (01/01/2019)

  • ScienceLogic SL1: A singular infrastructure monitoring and AIOps platform that provides operations teams with actionable insights to predict, detect, and resolve IT problems. It provides resource discovery, dependency mapping, monitoring, alerting, ticketing, workflow automation, dashboarding, and reporting for the cloud, networks, compute, storage, and applications.  (29/07/2020)

  • Splunk: Splunk captures, indexes, and correlates real-time data (generally logs) in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations.  (01/01/2018)

  • The Elastic Stack (ELK before): Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana allow to collect, aggregate, search and visualise data found in log files and other sources.  (01/02/2018)

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

  • Amazon Textract: A managed machine learning service to extract text and data (such as forms and tables) from scanned documents.  (21/08/2020)

  • Tesseract OCR: An open source OCR engine with support for unicode and the ability to recognize more than 100 languages out of the box. It can be trained to recognize other languages.  (21/08/2020)

PaaS and Serverless

  • App Engine: Google’s serverless managed platform. It provides popular runtimes such as Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Python, and PHP as well as the ability to bring customer runtimes too.  (14/10/2020)

  • Cloud Functions: Google’s response to AWS Lambda, in spite of having a serverless product already, in the form of App Engine.  (14/10/2020)

  • Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF): Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) was initially a vendor implementation of Cloud Foundry (an open source take on Heroku’s paradigm). As the 2007-era Heroku concepts such as build packs and 12 apps are becoming obsolete, Pivotal is quickly trying to rebrand themselves as a Kubernetes and FaaS vendor whilst still touting their Heroku-like offering which has been now renamed as Pivotal Application Service (PAS).   (01/03/2019)

Payment Systems and Networks

  • FedWire: A real-time gross settlement system of central bank money used by Federal Reserve Banks (the Fed) to electronically settle final U.S. dollar payments among member institutions.   (01/12/2020)

  • Interac: A payment system popular in Canada.  (11/10/2020)

  • SEPA: Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) establishes a single set of tools and standards that make cross-border payments in euro as easy as national payments.  (03/08/2020)

  • SWIFT gpi: SWIFT global payments innovation (GPI), is a closed private blockchain for cross-border payments.  (10/10/2020)

  • UPI: Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an instant real-time payment system developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to facilitate inter-bank transactions.   (02/12/2020)

Payments (Reference)

Payments Domain

  • ACH: The automated clearing house (ACH) is an electronic funds-transfer system that facilitates payments in the U.S. It is run by the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA).  (16/11/2020)

  • Clearing: The process of transmitting, reconciling and, in some cases, confirming transactions and establishment of final positions for settlement.  (04/11/2020)

  • Closed Loop: A payment system in which end parties connect directly to each other without intermediaries such as Banks. AMEX and Paypal are the canonical examples.  (04/11/2020)

  • Creditor: The end party that receives a payment/credit transfer.  (04/11/2020)

  • CSM: The Clearing and Settlment Mechanisms (CSM) refers to the series of processes underlying all payment transactions exchanged between two payment service providers (PSPs).  (04/11/2020)

  • Customer to Bank Space: In the Four Corner Model, this is the space that includes the Debtor to Debtor’s bank, and Creditor to Creditor’s Bank relationships.  (04/11/2020)

  • Debtor: The end party that initiates a payment/credit transfer.  (04/11/2020)

  • DvP: Delivery versus Payment (DVP) is a securities industry settlement method that guarantees the transfer of securities only happens after payment has been made. DVP stipulates that the buyer’s cash payment for securities must be made prior to or at the same time as the delivery of the security.  (04/11/2020)

  • Four Corner Model: A payment model which includes the following actors: the Debtor (the end party the send the money), the Debtor’s bank, the Creditor’s bank, and the Creditor (end end party that receives the money).   (04/11/2020)

  • Gross Settlement System: A system in which the transfer of funds occurs individually after each payment transaction is processed in the system.  (05/11/2020)

  • Interbank Space: In the Four Corner Model, this is the space that includes the Debtor’s Bank to Creditor’s Bank relationship (as well as any other relevant parties such as intermediary banks and CSMs).  (04/11/2020)

  • Net Settlement System: A system in which transactions are exchanged among participants without the transfer of funds. The actual transfer of funds only occurs at the cut-off of the established settlement cycle. When this event takes place, the sum of the value of all transfers a the participants have received and produced is calculated: this is the net settlement position.  (05/11/2020)

  • Netting: The offsetting of obligations between or among participants in the netting arrangement, thereby reducing the number and value of payments or deliveries needed to settle a set of transactions.  (04/11/2020)

  • Open Loop: A payment system in which there is no direct connection between the end parties and the payment systems. The end parties participate in the system through intermediaries such as Banks. Typical examples are Visa and MasterCard: these cards can only be obtained through an intermediary (typically a Bank).  (04/11/2020)

  • PE-ACH: The Pan-European automated clearing house (PE-ACH) is the capability to settle SEPA compliant credit transfers and direct debits across the Eurozone. There is only one implementation of PE-ACH which is STEP2.   (05/11/2020)

  • RTGS: A Real-Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) performs the debits and credits to the Debtor Bank and Creditor Bank on the spot for each individual transaction, without a deferred netting and settlement process.  (05/11/2020)

  • Settlement: The act that discharges obligations in respect of funds or securities transfers between two or more parties.  (04/11/2020)

  • SIPS: Systemically important payment systems (SIPS) are payment systems could potentially endanger the operation of the whole economy if they fail. Examples are the STEP2, and TARGET2, two pan-European payment systems.  (04/11/2020)

  • STEP2: The STEP2 SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) Service is a highly resilient Pan-European Automated Clearing House (PE-ACH) service with full disaster recovery features. It allows banks to send and receive SEPA payments and, at the same time, to reach all other financial institutions in SEPA.  (05/11/2020)

  • TARGET2: The real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system owned and operated by the Eurosystem. Central banks and commercial banks can submit payment orders in euro to TARGET2, where they are processed and settled in central bank money, i.e. money held in an account with a central bank.  (05/11/2020)

Personal Assistant Technology

  • Alexa For Business: Alexa for Business helps integrate common business office functions such as schedule management, setting reminders, and dialing into conference calls with Alexa.  (01/12/2019)

Product Development

  • MLP: A Minimal Lovable Product (MLP) is a product scope strategy that differentiates itself from the traditional MVP by focusing on making a small number of users passionate about the product.  (20/08/2020)

  • MVP: A Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is a version of a new product which allows the product’s team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.   (20/08/2020)

Programming Languages

  • Clojure: A LISP-like language that runs on the JVM.  (01/05/2018)

  • Java: Java, designed in 1995 by James Gosling, is an OOP language that remains one of the most popular in the enterprise world.  (01/02/2018)

Quantum Computing

  • Amazon Braket: A development environment to explore and build quantum algorithms, test them on quantum circuit simulators, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies.  (13/08/2020)

  • Azure Quantum: A full-stack, open cloud ecosystem, centred around Q# and QDK.  (13/08/2020)

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

  • JHipster: A development platform to generate, develop and deploy Spring Boot + Angular / React / Vue Web applications and Spring microservices.  (23/04/2020)

Robotics

  • AWS RoboMaker: A service to simulate and deploy robotic applications at cloud scale, including Robot Operating System (ROS) to be used in the robots themselves.  (05/01/2020)

Secrets Management

  • Secret Manager: GCP’s out-of-the-box secrets solution.  (31/01/2020)

  • Vault: HashiCorp Vault secures, stores, and controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, among others. It can generate AWS IAM/STS credentials, SQL/NoSQL databases, X.509 certificates, SSH credentials, etc.  (01/11/2018)

Security

  • Amazon Control Tower: A service to set up and govern a new, secure multi-account AWS environment.  (31/01/2020)

  • Amazon Detective: This service helps identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities by collecting log data from AWS resources and applying machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to produce inferences.  (10/02/2020)

  • AWS VPN: A desktop VPN client for MacOS and Windows to connect to AWS VPCs.  (05/02/2020)

  • Cryptomator: Client-side encryption for cloud storage services such as Dropbox, GDrive, etc.  (09/01/2020)

  • JWT: JSON Web Tokens (JWT) is an open standard to encode the information between parties as a JSON object using a compact and secure alphanumerical string.  (02/03/2020)

  • OpenSCAP: A NIST-certified platform for general spec compliance and vulnerability scanning which includes container-based as well as traditional workloads.  (07/12/2020)

  • RBAC: Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a policy-neutral approach to restricting system access to authorised users. It is defined around the notions of roles and privileges and it is flexible enough to implement both Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Discretionary Access Control (DAC).  (16/09/2020)

  • SkyWrapper: This open source tool analyzes behaviors of temporary tokens created in a given AWS account. The tool is aiming to find suspicious creation forms and uses of temporary tokens to detect malicious activity in the account.  (22/04/2020)

Security (Behaviour Analysis)

  • Amazon GuardDuty: Amazon GuardDuty is a paid threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behaviour (e.g. unusual API calls) to help protect AWS accounts and workloads.   (01/05/2018)

Security (Compliance)

  • AWS Artifact: AWS Artifact is a central resource for compliance-related information such as Service Organization Control (SOC) reports, Payment Card Industry (PCI) reports, and certifications from accreditation bodies, among others.  (01/12/2019)

Security (Containers)

  • Anchore: An open source Docker image vulnerability solution consisting of two components: Syft and Grype. Syft generates a bill of materials from an image whereas Grype reports known vulnerabilities.   (07/12/2020)

  • ARMO (Cyber Armor): A zero trust solution for Kubernetes (and supporting CI/CD) pipelines that has a special focus on runtime security and the prevention of code injection vulnerabilities.  (06/10/2020)

  • Clair: An open source project for the static analysis of vulnerabilities in application containers (currently including OCI and Docker).  (07/12/2020)

  • Falco: An open source solution for runtime container security based on the interception of Kernel syscalls.  (01/12/2020)

  • gVisor: A runtime container sandbox which adds security protection in terms of access to Linux syscalls as well as to the network stack. It is used by GKE by default.  (20/09/2020)

  • Harbor: An open source registry that secures artifacts with policies and role-based access control, ensures images are scanned and free from vulnerabilities, and signs images as trusted.   (17/07/2020)

  • Snyk: A vulnerability scanning solution for open source libraries and containers.   (11/10/2020)

  • Trivy: A simple vulnerability scanner for containers and other artifacts.  (07/12/2020)

  • Twistlock: Twistlock offers container image (as well as Production/runtime) vulnerability scanning and threat detection.  (01/12/2019)

Security (Identity and Access Management)

  • Okta: Okta offers full suite of IAM capabilities including SSO, MFA, Directory Services, including workforce and customer identity use cases.  (14/02/2020)

  • PingIdentity: PingIdentity is a general-purpose identity and authentication suite but that is particularly useful in PSD2 (Banking) scenarios.  (01/04/2018)

  • Thales: A digital identity solution centred on banking payments. Formerly known as Gemalto.  (17/08/2020)

Security (Personal Data)

  • Amazon Macie: Amazon Macie automatically discovers sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), stored in S3 buckets.  (01/02/2018)

Security (Privileged Access Management)

  • Centrify: A PEM solution centred on the notion of zero trust privilege.  (25/07/2020)

  • CyberArk: A PEM solution built upon a digital vault capability.  (25/07/2020)

Security (Spam Prevention)

  • reCAPTCHA Enterprise: A SaaS service to protect websites from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse.  (16/10/2020)

Security (Spec Compliance)

  • Amazon Inspector: Amazon Inspector is an agent-based security solution that automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices.   (01/01/2018)

  • AppArmour: AppArmor is a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) system which is a kernel (LSM) enhancement to confine programs to a limited set of resources. It is claimed to be easier than SELinux.  (01/08/2018)

  • Aqua: Vulnerability and threat analysis for containers, serverless, and cloud native applications.  (01/02/2018)

  • AWS Config: AWS Config tracks changes in resource configurations and also allows to enforce compliance against desired target ones.  (01/05/2018)

  • CFN Nag: A CLI tool that looks for patterns in CloudFormation templates that may indicate insecure infrastructure.   (18/06/2020)

  • Cloud Formation Guard: A CLI tool that checks AWS CloudFormation templates for policy compliance using a simple, policy-as-code, declarative syntax.  (18/06/2020)

  • Docker Bench: Docker Bench checks for common best-practices around deploying Docker containers in production. It is inspired by the CIS Docker Benchmark.   (01/10/2019)

  • Docker CIS Benchmarks: CIS Benchmarks applied to Docker.  (01/03/2018)

  • InSpec: Chef InSpec is a OS configuration compliance tool known for its user-friendly Ruby-based DSL. It can also audit properties of cloud infrastructure.  (01/01/2019)

  • Qualys: Qualys is a spec conformance and vulnerability analysis tool. It is popular in the financial sector despite the availability of more powerful and user-friendly tools in the marketplace such as InSpec.  (01/05/2018)

  • SELinux: Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a Linux kernel security module to implement access control security policies such as type enforcement, mandatory access controls (MAC), mandatory integrity controls, and role-based access control (RBAC).  (01/05/2018)

Security (Vulnerability)

  • CSRF: CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) is a malicious exploit where unauthorised commands are submitted from a user that the web application trusts.  (13/09/2020)

Serverless

  • Stackery: A collaboration platform to design, isolate, and deploy serverless projects.  (23/04/2020)

Service Levels

Service Management and Ticketing Systems

  • AWS Managed Services: AWS Managed Services is an ITIL-based operations management (change control, monitoring, patch management, security, backup, etc.) service.  (01/07/2019)

  • AWS Service Catalogue: AWS Service Catalogue allows to group and manage AWS resources using the Service Catalogue paradigm used in IT Service Management.  (01/05/2018)

  • JIRA: Atlassian JIRA is a ticketing system also used for Agile management.  (01/03/2018)

  • ServiceNow: ServiceNow is an end-to-end, SaaS IT services solution.  (01/01/2018)

Service Mesh

  • AWS App Mesh : An Envoy-based service mesh for container-based AWS workloads (Kubernetes, ECS, etc.)  (23/06/2020)

  • Consul: Consul is a key/value store, health checking & service discovery solution with service mesh (e.g. service-to-service encryption) capabilities. HashiCorps markets it as a batteries-included (e.g. Service Discovery) and easier-to-use alternative to Zookeeper.  (01/01/2018)

  • Envoy: Envoy is a data plane service mesh solution originally built at Lyft. It differentiates itself from Linkerd by claiming high performance since it is written in C++.   (01/11/2018)

  • Istio: Istio adds a control plane to Envoy. It is often considered a turn key solution that embeds Envoy.  (01/02/2018)

  • Kong: A service mesh solution which is part of a larger, general-purpose interconnectivity solution.  (01/12/2020)

  • Kuma: A service mesh control plane that uses the Envoy proxy standard.  (22/05/2020)

  • Linkerd: Linkerd was one of the first service data plane mesh solutions to become widespread. It is written in Java.  (01/12/2019)

SQL Databases

  • Amazon Aurora: A proprietary but MySQL and PostgreSQL wire-compatible relational database, which offers more performance and “cloud native” dynamics than the than the regular open source counterparts running on VMs.  (03/07/2020)

  • Amazon Aurora Serverless: An an on-demand, auto-scaling flavour of for Amazon Aurora.  (03/07/2020)

  • Amazon RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a set of managed database services that includes Amazon’s own flagship Aurora solution as well as market favourites such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and so on.  (01/09/2019)

  • CockroachDB: A distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store. It scales horizontally; survives disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention; supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions; and provides a familiar SQL API for structuring, manipulating, and querying data.  (15/10/2020)

  • Microsoft SQL Server: Microsoft SQL Server is the de facto database in Microsoft-centric ecosystems. Newer versions run on Linux and Docker Containers.  (01/03/2019)

  • MySQL: MySQL used to be one of the most popular open source products in the world before Oracle took over it.   (01/03/2018)

  • NuoDB: NuoDB claims to be a “scale out”, cloud native capable SQL database whilst still offering ACID guarantees. This is achieved, apparently, by scaling the compute aspects of the engine rather than those closer to actual data storage.  (01/01/2018)

  • PartiQL: A tool to interact with semi-structured and nested data (e.g. JSON), and NoSQL data sources (such as Amazon DynamoDB) using the SQL language.  (01/12/2020)

  • PlanetScale: A control plane for running a scalable MySQL cluster on Kubernetes.  (23/06/2020)

  • PolarDB: Alibaba Cloud’s managed database solution offering MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ORACLE wire compatibility.  (09/01/2020)

  • SingleStore: Previously called MemSQL, SingleStore is a hybrid transactional (ACID) and analytical (multi-petabyte) solution. It is a MySQL-wire compatible, distributed (Kubernetes-based) data store and is offered as a managed service in most clouds.  (23/10/2020)

  • YugaByteDB: A free and open-source, distributed, relational, RDBMS designed to handle large amounts of data spanning across multiple availability zones and geographic regions while providing single-digit latency, high availability, and no single point of failure.  (15/10/2020)

Storage Solutions

  • Amazon Storage Gateway: Amazon Storage Gateway is a solution that allows replicating files to Amazon storage (S3, Glacier, EBS) by means of an appliance that customers deploy on premise.  (01/10/2019)

  • Amazon WorkDocs: Amazon WorkDocs is a cloud document storage solution similar to Dropbox.  (01/08/2018)

Testing (API)

  • API Fortress: API Fortress is an all-round API Testing suite which caters for continous integration, API mocking, monitoring, and load testing.   (01/12/2019)

  • Cucumber: Cucumber is a tool that embraces the BBD paradigm. It allows defining software behaviours using a custom language called Gherkin.   (01/02/2018)

  • GoReply: A tool that allows to capture existing users activity and re-use it for testing.   (23/06/2020)

  • Karate: An open-source tool that combine API test-automation, mocks, performance-testing and UI automation into a single, unified framework. Uses the BDD syntax popularised by Cucumber as well as more structured JSON & XML assertions so that it is not necessary to write lower-level tests in a different language.  (16/11/2020)

  • REST-assured: A framework for testing REST services using a Java-based DSL.  (16/11/2020)

  • SoapUI: SoapUI is a tool for both UI-wise and headless-wise API testing (REST, SOAP, etc.). Complex scripts are written in Groovy.  (01/05/2018)

Testing (Load)

  • Apache Bench: Apache Bench (AB) is a small command line utility to stress test HTTP servers.  (01/03/2018)

  • Artilliery: Artillery is a simple command-line based load test tool but with features equivalent to a GUI-based performance testing suite.  (16/02/2020)

  • Distributed Load Testing on AWS: An AWS solution that automatically launches and configures containers running on AWS Fargate to create and simulate connected users generating a select number of transactions per second without having to provision servers.  (12/10/2020)

  • Gatling: A load testing tool in which scripts are written a Scala-based DSL.  (15/11/2020)

  • JMeter: JMeter is a legacy load testing tool written in Java, that stores configuration in XML, and is still used by teams unaware of smaller, faster, and more effective tooling.  (16/02/2020)

  • Locust: A load testing tool written in Python allowing the test cases to be written in Python itself too.  (30/03/2020)

  • Siege: Siege is regression test and benchmark utility that, in its simplest operation, can stress test a single URL with a user defined number of simulated users.  (01/09/2019)

Text Search

  • Amazon CloudSearch: Amazon CloudSearch is a text search solution for one’s website or application.  (01/01/2018)

  • Amazon Elasticsearch Service: Amazon Elasticsearch offers the popular open source text search engine on a managed basis together with the other “ELK stack” tools.  (01/01/2019)

Transaction Models

  • ACID: ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps.   (22/06/2020)

  • BASE: BASE (Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency) is is a consistency model used in distributed computing to achieve high availability.  (22/06/2020)

Video Processing

  • Amazon Kinesis Video Streams: Kinesis Video Streams automatically provisions and elastically the infrastructure required to ingest and process streaming video data from, according to Amazon, millions of devices.  (01/05/2018)

Virtual Machine Players

  • Hyper-V: Microsoft Hyper-V is Microsoft’s de facto virtualisation solution and deeply integrated with Windows.  (01/03/2018)

  • VirtualBox: Oracle’s “free” solution popular with Linux folks.  (01/10/2019)

  • VMWare Workstation: The traditional desktop virtual machine solution.   (01/02/2018)

Web & Mobile Application Testing

  • AWS Device Farm: A SaaS solution to test and interact with Android, iOS, and web apps on many devices at once, or reproduce issues on a device in real time.   (01/10/2019)

  • BrowserStack: A SaaS solution that allows testing across over 2000 devices and browsers typically using Selenium.  (14/02/2020)

  • SauceLabs: A SaaS solution for both mobile device and browser testing.  (08/03/2020)

Web Application Browser Compatbility

  • Babel: Babel allows compiling newer versions of JavaScript into older ones so that older browsers can be supported.  (01/05/2019)

Web Application Frameworks

  • Angular: Angular is Google’s end-to-end framework for building rich, interactive web and mobile applications front ends. Although it was initially conceived as a library to build single page applications. Today, it encompasses a wide ecosystem including templating, widgets and controls, build-phase tooling such as debuggers, minifiers and so on.  (01/01/2018)

  • Backbone: Backbone was one of the first frameworks to focus on implementing a separation of concerns approach between Models and Views. It is less “radical” than Angular and React in the sense that it does not introduce new syntax.  (01/03/2018)

  • Blazor: A framework to build interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript. Blazor apps are composed of reusable web UI components implemented using C#, HTML, and CSS. Both client and server code is written in C#, allowing you to share code and libraries.  (22/05/2020)

  • jQuery: jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies the manipulation of the browser DOM and CSS as well as adding various other helper functions. It was popular before the advent of all-encompassing frameworks like Angular and newer JavaScript versions which include many of the jQuery features out-of-the-box.  (01/08/2018)

  • LitElement: A minimalistic framework for creating lightweight web components based on Custom Elements v1 spec to be used in a standalone basis, or in a cross-framework scenario (React, Angular, etc.)  (20/02/2020)

  • Next.js: Next.js is a framework to turn React applications into server-side rendered applications (or statically generated sites) to improve SEO, old browser compatibility, and load speed.  (20/02/2020)

  • React: React is Facebook’s library for building interactive web and mobile applications. It focuses on the problem of synchronising model changes with the views, encapsulating views as reusable components, and performing efficient rendering (using a virtual DOM). It is not directly comparable to Angular since it does not aim to be a comprehensive, multiple-use case framework.  (01/02/2018)

  • Sapper: Sapper is a framework for converting Svelte sites into server-side rendered sites (and/or statically generated ones), similar to Next.js.  (20/02/2020)

  • Stencil: Stencil is a compiler to define cross-framework (React, Angular, etc.) web components that comply with the Custom Elements v1 spec.  (20/02/2020)

  • Svelte: Svelte is a “challenger” web framework that differentiates itself by doing away with virtual DOMs and library imports by compiling the entire set of declarations into vanilla, pure JavaScript, which results in smaller sites that start up faster.  (20/02/2020)

  • Vue: Vue is an actively developed competitor to Angular and React that focuses on simplicity. It follows a mix and match “progressive” approach that allows developers to use only selected parts of the framework as required as opposed to forcing them to buy into a radically different paradigm for all aspects of an application. It also implements a Virtual DOM approach.  (01/03/2018)

Web Application Libraries

  • Editor.js: A visual editor for “block” elements such as paragraphs, headings, images, lists, quotes, etc.  (25/06/2020)

  • FabricJS: An HTML5 image manipulation library that allows the resizing and rotation of individual SVG objects within one canvas.  (01/07/2019)

  • Live.js: This single include JavaScript library automatically reloads the page in which it is included when there are changes.  (27/03/2020)

  • RxJs: RxJS is the de facto library to implement the reactive programming paradigm in pure JavaScript.  (01/05/2018)

Web Application Module Bundler

  • Rollup.js: Rollup is a JavaScript module bundler, similar to Webpack, that consolidates disparate pieces of code into a single output.   (19/02/2020)

  • Webpack: Webpack analysis a web application’s static dependencies and produces a consolidated output which typically consists of one single physical file per file type (e.g. JS, CSS, etc.)  (01/03/2018)

Web Application Quality and Build Tools

  • Learna: Lerna is a tool that optimises the workflow around managing multi-package repositories (monorepos) with git and npm.  (19/02/2020)

  • Prettier: Prettier is a code formatter (or “beautifier”) for web languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, SCSS, GraphQL and so on.   (01/03/2018)

  • TSLint: TSLint is a linter (static analysis tool) for TypeScript code. It helps make TypeScript-based projects more readable and maintainable.  (01/11/2018)

Web Application SEO Tools

  • Prerender: A tool to convert JavaScript-based websites to static HTML so that they can be crawled by search engines.  (20/06/2020)

Web Application State Management

  • Redux: Redux is a library that manages a web application’s state using CQRS and Event Sourcing (ES) concepts. Whereas frameworks like Angular and React solve the problem of synchronising models with views; they don’t address the problem of state mutation itself which is what Redux focuses on.  (01/01/2018)

Web Application Testing

  • Cypress: An end-to-end, open source, front-end testing tool, that provides a developer-friendly experience at the expense of running only on Chrome and supports only JavaScript.  (28/04/2020)

  • Jasmine: Jasmine was one of the first feature-rich JavaScript testing frameworks. Although Jest has replaced it, it has arguably more literature and a larger community given that it is older. It is also more Angular focused whilst, arguably, Jest is more React focused.  (01/01/2018)

  • Jest: Jest is Facebook’s comprehensive test framework which has replaced Jasmine and covers all test aspects (assertions, test case organisation, display and reporting, mocking, stubbing, spying and code coverage) except for browser environment simulation for which jsdom is used as a plug-in.   (01/07/2019)

  • jsdom: jsdom simulates a real web browser environment entirely in JavaScript (browser Js objects, DOM, HTML, etc) without embedding or controlling an off-the-shelf web browser engine like Selenium-based solutions.  (01/05/2018)

  • Karma: Karma is a test runner that runs directly in the web browser and integrates with various other testing frameworks. It has particular focus on testing AngularJS-based applications.  (01/02/2018)

  • Playwright: A Python library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit browsers with a single API.   (09/10/2020)

  • Postwoman: An alternative to postman (a web-based REST client).  (01/08/2018)

  • Protractor: Protractor wraps Selenium to facilitate the testing of Angular-based applications.  (01/10/2019)

  • Puppeteer: Puppeteer provides a Node.js library to control run the Chrome browser engine in headless mode. It is a substitute for PhantomJS which is no longer actively developed.  (01/03/2018)

  • Selenium: Selenium allows scripting web interactions across different real browsers (Chrome, FireFox, etc.) through an API called WebDriver that is provided for most mainstream programming languages (Java, C#, Python, etc). Selenium is not a test framework per se so it is often used via wrappers such as Protractor.  (01/03/2019)

Web Application Widgets

  • Chart.js: Chart.js is a charting library that includes most usual Excel-esque chart types such as bar, line, area, scatter, pie, radar, etc.  (01/05/2018)

  • Kendo UI: Kendo UI is one of the most advanced commercial widget libraries and includes desktop-grade components such as calendar pickers, editable grids and so on. It supports a variety of frameworks and server-side programming languages such as C# and PHP. On the client side its recent focus has been on native Angular support.  (01/01/2019)

  • Webix: Webix is similar to Kendo UI in terms of capabilities but it differentiates itself by providing better documentation and focusing exclusively on the client-side as opposed to server-side binding.  (01/02/2018)

  • Zino UI: ZinoUI is a jQuery-based web widget library that contains over 25 components. It has a GPL3 licence for open source projects and an affordable donation-based alternative for commercial projects. It is less ambitious in capabilities than Kendo UI.   (01/05/2019)

Web CSS Frameworks

  • Bootstrap: Bootstrap is one of the most widespread HTML/CSS/JS frameworks given its emphasis on mobile-first, responsive layouts and its rich theme and plugin ecosystem.  (01/01/2018)

  • Foundation: Foundation is perceived as a more advanced and customisable framework than Bootstrap. It appeals to those who want to differentiate themselves from the ubiquitous number of Bootstrap-based sites.  (01/03/2019)

  • Google Material Design Lite (MDL): Google Material Design Lite (MDL) is focused on implementing the Material Design principles in terms of user experience and look & feel. The emphasis here is arguably less on the responsive aspect compared to Bootstrap.   (01/03/2018)

Web Site Generators (Static)

  • Hakyll: Hakyll is a static site generator built around Pandoc’s markdown engine.  (01/03/2018)

  • Jamstack: Jamstack is not a static site generator per se but a “manifesto” to support the cause for this kind of approach, including the development workflow, based on Git.  (01/02/2020)

  • Zola: Zola is a fast and small RUST-based static site generator.  (01/11/2018)

Web Standards

  • CORS: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a mechanism to tell browsers to give a web application running at one origin, access to selected resources from a different origin, by using additional HTTP headers.  (11/09/2020)

Web Style Sheet Processors

  • Block Element Modifier (BEM): Block Element Modifier (BEM) is a convention (rather than a library) for making styling more manageable, encapsulated, and reusable.  (01/03/2018)

  • CSS: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the mechanism to add styling to web documents supported by all web browsers by default; however, developers seldom write CSS directly in modern web applications. This is because CSS is limited in terms of modularity and manageability; it is, thus, often generated using a pre-processor or applied directly using JavaScript-based component technology.  (01/05/2018)

  • Less: Less is a style language inspired by SaaS (it generates CSS files) that is written directly in JavaScript rather than Ruby. This allows to compile CSS directly on the web browser for development purposes. It is, arguably, slightly less feature rich than SaaS.  (01/02/2018)

  • Saas: Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (Saas) is a style language that includes features such as variables, nested rules, and mixins. It generates CSS files.  (01/01/2019)