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Hypermedia: The New/Old Architecture Set to Revolutionize Web and Mobile Development

Hypermedia, Datastar, and Hyperlith
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Alberto Miorin
Featured

Hypermedia is the tech everyone is talking about, yet it remains a bit of a mystery for many. After diving deep, I’m convinced this new/old approach is not just a trend—it’s poised to disrupt how we build applications on both the web and mobile.

The strategic shift towards Hypermedia Driven Applications (HDA) fundamentally alters the economics of development, making internal solutions significantly more viable. As the cost of building web and mobile experiences drops, so too does the traditional calculus of “build vs. buy.

To capitalize on this change, our next major step is integrating Internal Developer Portal capabilities directly into BigConfig. This addition completes BigConfig’s transformation into the essential, comprehensive library for scalable operations, providing core building blocks like configuration as code, workflow orchestration, scaffolding, robust persistency, auditing, control planes, and now, internal developer portals.

Demystifying the control plane: the easy upgrade path from GitOps with BigConfig

BigConfig Store
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Alberto Miorin

For many engineering teams, GitOps has been a game-changer, providing a declarative way to manage infrastructure and applications. But as complexity grows, you may find your processes hitting a ceiling. The natural next step? Upgrading to a control Plane.

Often, teams hesitate, believing this shift requires a costly, painful rewrite of their entire configuration management solution when it is written in Terraform or Ansible. They fear increased cognitive load and massive sunk costs.

This is where BigConfig changes the narrative. With BigConfig, you can upgrade your existing GitOps solution to a full-fledged control plane without rewriting everything from scratch or overwhelming your team.

Local-First GitHub Actions Strategy

gha
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Alberto Miorin

If you’ve spent any significant time with GitHub Actions (GHA), you know the drill: it can be a massive time-saver, but when things go wrong, the development loop is painfully slow. Committing, pushing, waiting for the run to fail, and then repeating… it’s a productivity killer. Over time, I’ve refined a strategy that cuts this frustrating cycle short. My philosophy is simple: Avoid any GitHub Actions feature that isn’t available or easy to replicate locally.

Control planes in BigConfig

rama-jdbc
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Alberto Miorin

A control plane acts as an API for provisioning and managing infrastructure. Well-known examples include AWS itself and Kubernetes (K8s).

A common pain point when using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools like Terraform (using HCL) and GitOps is the difficulty in transitioning or upgrading to an internal control plane.

Teams that have invested significant time in writing Terraform’s HCL code traditionally face a complete rewrite to build a custom control plane API over their existing infrastructure definitions.

This limitation is no longer the case with BigConfig. We’ve demonstrated that a functional control plane can be created with as little as 200 lines of code, leveraging existing Terraform configurations.

Configuration Hell? How BigConfig Tames the Modern Dev Environment

rama-jdbc
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Alberto Miorin

Setting up a local development environment today is rarely a trivial matter. The days of simply git clone and npm install are long gone. Modern architectures, particularly those embracing microservices, polyglot persistence, and cloud-native practices, have turned the humble setup process into a multi-layered nightmare.

If you’ve ever spent an afternoon debugging why your local database port clashes with your integration environment, or wrestled with five different tools requiring three different credential formats, you know the pain.

Let’s dive into a concrete example — a complex but typical setup — and see how BigConfig transforms this chaos into an automated, zero-cost development experience.

A New Approach to Dotfiles management with BigConfig

dotfiles
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Alberto Miorin

Managing dotfiles—the configuration files that personalize your user environment—is a crucial part of a developer’s workflow. The go-to tools for this have long been Chezmoi and Stow. While Stow is celebrated for its simplicity, Chezmoi offers powerful templating and secret management. However, what if you need the best of both worlds?

This is where BigConfig comes in, offering a new way to manage your configurations by combining the simplicity of a declarative approach with the power of code.

Why Ansible Still Rules for Your Dev Environment

ansible
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Alberto Miorin

Back in the day, before Red Hat acquired Ansible, I was using it to provision Cloudera clusters in massive data centers. And let me tell you, its killer feature wasn’t some complex, enterprise-grade capability. It was pure simplicity.

You just needed SSH, and you were ready to go. The feedback loop was in seconds—a refreshing change from the slow, manual processes we were used to. It was a DevOps dream.

Then came Docker. For many use cases, containers were the new king. They offered a more lightweight, portable solution for shipping applications. And for a while, it seemed like Ansible might get relegated to the history books.

But not so fast. While Docker took over for application deployment, Ansible found its true calling: provisioning the remote development environment.

Reimplementing the AWS EKS API with Clojure using BigConfig, Rama, and Pedestal

K8s
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Alberto Miorin

The world of cloud infrastructure often involves interacting with complex APIs. While services like AWS EKS provide robust management for Kubernetes clusters, there might be scenarios where you need a more tailored or localized control plane. This article will guide you through reimplementing the AWS EKS API using a powerful Clojure stack: Pedestal for the API, BigConfig to wrap Terraform and Ansible in a workflow, and Rama for state and jobs.

The killer feature of BigConfig

Killer Feature
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Alberto Miorin

For anyone working with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), managing configurations and deployments efficiently is key. Engineers are constantly seeking ways to enhance their workflows. Today, we’re diving into a powerful combination: OpenTofu and BigConfig, highlighting a killer feature that makes your build step practically invisible!

Why I have replaced Atlantis with BigConfig

Atlantis
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Alberto Miorin

As a long-time infrastructure enthusiast, I’ve had my share of dalliances with various tools and workflows. For a good while, Atlantis was my reliable partner in managing Terraform deployments. It brought order to the chaos of collaborative infrastructure-as-code, and for that, I’ll always be grateful.

However, like many relationships, sometimes you just grow apart. And in the rapidly evolving world of DevOps, staying stagnant means falling behind. So, after much deliberation, I’ve decided to move on from Atlantis for my Terraform needs, and I want to share why.