Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Rethinking COTS: From "Black Box" Solutions to Transparent, Agile Platforms

Federal agencies are right to prioritize commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions for procurement modernization. Recent executive orders have provided a clear mandate for 'buy before build'—steering agencies toward proven, market-ready technology to accelerate mission delivery. But not all off-the-shelf procurement solutions are created equal. The technology landscape has evolved, revealing a critical divide in the world of off-the-shelf acquisition software.

Why Fast Analytics Unlocks Smarter Decisions (and AI Readiness)

A few years ago, we looked across many deployments and noticed a pattern: teams would build prototypes, spin up ML pipelines, and then stall. The model’s accuracy dropped. The “aha insights” dried up. The data scientists would get stuck waiting for dashboards to refresh, or data to be cleaned.AI is sexy. It sells. But it doesn’t do itself. The missing piece? Data readiness. Not just fast data.

What is BDD?

The term “Behavior Driven Development”, or BDD, is an umbrella term for a wide variety of techniques. The general principles of BDD include reframing tests as descriptions of system behavior – “when I do one thing, I should see this result”. Historically, those descriptions were the output of a computer program. Over time, the uses of BDD shifted toward Gherkin, an English-like but precise language.

Cross-Cloud Data Replication Over Private Networks With Confluent

Modern businesses don’t run in just one place. Your applications might live in Amazon Web Services (AWS), your analytics in Microsoft Azure, and critical systems on-premises. The challenge? Keeping all that data connected and flowing in real time—without adding complexity or risk. As more organizations adopt these multicloud strategies, the need for secure, private data replication has become critical.

Best Practices for Building a Secure FinTech App

‍ Trust is the currency in FinTech - and in 2025, that currency is under siege. Cybercrime is accelerating. Global costs from cyber attacks are projected to hit USD 10.5 trillion annually in 2025, up sharply from about USD 3 trillion in 2015. Meanwhile, in the financial sector where your app may live, the stakes are even higher: the average cost of a data breach in financial services is pegged at USD 6.08 million.

The True Cost of Kafka Replication

Kafka cluster-to-cluster data replication is critical to many use cases: disaster recovery (DR), cloud or data center migration, testing applications with production-like data, and multi-region data distribution. Easy replication of data between clusters: The business case is clear, but the cost model is not. Some solutions appear free but impose heavy operational burden.

Introducing Annotations for Ably Pub/Sub

Today, we’re excited to introduce Annotations in Ably Pub/Sub, a powerful way to enrich your realtime streams with structured, abstracted data. About Ably Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform. We power more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform, serving over a billion devices monthly. Businesses trust us with their critical applications like chat, notifications and broadcast - reliably, securely and at serious scale.

Do all testers need to learn how to code so they can automate tests?

Not every tester needs to code. Treat automation as part of a wider testing strategy. Keep business and domain expertise front and center to decide what to test, then choose the approach that fits your team low code, record and playback, or full code. This lets domain experts automate without losing the value of their product knowledge, while coders tackle the complex parts.