Yanik Peiffer

If you’ve read up on the GDPR basics (what personal data is, the 7 data handling principles, the rights users can exercise), you know the theory. Now let’s talk about what happens when you try to actually implement all of that in a microservices architecture. Because everything that’s simple in a monolith becomes a coordination problem the moment your data is spread across dozens of services. The Core Problem In a monolith, personal data lives in one database....

Nobody gets into software engineering because they’re excited about data regulations. GDPR is one of those topics that most of us want to hand off to the legal team and never think about again. And for the most part, that’s fine. You don’t need to become a privacy lawyer. But if you’re building systems that touch personal data, and you almost certainly are, there are parts of GDPR that land squarely on your desk....

When you first dockerize a Node.js application, the goal is just to get it working. You copy your code, install dependencies, and run it. But this quick-and-dirty approach often results in huge, slow, and potentially insecure Docker images. A bloated image slows down your CI/CD pipeline, increases storage costs, and expands the attack surface of your application. Let’s fix that. We’ll take a typical, unoptimized Node.js setup and transform it step-by-step into a lean, production-ready image....

When you first containerize a Node.js application, the goal is just to get it working. You create a Dockerfile, run docker build, and if it runs, you call it a win. But soon, you notice the consequences: your image is over 1GB, your CI/CD pipeline takes ages to build and push it, and you’re left wondering if there’s a better way. There is. By applying a few strategic optimizations to your Dockerfile, you can drastically reduce your image size and build times....

Every developer eventually faces the same challenge: how do we securely provide secrets like API keys, database credentials, and certificates to our applications? The most common answer is often a .env file. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, but it introduces a host of security and operational problems that can become a serious liability. When you use .env files, you have to securely share them with your team. Then you have to figure out how to get them onto your production servers....

Deploying a few microservices with Docker is a solved problem. You build an image, you run it, and you’re done. But what happens when “a few” turns into a dozen? The manual process of ssh and docker run across different servers quickly becomes a major bottleneck. Deployments become stressful, error prone, and slow. This is the exact situation my team faced when our project grew to twelve interdependent services. Coordinating updates, managing resources, and ensuring everything started in the right order was a full time job....