The Strangler Fig Pattern is a strategy for gradually modernizing software, replacing an outdated system piece by piece while it keeps running. It matters because it is one of the few legacy migration methods that avoids the all-or-nothing gamble.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service on AWS that decouples distributed system components and enables asynchronous communication. Understanding SQS is essential for anyone designing scalable, fault-tolerant applications built on microservices or serverless architecture.
Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management (IAM) server that takes over login, Single Sign-On and authorization from your applications. It is worth understanding because it has become the de facto standard for self-hosted IAM and a security foundation for microservice and cloud-native architectures.
Self-attention is the mechanism that lets a language model assess how every word in a sentence relates to all the other words at once. It is the foundation of the Transformer architecture and of every modern large language model — without it there would be no GPT, no Llama, no BERT.
JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture) is a machine learning architecture that learns to predict abstract representations of the world instead of reconstructing raw pixels. Created by Yann LeCun, it aims to give machines something large language models lack — an intuitive grasp of physics and causality.
SAML 2.0 is the XML-based federated authentication standard that has powered single sign-on across enterprises, universities and governments since 2005. Understanding its architecture and attack vectors is now foundational work for any security engineer or identity architect.
OAuth 2.0 is the industry-standard framework for delegating access permissions, allowing applications to access user data without ever knowing the user's password. Understanding it is essential for anyone building or consuming modern web, mobile, and API-based services.
Scope is the OAuth 2.0 mechanism that defines what an application can do with an issued token — not who the user is or what they are allowed to do. Understanding scope is fundamental to secure API design, social login through Google or GitHub, and integrations with AI agents.
mTLS is an extension of the TLS protocol in which not only the server but also the client cryptographically proves its identity. Understanding this mechanism matters today because it has become a foundation of microservice security, zero-trust architecture, and communication between autonomous AI agents.
Token Introspection is the standard way an API asks the authorization server whether a given token is still valid and what exactly it represents. Understanding this mechanism is essential when designing secure authorization in a microservice architecture and you have to choose between real-time state control and maximum performance.
OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an authentication layer built on top of OAuth 2.0 that has become the global standard for login in web, mobile, and microservice applications since 2014. We explain how it differs from OAuth 2.0, how the ID Token works, what the UserInfo endpoint does, and which authorization flows to use today.
PKI is a framework of standards, institutions and procedures that securely binds a cryptographic key to a real-world identity online. It is the invisible foundation of trusted HTTPS — without it, a browser has no way to verify that the server it is talking to is who it claims to be.
