Debugging Spinnaker Connectivity Issues with EKS Clusters Across VPCs: A Journey Through AWS Networking

In a recent debugging journey, we encountered a puzzling connectivity issue: our deployment tool, Spinnaker, which operates in a backend EKS cluster, suddenly lost access to resources in another cluster used for our public gateway. With recent EKS upgrades underway, we initially suspected a security group misconfiguration. However, this wasn’t a typical connectivity issue as no recent changes could clearly explain it.

As we investigated, we found ourselves navigating the complexities of AWS cross cluster routing and subnet configurations in EKS. Each clue pointed us deeper into the architecture, leading to unexpected discoveries about ENI placement and routing behavior within AWS. This blog details our journey through these layers of troubleshooting, the insights we gained, and the lessons learned along the way.

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Balancing Acts: DynamoDB as a Rewards Ledger

At Imprint, we are building rewarding ways to pay and drive customer engagement, acquisition, and brand loyalty. Central to our rewards platform is the ability to track earning of rewards and balances to ensure customers have access to their rewards and we can report back to our partner brands.
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Switching from AWS MSK with Confluent to MSK Serverless with Segmentio

Imprint uses Kafka for streaming realtime data into our data warehouse, along with asynchronous processing. This data includes updates to database entities, external events, webhook payloads, audit logs, and important internal metrics. Before this migration, we used AWS Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK), and Confluent’s Kafka Go library. This worked fine but had a few key issues that motivated us to switch to AWS Serverless MSK and Segment.io’s Kafka Go library.
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Unleashing Imprint App’s asset management system to scale with new brand partners

At Imprint, we have developed an advanced design pattern to manage, fetch and cache brand partner-specific assets, colors, and logos in our mobile app. This system efficiently addresses the growing number of brand partners we support and ensures a seamless experience for our users. This blog post outlines the key features and benefits of our asset management system.
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Mastering the Challenges of Using ALB Ingress in Kubernetes

In this blog post, we will discuss the reasons behind migrating from Istio to the Application Load Balancer (ALB) as the ingress controller in Kubernetes. We will highlight two challenges that arose during the transition: (1) Limited communication between ALB and Kubernetes, (2) Kubernetes Service’s insufficient knowledge of pods. We will also explore the solutions we implemented to overcome these challenges and achieve a more efficient and maintainable architecture.
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How Imprint built a modern and robust banking mobile app

We launched the Imprint mobile app on iOS and Android in just three months, and it was an incredible and unforgettable journey. Building a mobile app is not easy, especially since we always look for faster, easier, and more consistent ways to develop and ship mobile experiences across multiple platforms (Android and iOS). Iterating faster means the team can experiment more and provide a better user experience to their end-users. To enable faster iteration, we must carefully design the application’s architecture to maximize development velocity and minimize developer roadblocks.
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How Imprint built its card issuing platform in 6 months

As customer acquisition and retention costs skyrocket, branded card programs have become an emerging need for modern brands. Imprint’s first product to market, the branded rewards card, links to consumers’ bank accounts (just like Venmo or Coinbase), and comes without any baggage associated with traditional co-branded credit cards–no credit inquiries, no interest, and absolutely no fees. As of April 2022, we successfully launched 5 branded rewards cards, and we’re excited for what’s still to come.

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