===

As a result of recent reports suggesting that there may have been a security compromise of the third party vendor that hosts Costcophotocenter.com, we are temporarily suspending access to the site. We take the security of our members’ data seriously, which is why we are taking this precautionary step. This decision does not affect any other Costco website or our in-store operations, including in-store photo centers.

This situation is affecting multiple online photo sites. We are diligently working to determine when we can re-enable the site, but in all likelihood that will not occur until the middle of August. We will update this statement when we have more information.

As the time pressure mounted the microservices that communicated naturally combined. The driving force was just the cycle time. Testing and deploying microservices took longer. Mind you, not minutes vs hours. Just a few extra minutes makes a difference if you do it often enough.

One decision that give us confidence we will be able to split the system back out again was to use the stuartsierra/component library. By using DI we can be fairly confident we don't build dependencies we aren't aware of. We simply substitute a client that talks over the network in for the one that does the calculation locally.

We are still in the stabilization zone but have already started to split out services. Code velocity is the driving force for the splitting. Certain components are well understood and fairly robust other still young and poorly understood. We want to limit our ability to accidentally screw up something we have already gotten right. So the components that haven't changed in a while get spun out.

The last election showed how important IT systems are. And while it may take a few election cycles we can certainly use that to our advantage.

Thoughts?