cloud
Friday, June 25, 2021
Automating & Monitoring Seedling Growth in the Cloud Using IoT, Messaging & Micronaut
It all started with a small project to pass the time during The Great Quarantine of 2020. I bought some chiles from the local farmer’s market (with proper face coverings and social distancing, of course), fermented my first batch of hot sauce, and shared it with a few friends around the globe. I had no idea the sauce would be such a massive success, so I resolved to build on that triumph in 2021. But this time, I knew that I would have to start from the very beginning and grow the chiles myself. Of course, this presented the wonderful opportunity to combine two of my life’s greatest passions - the culinary arts and technology - to ensure that my growth operation was the ultimate success. Join me in this session where I show you how I used a microcontroller, some sensors, and the cloud to monitor and automate the germination and maturation of this year’s crop.
Replicating production on your laptop using the magic of containers
This will include a short introductory presentation on what test containers are, how they differ from other types of testing, and why they’re useful, as well as showing a live demo of how to use tools like MicroShed testing to enable this.
Saturday, June 26, 2021
Exploring Stateful Microservices built with Open Source Java in Kubernetes
How does one choose to architect a system that has a Microservice / REST API endpoints? There are many solutions out there. Some are better than others. Should state be held in a server side component, or externally? Generally, we are told this is not a good practice for a Cloud-Native system, when the 12-factor guidelines seem to be all about stateless containers, but is it? It’s unclear and this confusion may lead to poor technology stack choices that are impossible or extremely hard to change later on as your system evolves in terms of demand and performance.
While stateless systems are easier to work with, the reality is that we live in a stateful world, so we have to handle the state of data accordingly to ensure data integrity beyond securing it.
We will examine and demonstrate the fundamentals of a Cloud Native system with Stateful Microservices that’s built with Open Liberty in Kubernetes:
- Microservices/REST API – Options to use when running your apps in the JVM
- Concurrency – how to take advantage of multi-core CPUs and clustered distributed systems
- Stateful vs Stateless - while stateless apps are easier to implement, the bulk of the apps in production are stateful which involve a higher level of complexity and risk, especially when data would need to travel across multiple machines and network boundaries
- Deployment – how about containerization and orchestration using Kubernetes?
Survival Guide for the Java Architect in the Cloud Era
Let's be very honest, cloud computing cannot be learned in one day. There are several architectural challenges to deploying your application, such as which framework to choose, reflection or reflectionless, native or non-naive. We also have the operational challenges such as backups, CI/CD, and much more.
This presentation explains how to make some of these design choices and the tradeoffs to consider when building applications to run in a virtual cloud environment.
Micro services for the next Billion
The food wastage in India is 70 tonnes per year, and there is mismanagement at several layers. Approximately 20-30% of the wastage happens in the last mile, between wholesale traders, and retail mom-and-pop stores. Is there something we can do about food wastage?
This was the problem statement I attempted to solve as a first engineering hire at a startup. Our customers were 12.8 million retail owners that deal in FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods, such as food grains, tooth paste, etc.). The goal was to develop a platform for retail traders (mom and pop shop owners / small and medium business owners) to buy FMCG products from wholesale traders using an Android app.
We were attacking a deeply entrenched business practice to help solve a societal goal. For a section of the population which is not very well versed with smartphones and technology, the user experience had to be designed from the ground up to be multilingual, fungible, unstructured, and relevant. In this talk, I cover how we went about iterating the solution from a simple SMS based system to a full fledged app backed by micro-services. Having a micro-service architecture provided us the agility to experiment and iterate quickly, and we were able to push out changes much faster, and help solve wastage problems even sooner.
I will discuss the several problems we faced in this segment with regards to unstructured data, and how our data models had to adapt. We used cloud services extensively, so I will also cover how different pieces came together in a cogent form to build a better experience for our customers.