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Monthly Archives: May 2017

Geecon 2017 Kraków: Day One

25 May

Episode 71

As I’ve mentioned in the previous episode, I was attending a conference. Geecon 2017 took place between 17th to 19th May in Kraków. There were four tracks without explicit categorization, roughly 80 talks and 1200 people. The focus was mostly on Java with a pinch of soft topics, agile and similar stuff. It was the ninth edition, which took place at cinema complex about 5 kilometers from the city center.

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I’m a car person. Apparently, I have a train curse. Whenever I take a train, it is either significantly delayed, or breaks down in the middle of nowhere (hi Pyrkon 2013…). I was a bit hesitant to test the curse, and it still works to full extent, but more on that later. Let’s get down to business and review what I was able to grab from the event.

Talks

On day one, I’ve attended seven and a quarter of talks. A quarter, because one was so weak, that I’ve left after 15 minutes and started to wander mindlessly in the sea of conference sponsors. Let’s skip that one and see what good was out there. This will be a content-dense ride.

David Moore: Wrestling the Monolith

“Software is not done until last user is dead” – was the takeaway I liked the most in the keynote from Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on May 25, 2017 in Misc, News, Technology

 

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Amazon Database Services

18 May

Episode 70

Today we will continue with AWS stuff after a short break. You might remember a brief introduction to the database category in Episode 65: The Amazon Web Services Jungle. It’s time to expand upon that a bit as we did with compute and storage categories before.

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We will dive a bit deeper into four services, which somehow represents different approaches to organized data storage: Relational Database Service, DynamoDB – a NoSQL database, ElastiCache – an in-memory data grid and Redshift – data warehouse.

RDS – Long time ago…

Amazon RDS, released in 2009, is a service for managing “classic” relational databases, stuff that usually first comes to mind when we think of “database”.  RDS offers several engines: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle database, MS SQL Server and Amazon’s own AuroraDB. The service simplifies setting up a database – we don’t have to prepare a machine, install the database server on it, care about updates, licensing, HDD size, CPU, RAM, scaling, backups, replication, stand-by and Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on May 18, 2017 in AWS, Cloud, Technology

 

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Windows Subsystem for Linux

11 May

Episode 69

Last five weeks we focused on Amazon Web Services, let’s have a short break from that. Recently I’m working in a project where majority people works on Mac (why… ) or Linux (why… ) while I’m definitely a Windows user due of numerous reasons I’m not going elaborate on in this article. Honestly I’m still startled, since I was never in an environment where more than 10% of developers used anything else than Windows on their work stations (I’m not talking servers), and I was in quite a few environments. Anyway, unfortunately, OS agnosticism is a distant value to some people, so I was often finding myself in a situation where I need to either convert stuff to be OS independent or to run on Windows. At some point I grew tired of that and looked for a ways to run Linux shell scripts on my machine.

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There are quite a few, and one of them will be our topic today. Windows Subsystem for Linux, also known as WSL, Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, or just Bash on Windows gives us the Ubuntu shell build into Windows 10. You can run Linux commands, download and install programs and access files on Windows partitions. It’s still an experimental feature, but works very well for my needs.

There is a Penguin on my Window!

It’s not a virtual machine, it’s not a Docker container, It’s not a library nor an emulator. It’s a new kernel layer, more or less, based on Microsoft’s Astoria Project that was meant for Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on May 11, 2017 in Misc, Technology

 

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Amazon Compute: To serve or not to serve?

04 May

Episode 68

This is the fifth article in the Amazon Web Services Series so far (or sixth, if you consider the cloud computing intro a part of it). Within three weeks, we went through a list of all currently available AWS services and then, in the previous article, we focused on storage category: S3, Glacier, EFS and EBS. Today we are going to dive into the compute category, particularly EC2 and Lambda services.

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EC2 and Lambda represents two main computing models we can consider when hosting any application in AWS. We can have a server – a classic virtual machine, either with or without containers, or we can bypass all that and just run a piece of code as a function. Let’s look at both solutions and compare.

Elastic Compute Cloud

EC2 was introduced by AWS in 2006, and in 2010 the entire Amazon retail business switched to it. In essence, EC2 service is about providing virtual machines, or computing instances. Instead of buying physical servers and taking care of them, we can just buy time of the machine, get more when our needs grow and discard if they shrink as with everything in the cloud. Instances come in many different Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on May 4, 2017 in AWS, Cloud, Technology

 

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