RSS

Category Archives: Technology

Enterprise Technologies

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.

cloud_station__by_shelest-d4q3s33.jpg

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 »

 
5 Comments

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

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

Amazon Storage Services: S3 and beyond

26 Apr

Episode 67

April is definitely the AWS month in here. We started in episode 64 with an introduction, and an overview of first 3 service groups, then in the two following episodes we went through next 15 groups at a lightning fast pace for a total of 80 individual services. Oh my, that was a lot of links, and I bet, something new appeared meanwhile.

0bb3efcef86547a6dee64bf8db625f01.jpg

Today we are going to expand a bit upon the storage category, most importantly: S3, Glacier, EFS and EBS. We will talk about what those are exactly, what are the options, use cases and we will present some tips. I actually missed EBS from the list in the first article, since it does not appear under storage category in the AWS console, it is however present there on the webpage. However, let’s start with the most commonly known service, the S3.

Simple Storage Service

S3 is one of the oldest publicly available AWS services, and was launched in 2006. It’s an object-based storage for files up to 5TB in size. In order to upload one, we have to create a bucket first. Buckets act as Read the rest of this entry »

 
4 Comments

Posted by on April 26, 2017 in AWS, Cloud, Technology

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

Amazon Web Services Zoo

20 Apr

Episode 66

Two weeks ago we started our small AWS adventure with an introduction. Aside from basics we took a look at Compute, Storage and Networking. Week ago we went through Security, Databases, Migration, Developer and management tools and Messaging. Let’s continue with the rest of the list.

jungle-mule.jpg

Artificial Intelligence category is where things are starting to get interesting. Those services are based on machine learning technology that has access to massive (and I mean massive) amount of data belonging to AWS users. Yes, AWS AI pokes into your data. No privacy, sorry. Read the rest of this entry »

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on April 20, 2017 in AWS, Cloud, Technology

 

Tags: ,

Amazon Web Services Jungle

13 Apr

Episode 65

In the previous episode, we introduced Amazon Web Services, talked a little about history, concepts, notions and briefly about competition.  We looked at three categories of services which are the basic building blocks of software systems, namely Compute, Storage and Network. Today we will continue the walk through the AWS jungle.

b4f3d4e2d87035718e79599742941f4c

Categories and services are changing rapidly. When I started the previous article few weeks ago, there were 17 categories, now there is one more. Let’s see what’s in there.

Security, Identity and Compliance should be considered one of core aspects of any application environment, even if the application itself has no business notion of identified users. More on the category in Episode 77 and 78. Read the rest of this entry »

 
2 Comments

Posted by on April 13, 2017 in AWS, Cloud, Technology

 

Tags: , , ,

Amazon Web Services Intro

06 Apr

Episode 64

Seven weeks ago we had an introduction to cloud computing, so now, having some background, we can take a better look at one particular cloud provider. We will talk about why Amazon Web Services is currently so hot topic, a bit of history, some basic terminology, architecture, most important services and alternatives to AWS.

fc31f0ca99184fe4809c9562015e61fa.jpg

AWS is currently the most popular, largest and fastest growing cloud platform in the world. Since first quarter of 2016, Amazon is making more money on cloud services than on selling books. Check out this article if you want to know more about the numbers. Amount of organizations migrating their stuff to AWS and starting new projects there is growing so fast, that familiarity with this platform became very valuable skill on the IT market, and it’s a good investment for any software developer.

Rise of Amazon

History of AWS starts somewhere in the beginning of 21st century, with the realization, that the company need a clean, internal infrastructure as a service thing to operate more efficiently. Read the rest of this entry »

 
7 Comments

Posted by on April 6, 2017 in AWS, Cloud, Technology

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Spring Security Basics

30 Mar

Episode 63

Welcome to the next installment of the series about Spring-based web applications development. So far we have covered Angular JS fronted, Spring core, webservices, database access and unit tests. Today we are going to take care of our application security – basic authentication and authorization, users, roles, custom login form and method level security.

70d42d4aaa6aede4b84bde43e3dead63

Spring Security project started as Acegi security around 2004 and initially focused on custom authorization, using standard Java Enterprise Edition container managed authentication. Version 1.0.0 became official Spring sub-project in 2006 and year later was re-branded to Spring Security. Say hello to Alice, Bob and Eve.

Foundations

We should briefly clarify some security terminology, which might sometimes by confusing:

Identification is stating a subject identity, like user name, without yet providing any proof for that (Hi, I’m Alice). Read the rest of this entry »

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on March 30, 2017 in Spring, Technology

 

Tags: , , ,

Unit Testing Basics

23 Mar

Episode 62

Previous episode was about talking to database in Spring. Today we will continue exploring basics of building web applications, and talk about unit testing. This time, however, we are going to leave Spring alone for a moment and focus on plain unit tests using JUnit, Mockito and DataProvider.

4d821599ecc582a1ab14fe16e0594e27

As usual, all the code presented in this article is available on my GitHub in the same project as before. This tag corresponds to project state at the time of writing this article. Let’s start with some basic ideas, and why write unit tests in the first place.

Client does not pay for unit tests

Well, I have heard that once. I was in a project where code coverage was around 2%, and when I was actively trying to improve upon that, manager took me to a one on one discussion to a small room. Starting to cover old projects with tests is often difficult, but in the end the business pays much more for not having decent automatic test harness than saving on skipping it and only producing features. It simply pays back in the long run. There are less unnoticed bugs, design is cleaner, the amount of tedious repetitive work is dramatically reduced. Often it is much faster to Read the rest of this entry »

 
3 Comments

Posted by on March 23, 2017 in Clean Code, Spring, Technology

 

Tags: , , ,

Spring Data JPA Basics

16 Mar

Episode 61

In the previous episode, we covered basic concepts of web services in Spring framework. Today we will build upon that foundation and take a look on how to transfer some data between our Spring Boot application and the database. Getting started with this part requires just a bit of effort to set up the aforementioned database and configuring our application, so the two can talk to each other, but no worries I will go through this step by step.

wallup-13611.jpg

As usual, all the code presented in this article is available on my GitHub in the same project as before. This tag corresponds to project state at the time of writing this article. Before we dive into the configuration and code, let’s start with some underlying concepts, namely ORM and JPA.

Foundations

ORM, or Object Relational Mapping is a technique of mapping data between objects in object oriented languages and relational databases. Complications stem from the fact, that objects form graphs in the mathematical sense, and relational databases comprise of Read the rest of this entry »

 
7 Comments

Posted by on March 16, 2017 in Spring, Technology

 

Tags: , , ,

Spring Web Basics

09 Mar

Episode 60

Here is the second part of Spring back-end series for beginners. Part zero appeared half year ago, and was focused on Angular front-end. Part one was two weeks ago, and consisted of some basic concepts of Spring framework including inversion of control, dependency injection, beans, configuration and profiles. Today we are going to look into Spring web, in particular web services and handling incoming HTTP requests. There will be no fancy front-end stuff this time, just naked request and response.

steampunk_spider_lamp_by_catherinetterings-d6ugb5v

As usual the introduction to the topic and going over basic concepts might well be at least one separate article but let’s try to do all at once. We will cover the concept of HTTP protocol, servlets, web services, REST and JSON. If you would like to play with complete application working out of the box, visit my GitHub project Spring Angular Intro. This tag corresponds to project state at the time of writing this article.

Foundations

HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, belongs to the application layer of Internet Protocol Suite, so it’s the highest-level layer above transport layer (like TCP), network layer (like IP) and link layer (like Ethernet). HTTP request contains Read the rest of this entry »

 
4 Comments

Posted by on March 9, 2017 in API, Spring, Technology

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Boiling Frogs Wrocław 2017

02 Mar

Episode 59

Last Saturday, on February 25, I attended Boiling Frogs – software development conference held in my home city, Wrocław. It’s the second edition of the event, this time it took place at Wrocław Congress Center near Cenntenial Hall, one of the city landmarks. There were 31 talks / lightning talks in total, spread across three tracks covering variety of subjects not tied to any specific programming platform but focusing mostly on more generic aspects of coding, building organizations, solving problems and software craftsmanship in general.

c2d4qvhwiaaalrh

Unfortunately, I arrived a bit late and missed the keynote. Apparently, the closer you live to the place you are supposed to be on time, the lower are the chances of it happening – the universal rule. In addition, the day before I drove 300 km to Kraków and back again, and people need to sleep sometime.

Talks

I managed to be on six talks and one lightning talk in total, basically all of them were really good. let’s do a small recap of each of them. Read the rest of this entry »

 
1 Comment

Posted by on March 2, 2017 in Technology

 

Tags: ,

← Older posts
Newer posts →