The meteoric rise in the value of bitcoins has put a spotlight on the blockchain, which is the primary public, digital ledger for bitcoin transactions. A blockchain allows digital transactions to be transparent and distributed, but not copied. It is thought to be the brainchild of an anonymous person or group operating under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The bitcoin network has attracted attention from almost all industries and experts due to its variable market value. These captains of industry and the experts are trying to figure out how this technology can be adapted to and integr ..read more

Kolla provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds that are scalable, fast, reliable and upgradable — using community best practices. I still remember the kind of applause I got from my colleagues when I got my first OpenStack deployment working. Most of the things then worked around DevStack, the development environment of OpenStack, and vendors were still trying to find the right mix of DevOps tools to deploy OpenStack. The evolution process involved working with tools like Chef, Puppet and Ansible, with vendors creating a deployment model around ..read more

Kata Containers is new container technology that combines technology from Intel Clear Containers with runV from Hyper. Managed by a community, the objective of Kata is to deliver speed and security. Ever since Linux containers were launched with Docker, containerisation has become a full-fledged domain. Containers are now used in a number of applications and, as in the case of all developing technologies, real-life challenges linked to performance and security have begun to matter with containers as well. Intel has been working on the Clear Containers Project for some time to address security ..read more

I was recently interviewed by Dmitry Filippov, Product Marketing Manager at JetBrains related to OpenStack Development with PyCharm. Here is the link for the interview ..read more

Introduction With reference to steps listed at Using kubeadm to Create a Cluster for setting up the Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm. I have been working on an automation to setup the cluster. The result of it is kubeadm-vagrant, a github project with simple steps to setup your kubernetes cluster with more control on vagrant based virtual machines. Installation Clone the kubeadm-vagrant repo git clone https://github.com/coolsvap/kubeadm-vagrant Choose your distribution of choice from CentOS/Ubuntu and move to the specific directory. Configure the cluster parameters in Vagrantfile. Refer be ..read more

With reference to Kata Containers Developers Guide steps, I setted up the  development environment. At the same time, I went ahead and created a little automation to recreate the environment with Vagrant. The primary code to create the environment is pushed at vagrant-kata-dev. For setting it up, you will need, VirtualBox (Currently only tested with virtualbox) Vagrant with following plugins vagrant-vbguest vagrant-hostmanager vagrant-share To Install the plugins, use following command, $ vagrant plugin install <plugin-name> The setup instructions are simple, once you have in ..read more

Health Checks Health checks are becoming an essential part of modern microservices setup. Every service is expected expose a health check endpoint which can be accessed by server monitoring tool. Health checks provide important attributes as they allow the process responsible for running the application to restart or kill it when it starts to misbehave or fail. Design with this pattern needs to be incredibly careful and not too aggressive to use major cycles to utilize this. What needs to be recorded with health checks is entirely one’s choice. However, you might run into some recommendations ..read more

Before we delve deeper into circuit breaking pattern let us understand couple of patterns which will help us understand it better. Pattern – Timeouts A timeout is an incredibly useful pattern while communicating with other services or data stores. The idea is that you set a limit on the response of a server and, if you do not receive a response in the given time, then you write a business logic to deal with this failure, such as retrying or sending a failure message back to the upstream service. A timeout could be the only way of detecting a fault with a downstream service. However, no reply d ..read more

With monolithic applications, services invoke one another through language level methods or procedure calls. This was relatively straightforward and predictable behavior. As application complexity increased we realized that monolithic applications were not suitable for the scale and demand of modern software, so we moved towards SOA or service-oriented architecture. The monoliths were broken into smaller chunks that typically served a particular purpose. But SOA brought its own caveats in the picture with inter-service calls, SOA services ran at well-known fixed locations, which resulted in st ..read more

Event processing is a model which allows you to decouple your micro services by using a message queue. Rather than connect directly to a service which may or may not be at a known location, you broadcast and listen to events which exist on a queue, such as Redis, Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, and a whole host of other sources. The message queue is a highly distributed and scalable system, and it should be capable of processing millions of messages so we do not need to worry about it not being available. At the other end of the queue, there will be a worker who is listening for new messag ..read more