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In his blog post Amar Kapadia gives comprehensive description of the various open source NFV (Network Function Virtualization) projects integrated by OPNFV (Open Platform for NFV) and the carrier grade features contributed back to these upstream projects by the community.

OPNFV is the only open source project that integrates, deploys, and tests a wide range of open source NFV projects on a continuous basis:

• NFV infrastructure (NFVI)
• Virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM)
• SDN Controller
• Management and network orchestration (MANO)

Like OPNFV, OpenDaylight (ODL), is also a Linux Foundation project. It is a full blown modular SDN controller that caters to multiple use cases such as NFV, IoT, and enterprise applications. Plethora of information in this post and links to many resources and a book.

Julia Evans excellent blog post focusing on how to set up your Kubernetes network. She hasn’t had seen much about how to operate the network and be confident that it would not create a lot of production incidents for you down the line. And that’s why she dives into kubernetes networking in this post.

She tries to home in at these things:

• Avoiding networking outages in production is important
• Operating networking software is hard
• Thinking critically about major changes to your networking infrastructure and the impact on your API integration

Amongst some interesting points made is a notion that networking software often relies very heavily on the Linux kernel. And to fix a production networking issues you often need a lot of expertise. She feels like as an organization running your own Kubernetes cluster you need to make a pretty large investment into making sure you understand all the pieces so that you can fix things when they break.

Good coverage of the kubernetes networking topic from newcomer perspective with some example code.

Bruce Wang detailed article in which you learn how they went about creating microservices starter kit when moving from monolithic architecture to self contained microservices.

They created sample app which contains several capabilities and it may not all make sense for a new service and to cover a multitude of integrations so any new service can pick and choose what it needs. The main features supported:

• Continuous integration with CircleCI and Coveralls
• PostgreSQL support with migrations using Flyway
• Synq API integration using our Golang SDK
• Gin Web framework
• 100% test coverage via various mocking and code organization techniques

Loads of example code and organization explained in this article. And if you fancy, you can help author with the issues on GitHub. Good read!

Michael Churchman from Rancher Labs nice blog post in which he takes a look at what you need to know about serverless computing, and how it should figure into your IT strategy. Serverless computing is a hot topic right now - this article should help you to answer common questions like: Is serverless computing a replacement for containers? Or is it just another popular technology that can be used alongside containers?

Serverless computing of the type represented by AWS Lambda can be an extremely valuable resource, and if it isn’t already part of your DevOps delivery chain, it probably should be.Serverless computing is very well suited to a variety of tasks, but it is far from being an all-around substitute for deploying and managing your own containers.

Author then describes:

• How serverless works
• What serverless computing does well
• Serverless use cases
• What containers can do better
• What are the limists

And more in the article. Give it a go!

Everett Griffiths is author of the blog post which focuses on the Data Access Object design pattern and how it can be used to communicate with multiple data sources. The article will demonstrate a solution using PHP and dependency injection to straddle multiple data sources in a scalable and testable way. Similar results can be obtained in other languages or using different organizational approaches.

He presents very interesting user case when application needs to retrieve data from multiple sources. The example with bad way to update the data model is presented with supporting code and then better alternative suggested.

This article demonstrates one way to split code execution across multiple classes by injecting one class into another. Accessing data across various microservices is only one possible use of this trick of sequential chaining. Drawbacks are listed as well. All in all - good read!

Very interesting post from Microsoft Powershell team with minimalistic code example how to run a microservice directly from Powershell. This is an experimental code but shows the power of Microsoft platform.

Polaris is a cross-platform, minimalist web framework for PowerShell Core 6. With 6 lines of code, you have your very own web server running and ready to accept requests – all within PowerShell.

PowerShell is evolving and Microsoft want you to experiment with other use cases for PowerShell. With .NET Standard 2.0 out, authors were able to get their hands on the .NET HttpListener class originally from the .NET Framework. With it comes a solution that works anywhere that PowerShell does.

This can be a way to run your own web servers to allow for a language-agnostic way to run PowerShell scripts thanks to HTTP. Imagine a mobile app triggering remote PowerShell scripts all through HTTP. Or hosting a static site and interacting with an external API all using PowerShell for server code.

Awesome! Follow the link to learn more!

Evan Bottcher - technical principal at ThoughtWorks - take on core values for building great software. When it comes to the craft of building software, he recognizes some fundamental software engineering values that ThoughtWorks share. None of values and practices mentioned in the post are new, in fact, some some were lifted directly from the XP values and practices.

He has chosen four core values to present:

• Clean code - easy to understand and maintain
• Fast feedback - whether a change has been successful in moments
• Repeatability - confidence and predictability, remove manual tasks
• Simplicity - no more complexity than software needs to do a good job

He also dives in eight core engineering practices — methods and approaches that support the core values. Even specialized technical domains are built on top of the same core of values and practices. Everything in the core practices applies to prototype development, MVP, test and learn, any other explanation you might use to cut corners.

To find out more and to see charts with all mentioned above, follow the link.

Roman Pichler published this post some time ago but advice in it still applies today. A product roadmap is a powerful tool to describe how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to acquire a budget for developing the product. But creating an effective roadmap is not easy, particularly in an agile context where changes occur frequently and unexpectedly.

Whenever you are faced with an agile, dynamic environment you should work with a goal-oriented product roadmap:

• Focus on goals and benefits
• Tell a coherent story
• Keep it simple
• Secure a strong buy-in, create agreement
• Have the courage to say no

You’ll find more in the article with further links to learn more about the topic and a link to example roadmap. Give it a go!

Niklas Keller excellent blog post focusing on generators in PHP. Generators are special functions in PHP. Whenever a function contains yield, it’s no longer a normal function anymore, but always returns a Generator. Generators have been added to PHP in version 5.5, yet they have received rather low attention.

It is important to notice that generators don’t execute anything until you start using the returned generator. We have an interruptible function now that we can pause and resume at any yield. This enables writing lazy functions that do just as much as the consumer needs. You could build something that reads all users via the GitHub API. These are paginated, but you could hide that detail and fetch new pages as needed.

Plenty of code examples will help you to get up to the speed with generators and what is the main difference between them and non-iterator implementation using arrays. Generators have way more use cases than many people think. Could not agree more!

Cyrille Hemidy blog post describing how to host your static web site for free. Site is generated with Hugo generator, free SSL certificate and security provided by Cloudflare, and CI/CD provided via GitHub and Netlify. Cloudflare also manages DNS for custom domain and provides caching.

This set up works well with static web sites (Netlify does not host dynamic sites but provides CDN, builds your site from hugo code, enables staging environment, pre-rendering, assets post processing - for free). Post briefly goes over:

• Explaining what is Hugo sites generator
• Explaining what is Netlify
• Explaining what is CloudFlare
• Describing the setup and workflow

Nice charts and screen grabs help you to get clear picture how it is done.