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Janakiram MSV article about an open source serverless platform from IBM, OpenWhisk. OpenWhisk is available in two modes, hosted and on-premises. Developers can easily get started with it for implementing event-driven, loosely coupled functions.

Article detailed instructions will help you to set up, configure, and Test Apache OpenWhisk in a Virtual Machine. Configuring the platform is simple and straightforward.

Key Concepts and Terminology - OpenWhisk deals with three key components: Triggers, Actions, and Rules. Actions are the functions that developers write, which get invoked directly through an HTTP call or by a Trigger. OpenWhisk supports JavaScript, Java, Swift, and even arbitrary binaries packaged as Docker containers.

Creating an Action to Send an Email - Example code will help you demonstrate how to use custom node.js packages to build a function, and invoking it asynchronously. And then you will use SendGrid for sending the email.

In recent years, the term infrastructure has emerged as code in the software development terminology. In the modern sense, an infrastructure is considered as all elements of a project solution, but excluding the application. Configured web servers and operating systems among other components make up the infrastructure.

Infrastructure as a code is a concept that has emerged to place an emphasis on using the techniques of organizing code in organizing your infrastructure.

Infrastructure as a code is the process of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure (processes, bare-metal servers, virtual servers, etc.) and their configuration through machine-processable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or the use of interactive configuration tools

In this tutorial author identifies two tools - Vagrant and Puppet - which can be used to overcome challenges of traditional infrastructure provisioning. Light reading.

This post by Mike gives a feel for the content in our report on probabilistic programming by introducing the algorithms and technology that make probabilistic programming possible.

Probabilistic programming enables us to construct and fit Bayesian models in code. Bayesian inference is a principled way to draw conclusions from incomplete or imperfect data, by interpreting data in light of prior knowledge of probabilities.

The problem is that, until recently, the algorithms that make product and business problems tractable using Bayesian methods have been difficult to implement and computationally expensive to run.

Until recently, the main alternative to this naive approach was Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling (of which Metropolis Hastings and Gibbs sampling are well-known examples). Articles then continues with explanation of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and the No U-Turn Sampler, Variational Inference and Automatic Differentation.

Benjamin Wootton - co-founder and Principal Consultant at Contino - aims in this article to introduce ECS and provide a walk-through example for deploying your first container cluster.

EC2 Container Service (ECS) is a new service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). ECS is aimed at making it easier to work with Docker containers, providing a clustering and orchestration layer for controlling the deployment of your containers onto hosts, and the subsequent management of the containers lifecycle within a cluster.

Designing robust and performant distributed clustering systems is notoriously difficult, so tools such as Kubernetes and Swarm give us that capability without having to build it ourselves. ECS takes this one step further by taking away the need to setup, run and administer the orchestration layer.

Joel Lee had been programming since he was 13, yet still find it both challenging and rewarding. There’s nothing quite like it. But it can be overwhelming at times, leading some people to give up and quit.

To become a better coder, you have to be intentional - in how you read and write code, in how you study new concepts, and even in the way you take breaks and refresh your mind. Intention is key to progress.

Interesting thoughts how journaling helps you articulate your thoughts. The process of “unloading your thoughts” is more important than you might realize.

Good read!

Brian Jackson good article exploring current resource hints and directives which can be another great way to boost the performance on your website or web application.

You might have heard of preload, prefetch, and preconnect, but authors will dive deeper into the differences between them and how you can benefit from them. Article contains great deal of supporting visual materials - schemas and browser comparison charts.

You will understand how you can utilize resource hints to speed up delivery of content and assets by using them in a strategic manner. Although techniques have the potential to speed up many interactive sites, sometimes it won’t work and you will learn when it is the latter.

Brian Brazil superb article about wide array of practices considered to be monitoring in an operational, container and cloud-based context.

Main cases for monitoring he dived into are:

• Knowing when something is wrong
• Having the information to debug a problem
• Trending and reporting
• Plumbing

In this article, author covered the use cases for monitoring, which should help you understand the problems that can be solved with monitoring. We learned about the four different ways for using events: metrics, logs, profiling and distributed tracing.

Each solution has its pros and cons, and you’ll almost certainly need more than one tool to create a comprehensive solution for monitoring containers.

It isn’t often that good news makes headlines, especially in the security world. Dovecot bucked the trend earlier this month, with a cybersecurity audit that praised the mail server as “near-impenetrable”.

Cure53, the German security team that audited Dovecot, did a thorough job. The results were impressive. Cure53 found only three minor issues. Online discovery tool Shodan found that 68% of IMAP servers ran Dovecot.

Stellar report card is important is because it is open-source software. However, some of the biggest and most popular open-source projects have been felled by bugs that lay dormant for years.

Interesting thought: The problem is that while many eyes may scour open-source code, they aren’t all well-trained or experienced eyes, and they won’t always look at mundane parts of the code.

This tutorial takes a test-first approach to implementing token-based authentication in a Flask app using JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). JSON Web Tokens (or JWTs) provide a means of transmitting information from the client to the server in a stateless, secure way.

Flask (web framework) Flask is a micro web framework written in Python and based on the Werkzeug toolkit and Jinja2 template engine.

Excellent and long tutorials You will learn:

• the benefits of using JWTs versus sessions and cookies for authentication
• implement user authentication with JWTs
• blacklist user tokens when necessary
• write tests to create and verify JWTs and user authentication
• practice test-driven development

Previous knowledge of Python and git (all code in repo) will be needed to follow this tutorial.

Lawrence Hecht article about monitoring. Monitoring is not a new concept, but a lot has changed about the systems that need monitoring.

With the current prevalence of automated systems, users often want to reduce the time needed to setup a monitoring tool and trying to find the problem in their stack. To understand how to monitor containers and their related infrastructure, article helps you understand what is different about containers.

Topics covered:

• Ephemerality and Scale of Containers
• Proliferation of Objects, Services and Metrics to Track
• Services Are the New Focal Point
• More Diverse Group of Monitoring End-Users
• New Mindset, New Methods
• Approaches to Address the New Reality
• Finding the Most Relevant Metrics

Links to further resources and articles detailing the different components of an effective monitoring stack provided.