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Dario Simonetti - Head of Core Engineering at Attest wrote nice article about service mesh for AWS EC2 Container Service (AWS ECS). There is very little content online that explains how to set it up.

As opposed to Kubernetes, AWS ECS is simply a container scheduler and very little more. It doesn’t provide features such as service discovery and application configuration. For those, you’ll need an external tool or craft something yourself; e.g. Consul.

Article then explains linkerd various configuration you can deploy to AWS. linkerd is a transparent proxy that adds service discovery, routing, failure handling, and visibility to modern software applications. The article touches on advantages and disadvantages of each configuration. Code examples and detailed explanation of good and bad for each configuration are provided. When you deploy a new version of your ECS services, ECS will do a rolling deployment, ensuring no downtime.

Recommended reading!

Micha Hernandez van Leuffen short reading about how much has changes in last 15 years in software world and what needs to change going forward. About 15 years ago, back in the age of Y2K, the way we computed looked wildly different. Virtually all computing took place using on-premise hardware.

Author then considers changes since early 2000s:

• Bare-metal workloads have been migrated to virtual server and then to Docker containers
• Systems are now almost over-administered over the network
• The cloud paradigm has been widely accepted
• New automation tools and strategies to work with, CI servers
• Massive cultural change has taken place within organizations

However, software development Nirvana remains elusive. Read to discover more.

Chris Tomich shares in this post 3 patterns, 2 of which can be used, to deal with Golang’s lack of method overloading – a functional way, an object oriented way, and a “JavaScript” way. Author realises that method overloading can be pretty badly abused but it’s perfect for default values.

The functional way example uses Golangs ability to return multiple values from a function and the ability to immediately accept those multiple values as an argument list for another function.

The object oriented way - is vastly more readable. And The JavaScript way example is also included, but author points out that it should be never really used in production.

Chris concludes that you will probably end up using a hybrid of the functional method and the object oriented methods. Example code for all above mentioned approaches in included.

Dana Van Aken, Geoff Gordon, and Andy Pavlo from Carnegie Mellon University guest blog post on AWS demonstrates how academic researchers can leverage AWS Cloud Credits for Research Program to support their scientific breakthroughs.

Database management systems (DBMSs) are the most important component of any data-intensive application. They can handle large amounts of data and complex workloads. OtterTune, a new tool written in Python that’s being developed by students and researchers, can automatically find good settings for a DBMS’s configuration.

Article then goes on explaining:

• How OtterTune works
• The machine learning pipeline
• Implementation
• Evaluation with MySQL and Postgres

Also loads of charts supporting the explanation. Nice!

Tom Sweeney from Project Atomic wrote an article about the Buildah tool for building Open Container Initiative (OCI) complaint container images. The tool requires golang. The buildah package provides a command line tool which can be used to (amongts other):

• Create a working container, either from scratch or using an image as a starting point
• Create an image, either from a working container or via the instructions in a Dockerfile
• Images can be built in either the OCI image format or the traditional upstream docker image format
• Mount a working container’s root filesystem for manipulation

Buildah simplifies the process of creating, building and updating images while decreasing the learning curve of the container environment. What’s really neat is there is no requirement for a container runtime daemon to be running on your system chewing up resources and complicating the build process.

As usually article sports command line examples for building and playing with container images.

Monty Shokeen wrote neat article about handling exceptions in Python programming language. It is very common to encounter errors during the execution of a program. Two common kinds of errors that you may have to deal with are syntax errors and exceptions.

Exceptions occur during the execution of a program when something unexpected happens. For example, let’s say you are asking the user to input a number in order to perform a division.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to properly handle and raise exceptions in Python. Article describes many types of exceptions, including:

• NameError
• TypeError
• ValueError
• ZeroDivisionError
• NotImplementedError
• FileNotFoundError

Code examples, including ones with more complex multiple exceptions, are present. Good read.

Dario Carrasque wrote post blog on topic of the evaluation of frameworks to develop REST APIs to satisfy requirements of modularity and availability.

Author describes process of framework selection including considering various languages, e.g.: Python, Scala, and Ruby. A backward compatibility with core Java applications was the most important requirement, though.

They considered 3 frameworks:

• Spring Boot
• Play
• Lagom

Read, how and why they decided to go with Spring Boot and what were their criteria for selection process. Examples of the code including hint to swagger documentation in article.

Alexis Mangin deep dive on a good architecture for very large web applications in React. if you didn’t start with a good architecture, it can become difficult to keep your code organized.

Author spent time comparing solutions from Nathanael Beisieg and others but decided to go with his own approach. He also compares common boilerplate projects on GitHub. They often organize all the files by type, but many of them do not account for application grows; and it often becomes difficult to maintain it later.

He takes liking in Ember and it’s ability to structure your project by features, instead of by type. Author decided to group all related features together, and nest them as needed. Recommended way is to create services to manage all api requests.

Code with examples in ReactJS provided. Excellent article!

Tomek Kaczanowski journey into explaining what you do at work to a group of 6 years old kids, how to explain programming to them in engaging and funny way. Interesting article built on ideas for a successful presentation:

• Keep children them engaged by asking questions and drawing (big drawing, drawing while talking).
• Build upon what they already know (YouTube, laptops, tablets, DVDs).

All children new about laptops of their parents, smartphones, tables and often consumed content over the internet. Author explained in simple ways (drawings) what computers are, how they work, that they use a funny language which consists only of zeros and ones. Methods which worked are also mentioned, e.g.:

• Drawing pictures is the right way to go - grabs their attention.
• Be prepared for repeating things over and over again.
• Write carefully - e.g. they will protest when you write 1 so it looks like 7.
• ~25 minutes is enough; their attention span is simply too short.
• There is no point in correcting them about technical details, important is to understand the concept.

Very interesting and educational.

Anup Cowkur post on topic: why not use some of the concepts and techniques from the functional world in Android programming.

The term Functional programming is an umbrella for a range of programming concepts which the moniker doesn’t quite do justice to. At it’s core, it’s a style of programming that treats programs as evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids mutable state and side effects. Declarative, Explicit and Concurrent code that is easier to reason about and is designed to avoid surprises.

Authors then describes how to use pure functions. A function is pure if its output depends only on its input and has no side effects. Code examples demonstrating functional programming in both Java and Kotlin are included… Good reading.