Finding What Works

Application development with microservices is typically a bit different and at times more complicated than more traditional monolithic architectures. When writing a feature against a single service, you may find that you depend on another running service to test API calls. Debugging and observability can be more difficult as well, due to needing to aggregate logs and traces across multiple services.

Microservices help solve some of the scaling problems inherent with monolithic designs, and Kubernetes helps solve some of the problems with deploying and scaling these microservices. But staying agile when developing microservices can be challenging. With a monolith like Rails, the entire application runs and deploys as one making it straightforward to run locally to develop against, at least for smaller applications. When developing a microservice like in a Golang monorepo, you’ll usually need to manually run other services locally or somehow forward requests to a remote (usually shared) instance of the other services.

This sprint I have a ticket from the security team to investigate unencrypted snapshots in our AWS account and either encrypt them or delete them if no longer needed. In my initial attempt I just used the AWS web console, filtered by “Encryption: Not Encrypted” in the snapshots section, and attempted to delete that list.

But it would make for a boring story if things were that simple:

The snapshots still seem to be in use by AMIs :thinking:

With Windows 10 Pro, you have the option of using a Windows native hypervisor called Hyper-V. It’s included with the OS so you don’t have to pay the high price of something like VMWare Workstation while still getting great performance. I set it up with the default option of using Dynamic Memory so that it won’t use much ram until you start adding a lot of routers and switches and it will scale up the VM’s available RAM as needed. I simulated the INE CCIE R/S topology on it with 20 routers and 5 switches, and sat at around 6GB memory consumption of the VM and my total system ram usage right up at 7.6GB of 8GB total. I didn’t notice any issues at all though, and I think that Hyper-V will scale the VM back and give more to the host if it needs it. Overall it feels much better than using VMWare Player which always opened up a window when starting GNS3. With this option, you just set Hyper-V to boot your VM automatically when you boot your desktop and it will always be in the background, available for you to use as a remote sever from GNS3.

I’ve been wanting to learn systems programming for a long time now. After reading about Rust every-other-day on Hacker News I’ve been dying to dive into it but have found that most tutorials online get kind of tough to follow for those of us without a C/C++ background. So, I found a copy of The C Programming Language on Amazon for 15 bucks and will be learning both C and Rust at the same time by doing the exercises in Kernighan & Ritchie’s highly praised 2nd edition book. One of the ways I learn best is by teaching. Given that I am learning this as I’m going, don’t take everything here as the gospel. Having said that, I’ll do my best to accurately describe the material. After all, that’s another great benefit of teaching while you learn: you have to make sure you are confident in your understanding of a topic before teaching it as fact.

In the latest test build of Windows 10 (build 14316), Microsoft introduced Ubuntu userland as a windows exe. This means you can apt-get anything in ubuntu’s repositories and PPAs right from windows! This is actually pretty cool.

More background can be found at https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/04/06/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-14316/

Join Windows Insider

1. Goto windows update settings, click on Advanced options

2. Join the Windows Insider program

3. After your account is linked, change your Insider level to Fast