Dev

A co-worker recently told me about flic.io buttons. These button caught my attention because they can include triggers for single, double, or hold click and can be easily wired up to all kinds of actions. I instantly thought of of a few really interesting applications. To start with though, I wanted to create a simple service that would allow me to push the custom data defined on each button over HTTP to Cloud PubSub. That in turn would then connect me to the many more actuation options through GCP APIs and services that connect to Cloud PugSub. ...

I had a chance to speak at the Cloud Conf 2019 in Turin, Italy. The conference has double its audience from last year, had a spectacular venue, and large selection of topics. I spoke in the #serverless track on using Knative as a means to serverless where you want it and on your own terms. Stressing the importance of portability and demonstrating the key features that the Kantive community has already delivered. ...

By now, Kubernetes should be the default target for your deployments. Yes, there are still use-cases where Kubernetes is not the optimal choice, but these represent an increasingly smaller number of modern workloads. The main value of Kubernetes is that it greatly abstracts much of the infrastructure management pain. The broad support amongst virtually all major Cloud Service Providers (CSP) also means that your workloads are portable. Combined with the already vibrant ecosystem of Kubernetes-related tools, means that the experience of the operator, the person responsible for managing Kubernetes, is now pretty smooth. ...

Google Stackdriver has thousands of build-in metrics to monitor everything from Kubernetes cluster to database or storage. Stackdriver is also not just limited to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it supports a number of AWS-native services and extensive log monitoring capabilities for a wide array of open source software packages, whether they run in the Cloud or in on premises. ...

I wanted to use the now generally available Cloud Spanner database to write an app that would track stock prices and social media sentiment to identify potential correlation. To test even the validity of this approach I put together a Go app that subscribes to Twitter stream for all companies defined in the Stocks table and scores each event against the Google NLP API while comparing the user sentiment against the stock ask price against Yahoo API. ...

As part of my ramp up on Google APIs I wanted to create a project that would allow me some practical exercise in a context of a real application. TFeel (short for Twitter Feeling) is a simple sentiment analyses over tweeter data for specific Twitter search terms using Google Cloud services: ...

Over the holidays, as many of us do, I embarked on a little extra-curriculum development effort I called thingz.io. I was driven by the pattern I’d observed in Data Center (DC) monitoring products; although that pattern also exists in many of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. ...

As part of my recent solution review, I wanted to compare a few performance metrics specific to multi-node data service deployment on different clouds. This post is about my experience with Google Compute Engine (GCE) as part of that evaluation. ...

After a pretty positive experience with influxdb I wanted to create a super simple telemetry producer (this one in Node.js) to spotlight a few types of time series data query supported in influxdb. (Source code available on GitHub) To get live data for this demo, I created a simple script that generates metric data for CPU Utilization and Free Memory on your local machine at 1 sec resolution. ...