Dev

We are entering a period where custom, highly-optimized, vertical solutions are becoming viable option again. This is a good news for ISVs with proven domain expertise and skilled development resources. Why do I think so? We now have: Plethora of feature-rich developer frameworks, message queues, scalable data stores, and even lower-level components in the OSS community with great documentation and a large number of use-case validation Growing number of custom solution companies (more than just ISVs) with existing deep vertical/domain expertise who are also increasingly now investing in hiring and training strong development teams Virtually every Cloud provider offering either a raw Kubernetes service or managed container execution platform which (regardless how you feel about these technologies) creates ubiquitous surface area that can be addressed with a single solution Yes, there still are many ways in which these custom development efforts can fail. Still, as one who has started their professional career developing custom software, I’m glad to see how these kinds of efforts are becoming cost effective again and increasingly represent a viable option for differentiation and real business value delivery. ...

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. ...

I wrote a new post on Google blog on the momentum behind the Knative project. How it the community reached another adoption milestone, doubling the number of its contributors. Also, another data point underscoring the Knative momentum is the month-over-month contributions which have increased over 45% since the 0.1 release, now representing more than a dozen of different companies. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...