AWS Beanstalk (running Spring Boot jar) and Log aggregation with ElasticSearch & Filebeat

Most serious applications (and distributed microservices style architectures) will require to provide a log aggregation & analysis feature to its dev & operations teams. Reviewing log entires from 10s or 100s of server instances is not something to take lightly. Whether you choose to use a commercial product or an open source offering – that does not matter; just make sure you have one available.

Recently I have been deploying applications using AWS Beanstalk. You can definitely configure CloudWatch Logs to send log streams over to AWS ElasticSearch service. Log messages can be routed to a Lambda function which would break the log messages into individual attributes suitable for indexing. I wanted to try a slightly different route where I depend less on CloudWatch Logs and more on open source tools. Enter filebeat on Beanstalk.

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forge for fast build/deploy for kubernetes (with minikube)

Just came across a nice dev tool to build and deploy Docker’ized applications. A developer may want to independently build/deploy to a local docker container or another Kubernetes cluster vs. waiting for a remote CI/CD process to deploy to a dev environment. This involves some repetitive tasks such as building the binary, packaging into a Docker container, pushing to a Docker registry and all the way to deploying to a running container. If you run this often it can be a time suck for developers. forge.sh takes away those repetitive steps and lets you build/deploy locally or to another cluster.

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Building HiPeE (High Performance Engineering) teams

Have you worked in a high performance engineering (HiPeE) team, how do you know you are in one and why is it so hard to replicate that?  Are there factors that make it possible for HiPeE teams to grow and sustain. This was a topic of discussion at a recent chat with a few folks. I speak from my own experiences having seen HiPeE teams and was lucky enough to be part of it couple of times. It came down to a few dimensions for me.

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Taming your Microservice & Container Envy

It is hard not to be affected by the constant chatter on Microservices Architecture and Container technology. Both are leading the discussions nowadays and they combine to provide new ways to Architect distributed systems and provide agility in delivering business value. While they do bring in big benefits when implemented successfully, the path to success for most enterprises (other than startups/product/tech firms) is going to be difficult and having a level of measured caution would be good.

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Serverless Architecture Style

To discuss Serverless Architecture we need to understand how we got here. From using physical machines we moved to virtual machines (somewhere in between a few brave folks also used linux/solaris containers). The current trend is container technologies such as Docker or CoreOS RKT which allow even more efficient use of resources. Regardless of which you use, we are often required to plan our application infrastructure needs upfront and permanently keep the “servers” running.

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Spring Boot + Spring Cloud (Eureka + Hystrix) to run API/Micro Services

Spring Boot and Spring Cloud are relatively newer additions to the Spring portfolio. Boot makes it faster to spin up your project with less configuration (and an opinionated programming model). Spring Cloud brings in techniques and tools to efficiently standup distributed applications. In a previous blog I had noted my ramblings on API/Microservices style. If you take that path and have more than a handful of API’s then you will need some of the capabilities of what Spring Boot and Spring Cloud offer.
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