74 items found: Search results for "just cloud it" in all categories x
September 2, 2021 | Blog, Cloud, Kubernetes
October 8, 2019 | Cloud, Cloud Native, Culture
Following on from the last two blogs by Stuart (who shared highlights for day 1) and Trent (who shared highlights from day 2), I will conclude with mine on CloudNative London 2019 Day 3.
The Cloud Native landscape can be bewildering, and not only for newcomers. As a traveller on the Cloud-native journey, I have sometimes been overwhelmed by the number of products and projects. This is why I took hold of the opportunity to go to Day 3 of the Cloud Native London Conference last month hosted by Skills Matter.
Here are my top highlights from Day 3 of the CloudNative London 2019.
March 7, 2017 | Data Analysis, GCP
Google has recently made its internal Spanner database available to the wider public, as a hosted solution on Google Cloud. This is a distributed relational/transactional database used inside for various Google projects (including F1, the advertising backend), promising high throughput, low latency and 99.999% availability. As such it is an interesting alternative to many open source or other hosted solutions. This whitepaper gives a good theoretical introduction into Spanner.
October 18, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps
Last week Steve Poole and I were once again back at the always informative JAX London conference talking about DevOps and the Cloud. This presentation built upon our previous DevOps talk that was presented last year, and focused on the experiences that Steve and I had encountered over the last year (the slides for our 2014 “Moving to a DevOps” mode talk can be found on SlideShare, and the video on Parleys).
August 10, 2015 | Cloud, Software Consultancy
As a company, we at OpenCredo are heavily involved in automation and devOps based work, with a keen focus on making this a seamless experience, especially in cloud based environments. We are currently working within HMRC, a UK government department to help make this a reality as part of a broader cloud broker ecosystem project. In this blog post, I look to provide some initial insight into some of the tools and techniques employed to achieve this for one particular use case namely:
With pretty much zero human intervention, bar initiating a process and providing some inputs, a development team from any location, should be able to run “something”, which, in the end, results in an isolated, secure set of fully configured VM’s being provisioned within a cloud provider (or providers) of choice.
June 23, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps, Terraform Provider
Working with OpenCredo clients, I’ve noticed that even if you are one of the few organisations that can boast ‘Infrastructure as Code’, perhaps it’s only true of your VMs, and likely you have ‘bootstrap problems’. What I mean by this, is that you require some cloud-infrastructure to already be in place before your VM automation can go to work.
March 28, 2024 | Blog, Platform Engineering
Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 on her talk “To K8S and Beyond – Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative.”
February 22, 2024 | Blog, Kafka
Check out Peter Vegh’s latest blog where he explores a bespoke Kafka backup framework, discussing the approach, architecture and design process to implement and deliver the solution.
February 6, 2024 | AWS, Blog, OPA
Check out the latest blog by our Consultant, Tristan Hosken, as he explores Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Tristan provides insights into advantages and disadvantages of RAG through hands-on experiments with AWS’s Bedrock and Azure’s OpenAI service.
September 27, 2023 | Blog, Kubernetes
Learn to create your first Kubernetes operator by checking out our Senior Consultant Michal Tusnio’s latest blog, “Kubernetes Operators – Whys, Hows and Whats” where he takes you on a journey from zero to operator.
August 17, 2023 | Blog, Terraform Provider
Check out John Sharpe and Will May’s latest blog where they give suggestions for Terraform Provider authors who are thinking about upgrading from SDKv2 to Framework
Check out Greg Nuttall’s latest blog where he looks at the challenges posed by GDPR’s “Right to be Forgotten” in the context of Apache Kafka, and delves deeper into three strategies for overcoming them.
May 18, 2023 | Blog, Kubernetes
Check out Matthew Revell-Gordon’s latest blog as he explores building a local Kubernetes test cluster to better mimic cloud-based deployments, using Colima, Kind, and MetalLB.
January 26, 2023 | Blog, Data Analysis, Neo4j
Fahran Wallace and Ebru Cucen’s most recent blog post is part 1 of a three-part series. They investigate how OpenCredo ingested 400 million nodes with a billion relationships into Neo4j.
February 11, 2022 | AWS, Cloud, GCP, Kubernetes, Microservices, Open Source, Software Consultancy
Serverless functions are easy to install and upload, but we can’t ignore the basics. This article looks at different strategies related to testing serverless functions.
January 31, 2022 | Blog, Data Engineering
There are two camps of Graph database, one side is RDF, where they are strict with their format, and somewhat limited for their extensibility. The other side is LPG, where they can define labels to the relationships. With its recent extension, RDF now allows users to add properties, thus becoming RDF*. In this blog, Ebru explores the structural and performance differences between LPG and RDF*.
April 20, 2021 | Data Engineering, Machine Learning, Software Consultancy
Our recent client was a Fintech who had ambitions to build a Machine Learning platform for real-time decision making. The client had significant Kubernetes proficiency, ran on the cloud, and had a strong preference for using free, open-source software over cloud-native offerings that come with lock-in. Several components were spiked with success (feature preparation with Apache Beam and Seldon for model serving performed particularly strongly). Kubeflow was one of the next technologies on our list of spikes, showing significant promise at the research stage and seemingly a good match for our client’s priorities and skills.
That platform slipped down the client’s priority list before completing the research for Kubeflow, so I wanted to see how that project might have turned out. Would Kubeflow have made the cut?
February 9, 2021 | Cloud Native, DevOps, Kubernetes
Watch Nicki Watt’s talk on Platform Engineering as a (Community) Service at GOTOpia to learn what it takes to build a platform that is fit to serve the communities which will ultimately use it.
December 11, 2020 | Cloud, Cloud Native, Kubernetes, Microservices
“WebAssembly is a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation.” – W3C
In this blog, I’ll cover the different applications of Wasm and WASI, some of the projects that are making headway, and the implications for modern architectures and distributed systems.
October 29, 2020 | Cloud, Kubernetes, Open Source
While working with a client recently, we experienced some issues when attempting to make use of NLB external load balancer services when using AWS EKS. I wanted to investigate whether these issues had been fixed in the upstream GitHub Kubernetes repository, or if I could fix it myself, contributing back to the community in the process.
September 22, 2020 | AWS, Blog, Cassandra, Cloud, DevOps, Open Source
With the upcoming Cassandra 4.0 release, there is a lot to look forward to. Most excitingly, and following a refreshing realignment of the Open Source community around Cassandra, the next release promises to focus on fundamentals: stability, repair, observability, performance and scaling.
We must set this against the fact that Cassandra ranks pretty highly in the Stack Overflow most dreaded databases list and the reality that Cassandra is expensive to configure, operate and maintain. Finding people who have the prerequisite skills to do so is challenging.
April 2, 2020 | Machine Learning
Recent years have seen many companies consolidate all their data into a data lake/warehouse of some sort. Once it’s all consolidated, what next?
Many companies consolidate data with a field of dreams mindset – “build it and they will come”, however a comprehensive data strategy is needed if the ultimate goals of an organisation are to be realised: monetisation through Machine Learning and AI is an oft-cited goal. Unfortunately, before one rushes into the enticing world of machine learning, one should lay more mundane foundations. Indeed, in data science, estimates vary between 50% to 80% of the time taken is devoted to so-called data-wrangling. Further, Google estimates ML projects produce 5% ML code and 95% “glue code”. If this is the reality we face, what foundations are required before one can dive headlong into ML?
November 13, 2019 | Software Consultancy
Pioneering and pushing technology boundaries – pretty much a given nowadays for the software-driven startup. Here are some insights we’ve observed working with a number of venture capital (VC) companies who have managed to navigate the choppy waters and successfully grow their business including winning further investment along the way.
With our deep hands-on technical expertise and pragmatic focus, OpenCredo has become a natural software acceleration partner for VC funded organisations who are looking to deliver tangible value as effectively as possible. We’ve been brought in to work alongside these innovators at various stages of their journey. As such we’ve gained an appreciation for and acquired, first-hand insight into some of the pressures and challenges faced. From getting and securing that next round of funding, to grappling with the technical decisions and challenges inherent in sensibly evolving offerings to accommodate future growth and scaling.
This blog is written exclusively by the OpenCredo team. We do not accept external contributions.
October 3, 2019 | Cloud, DevOps, Hashicorp, Open Source
Terraform 0.12 in recent years has emerged as the de facto standard with regards to defining and managing cloud infrastructure. It is one of four primary tools offered by HashiCorp, (Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad) and underpins the workflows that make up their Cloud Operating Model.
Since its first release in 2014, the wider Terraform community has embraced frequent releases and this past year has been no exception. HashiCorp announced the release of Terraform 0.12 in May 2019 and as of writing this post the official release is 0.12.9.
September 12, 2019 | Cloud Native, Microservices, Software Consultancy
As a technology leader, you’ll be aware that competitive pressures and shifting business requirements are driving changes in the technical architectures of many organisations. This means you need a new strategic approach based on the ability to continually evolve elements of your systems and architectures.
February 5, 2019 | Cloud Native, DevOps, Kubernetes, Microservices, Open Source
While Prometheus has fast become the standard for monitoring in the cloud, making Prometheus highly available can be tricky. This blog post will walk you through how to do this using the open source tool Thanos.
February 14, 2018 | Cloud
AWS Announced a few new products for use with containers at RE:Invent 2017 and of particular interest to me was a new Elastic Container Service(ECS) Launch type, called Fargate
Prior to Fargate, when it came to creating a continuous delivery pipeline in AWS, the use of containers through ECS in its standard form, was the closest you could get to an always up, hands off, managed style of setup. Traditionally ECS has allowed you to create a configured pool of “worker” instances, with it then acting as a scheduler, provisioning containers on those instances.
January 11, 2018 | Data Engineering
The last few years have seen Python emerge as a lingua franca for data scientists. Alongside Python we have also witnessed the rise of Jupyter Notebooks, which are now considered a de facto data science productivity tool, especially in the Python community. Jupyter Notebooks started as a university side-project known as iPython in circa 2001 at UC Berkeley.
August 9, 2017 | Cloud, DevOps, Terraform Provider
The recent 0.10.0 release of HashiCorp Terraform, saw a significant change to the way Providers are managed. Specifically, the single open source code repository for Terraform has been divided into core and multiple provider repositories.
Join Daniel Bryant and Antonio Cobo at DevOpsCon 2017; The Conference for Continuous Delivery, Microservices, Docker, Clouds & Lean Business! DevOpsCon will be running from the 12th-15th of June, and offers you a glimpse at popular topics such as innovative infrastructure and modern lean business culture through hands-on workshops, sessions and keynotes.
June 15, 2017 | Data Engineering
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL (“NewSQL”) database developed by Cockroach Labs and has recently reached a major milestone: the first production-ready, 1.0 release. We at OpenCredo have been following the progress of CockroachDB for a while, and we think it’s a technology of great potential to become the go-to solution for a having a general-purpose database in the cloud.
March 20, 2017 | DevOps
DevOps has swept the tech landscape. Now, many are discovering the benefits of programmable infrastructure. I have been lucky to work on many projects where we’ve taken advantage of tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Chef.
Join Lorenzo Nicora at Voxxed Days Bristol 2017 for his talk on Event Sourcing and CQRS! Voxxed Days is a series of tech events organised by local community groups where local and international speakers converge at a wide range of locations around the world. This means each event retains a unique regional flavour, whilst being part of the overall Voxxed movement. Topics covered at Voxxed Days fall under the same radar as Voxxed.com, including: Server Side Java, Java Language, Cloud and Big Data, Web & HTML, Mobile, Programming Languages, Architecture & Security, Methodology, Culture and Future Technologies.
January 24, 2017 | Cloud
This blog aims to provide an end to end example of how you can automatically request, generate and install a free HTTPS/TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt using Terraform. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA) aiming to make it super easy (and free – did I say free!) for people to obtain HTTPS (SSL/TLS) certificates for their websites and infrastructure. Under the hood, Let’s Encrypt implements and leverages an emerging protocol called ACME to make all this magic happen, and it is this ACME protocol that powers the Terraform provider we will be using. For more information on how Let’s Encrypt and the ACME protocol actually work, please see how Let’s Encrypt works.
Join Rafal Gancarz at ServerlessConf London! Serverlessconf is a community led conference focused on sharing experiences building applications using serverless architectures. Serverless architectures enable developers to express their creativity and to focus on meeting user needs rather than spend time managing infrastructure and looking after servers. These architectures build on the work done in many […]
GOTO London is back for the second year running to throw another great conference! Creating a meeting place for software innovators and thought leaders from startups and enterprises, GOTO London will give you the opportunity to network with people all across different disciplines of software development! With 1 days workshops where attendees can go into depth with […]
Join Brett Mack for October’s installment of the London Hashicorp Meetup! The London Hashicorp meetup is back on the 13th of October and will be held at the Holburn Sainsbury office with the usual beers and pizza on offer! Agenda: 6.30pm – Arrive, beers socialising 7pm – Talk 1 – Brett Mack, Consultant @ OpenCredo […]
The London Mesos User Group is back – Join us on the 21st of September! London Mesos User Group is back after the summer break, taking place on the 21st of September. This time around, Cloudfare will be hosting the meetup at the office in London and will also be providing the beers and pizza! Agenda: […]
Join Daniel at JavaOne 2016 on the 18th of September! Java, the Cloud, Containers: Migrating Without the Tiers (or Tears) [CON3601] Everyone is talking about building “cloud native” Java applications—and taking advantage of microservice architecture, containers, and orchestration/PaaS platforms—but there is, surprisingly little discussion of migrating existing legacy (moneymaking) applications. This session aims to […]
August 24, 2016 | Cassandra
At OpenCredo we are seeing an increase in adoption of Apache Cassandra as a leading NoSQL database for managing large data volumes, but we have also seen many clients experiencing difficulty converting their high expectations into operational Cassandra performance. Here we present a high-level technical overview of the major strengths and limitations of Cassandra that we have observed over the last few years while helping our clients resolve the real-world issues that they have experienced.
OpenCredo is going North with Microservices Manchester! We are super excited to announce ourselves as Event Partners and organisers of Microservices Manchester. It will be held on the 5th of July 2016 and is a free single day two-track conference. Microservices Manchester is specifically designed for technical implementers and decision makers who wish to better understand […]
Nick’s talk “Continuous delivery of secure cloud environments” looks at how taking advantage of cloud computing for development purposes, and even the running of production systems has become a de facto approach for many organisations nowadays.
Join us for Infracoders London on the 21st of June to hear talks from our Lead Consultant, Bart Spaans and Thoughtwork’s Cloud Specialist, Kief Morris!
Taking place on the 8th and 9th of June in the heart of London at CodeNode, ContainerSched 2016 will focus on the current interest around both containers and schedulers, exploring the core technologies and associated areas of interest such as networking, storage and security.
April 2, 2016 | Terraform Provider
When it comes to automating the creation of infrastructure in cloud providers, Terraform (version at time of writing 0.6.14) has become one of my core go to tools in this space. It provides a fantastic declarative approach to describing the resources you want, and then takes care of making it so for you, keeping track of the state in either a local file or a remote store of some sort. Various bits of sensitive data is often provided as input to terraform.
March 2, 2016 | Microservices
Microservice-style software architectures have many benefits: loose coupling, independent scalability, localised failures, facilitating the usage of polyglot data persistence tools or multiple programming languages.
However, they also introduce other challenges. A major one is the fact that the end-user functionality of the system will ultimately emerge as a composition of multiple services. This significantly increases the complexity of deploying the system. In addition, because we lose the concept of “versions” of the system, it becomes harder to answer questions like “what capabilities are in production?” and “when is a new feature considered ‘done’?”.
December 1, 2015 | Software Consultancy
This post introduce some of the basic features of Hazelcast, some of its limitations, how to embed it in a Spring Boot application and write integration testings. This post is intended to be the first of a series about Hazelcast and its integration with Spring (Boot). Let’s start from the basics.
November 3, 2015 | Software Consultancy
My JavaOne experience was rather busy this year, what with three talks presented in a single day! The first of these talks “Debugging Java Apps in Containers: No Heavy Welding Gear Required” was delivered with my regular co-presenter Steve Poole, from IBM, and we shared our combined experiences of working with Java and Docker over the past year.
October 30, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps
In some companies, the inevitable rapidly became accepted as the way to do things, and both development and IT operations worked together to figure out how to collaborate on building systems that satisfied development’s desire for change, and operations desire for stability. Outsourcing infrastructure, and all it implied, gave rise to Devops – the unification of business needs, developer delivery, and operational capacity – but it also gave rise to something else, in companies where the operations teams weren’t quite as quick to move – Shadow IT.
September 24, 2015 | Microservices
Unless you’ve been living under a (COBOL-based) rock for the last few years, you will have no doubt heard of the emerging trend of microservices. This approach to developing ‘loosely coupled service-oriented architecture with bounded contexts’ has captured the hearts and minds of many developers. The promise of easier enforcement of good architectural and design principles, such as encapsulation and interface segregation, combined with the availability to experiment with different languages and platforms for each service, is a (developer) match made in heaven.
September 14, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps
If you are operating in the programmable infrastructure space, you will hopefully have come across Terraform, a tool from HashiCorp which is primarily used to manage infrastructure resources such as virtual machines, DNS names and firewall settings across a number of public and private providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, …).
August 26, 2015 | Cloud
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you’ll undoubtedly know that microservices are the new hotness. An emerging trend that I’ve observed is that the people who are actually using microservices in production tend to be the larger well-funded companies, such as Netflix, Gilt, Yelp, Hailo etc., and each organisation has their own way of developing, building and deploying.
August 5, 2015 | Data Analysis, Data Engineering
A few weeks ago, we thought about building a Google analytics dashboard to give us easy access to certain elements of our Google Analytics web traffic. We saw some custom dashboards for bloggers, but nothing quite right for our goal, since we wanted the data on a big screen for everyone in the office to view.
August 2, 2013 | Software Consultancy
Configuration management was born in the pre-cloud era. Remember the days when acquiring a super powerful multi core server felt like winning the jackpot? Infrastructure was a slightly different place back then. Yet for all the recent developments in DevOps, its legacy is still with us.
January 10, 2013 | DevOps
Recently I have started looking into SaltStack as a solution that does both config management and orchestration. It is a relatively new project started in 2011, but it has a growing fanbase among Sys Admins and DevOps Engineers. In this blog post I will look into Salt as a promising alternative, and comparing it to Puppet as a way of exploring its basic set of features.
February 8, 2012 | Data Analysis, Data Engineering
Most of the important players in this space are large IT corporations like Oracle and IBM with their commercial (read expensive) offerings.
While most of CEP products offer some great features, it’s license model and close code policy doesn’t allow developers to play with them on pet projects, which would drive adoption and usage of CEP in every day programming.
