62 items found: Search results for "cluster" in all categories x
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.
September 2, 2021 | Blog, Cloud, Kubernetes
May 2, 2017 | Cassandra, Data Engineering
My recent blogpost I explored a few cases where using Cassandra and Spark together can be useful. My focus was on the functional behaviour of such a stack and what you need to do as a developer to interact with it. However, it did not describe any details about the infrastructure setup that is capable of running such Spark code or any deployment considerations. In this post, I will explore this in more detail and show some practical advice in how to deploy Spark and Apache Cassandra.
March 9, 2023 | Blog, Data Analysis, Neo4j
Check out the last part of Ebru Cucen and Fahran Wallace’s blog series, in which they discuss their experience ingesting 400 million nodes and a billion relationships into Neo4j and what they discovered along the way.
December 5, 2021 | Cloud, Kubernetes
Kubernetes’ second release in 2021, version 1.22, has been out for a little while now and with 1.23 on its way, we thought we’d take a look back. Kubernetes 1.22 was a highly comprehensive release with 53 enhancements in all three graduation levels: 13 features have graduated to stable, 24 enhancements reached beta status, and 16 new features have been accepted into the alpha stage.
The latest version has some noteworthy security features such as running Kubelet without root access, pod security policies, and seccomp. There are also a couple of deprecated and removed APIs. In this blog, we’ll discuss the significant changes in v1.22, as well as how to handle the removed APIs.
November 4, 2021 | Kubernetes
We always read that ‘security is everyone’s responsibility’. For any organisation, big or small, security should always be the primary concern—not a mere afterthought. In terms of Kubernetes, securing a cluster is challenging because it has so many moving parts and, apart from securing our Kubernetes environment, we also want to control what an end-user can do in our cluster.
To achieve these goals, we can start with the built-in features provided by Kubernetes like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Network Policies, Secrets Management, and Pod Security Policies (PSP). But we know these features are not enough. For example, we may want specific policies like ‘all pods must have specific labels’. And even if we have the policies in place, the next big question is how to enforce them on our Kubernetes cluster in an easy and repeatable manner.
In this blog post, we’ll address this challenge and other questions pertaining to OPA and how it can integrate into Kubernetes.
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 17, 2021 | Blog, Cloud, Cloud Native, GCP, Open Source
Multi-cloud is rapidly becoming the cloud strategy of choice for enterprises looking to modernise their applications.
And the reason is simple – it gives them much more flexibility to host their workloads and data where it suits them best.
In this post, we focus on Google’s application modernisation solution Google Anthos and the role it can play in your cloud transformation strategy.
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.
Writing your own Kafka source connectors with Kafka Connect. In this blog, Rufus takes you on a code walk, through the Gold Verified Venafi Connector while pointing out the common pitfalls
February 20, 2019 | DevOps, Hashicorp, Kafka, Open Source
Creating and managing a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) could be a very straightforward task if you use appropriate tools. In this blog post, I’ll cover the steps to easily set up a PKI with Vault from HashiCorp, and use it to secure a Kafka Cluster.
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.
May 31, 2018 | DevOps
As traditional operations has embraced the concept of code, it has benefited from ideas already prevalent in developer circles such as version control. Version control brings the benefit that not only can you see what the infrastructure was, but you can also get reviews of changes by your peers before the change is made live; known to most developers as Pull Request (PR) reviews.
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 23, 2018 | Data Engineering, DevOps
Machine Learning is a hot topic these days, as can be seen from search trends. It was the success of Deepmind and AlphaGo in 2016 that really brought machine learning to the attention of the wider community and the world at large.
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 8, 2017 | Cassandra
Recently, the sad news has emerged that Basho, which developed the Riak distributed database, has gone into receivership. This would appear to present a problem for those who have adopted the commercial version of the Riak database (Riak KV) supported by Basho.
This blog is written exclusively by the OpenCredo team. We do not accept external contributions.
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.
May 22, 2017 | Data Analysis
As a final piece of our recent blog series about Apache Spark on 16 May we have presented details of a use-case about using Spark Structured Streaming to generate real-time alerts of suspicious activity in an AWS-based infrastructure.
This blog is written exclusively by the OpenCredo team. We do not accept external contributions.
May 9, 2017 | Cassandra
Data analytics isn’t a field commonly associated with testing, but there’s no reason we can’t treat it like any other application. Data analytics services are often deployed in production, and production services should be properly tested. This post covers some basic approaches for the testing of Cassandra/Spark code. There will be some code examples, but the focus is on how to structure your code to ensure it is testable!
This blog is written exclusively by the OpenCredo team. We do not accept external contributions.
April 25, 2017 | Cassandra, Data Analysis, Data Engineering
Apache Spark is a powerful open source processing engine which is fast becoming our technology of choice for data analytic projects here at OpenCredo. For many years now we have been helping our clients to practically implement and take advantage of various big data technologies including the like of Apache Cassandra amongst others.
April 13, 2017 | Terraform Provider
Recently I’ve been doing a lot with Terraform; having briefly flirted with it in the past, it’s only now with v0.8.x that I’ve been seriously stepping out with it (and Azure, since you asked). In the main I think it’s great, especially as it means I don’t have to yak-shave with the AWS and Azure CLIs. However, I have started to bang my head against some of Terraform’s limitations, specifically around HCL (Hashicorp Configuration Language) – used to define infrastructure in the Terraform .tf files.
March 23, 2017 | Cassandra, Data Analysis, Data Engineering
In recent years, Cassandra has become one of the most widely used NoSQL databases: many of our clients use Cassandra for a variety of different purposes. This is no accident as it is a great datastore with nice scalability and performance characteristics.
However, adopting Cassandra as a single, one size fits all database has several downsides. The partitioned/distributed data storage model makes it difficult (and often very inefficient) to do certain types of queries or data analytics that are much more straightforward in a relational database.
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.
February 16, 2017 | Cassandra
One of the default Cassandra strategies to deal with more sophisticated queries is to create CQL tables that contain the data in a structure that matches the query itself (denormalization). Cassandra 3.0 introduces a new CQL feature, Materialized Views which captures this concept as a first-class construct.
February 13, 2017 | Data Engineering
One of the stated intentions behind the design of Java 8’s Streams API was to take better advantage of the multi-core processing power of modern computers. Operations that could be performed on a single, linear stream of values could also be run in parallel by splitting that stream into multiple sub-streams, and combining the results from processing each sub-stream as they became available.
September 27, 2016 | Cassandra, Data Engineering
If there is one thing to understand about Cassandra, it is the fact that it is optimised for writes. In Cassandra everything is a write including logical deletion of data which results in tombstones – special deletion records. We have noticed that lack of understanding of tombstones is often the root cause of production issues our clients experience with Cassandra. We have decided to share a compilation of the most common problems with Cassandra tombstones and some practical advice on solving them.
September 15, 2016 | Cassandra
Cassandra isn’t a relational database management system, but it has some features that make it look a bit like one. Chief among these is CQL, a query language with an SQL-like syntax. CQL isn’t a bad thing in itself – in fact it’s very convenient – but it can be misleading since it gives developers the illusion that they are working with a familiar data model, when things are really very different under the hood.
September 6, 2016 | Cassandra
A growing number of clients are asking OpenCredo for help with using Apache Cassandra and solving specific problems they encounter. Clients have different use cases, requirements, implementation and teams but experience similar issues. We have noticed that Cassandra data modelling problems are the most consistent cause of Cassandra failing to meet their expectations. Data modelling is one of the most complex areas of using Cassandra and has many considerations.
August 26, 2016 | Cassandra
At OpenCredo we have been working with Cassandra since 2012 and we are big fans of both open source Apache Cassandra and the capabilities of DataStax Enterprise. Over the years we have collected a great deal of experience throughout the company on how to deliver the benefits of Cassandra in real world projects and have also seen some common pitfalls that businesses have fallen into.
August 26, 2016 | Kubernetes
This post is the last of a series of three tutorial articles introducing a sample, tutorial project, demonstrating how to provision Kubernetes on AWS from scratch, using Terraform and Ansible. To understand the goal of the project, you’d better start from the first part.
August 26, 2016 | Kubernetes
This post is the second of a series of three tutorial articles introducing a sample, tutorial project, demonstrating how to provision Kubernetes on AWS from scratch, using Terraform and Ansible. To understand the goal of the project, you’d better start from the first part.
August 26, 2016 | Kubernetes
This post is the first of a series of three tutorial articles introducing a sample, tutorial project, demonstrating how to provision Kubernetes on AWS from scratch, using Terraform and Ansible.
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.
May 31, 2016 | Kubernetes
Do you ever wake up and think to yourself: oh geez, Kubernetes is awesome, but I wish I could browse and edit my services and replication controllers using the file system? No? Well, in any case, this is now possible.
April 28, 2016 | Software Consultancy
In a conventional RDBMS-with-ORM system, we are used to thinking of domain objects as mapped to rows in database tables, and of the database as a repository where the current state of every object exists simultaneously, so that what we get when we query for an object is the state that object was in at the time the query was issued. To perform an update, we can start a transaction, retrieve the current state of the object, modify it, save it back again and commit. Transactions move the global state of the system from one consistent state to another, so that the database transaction log represents a single, linear history of updates. We are therefore able to have a very stable, intuitive sense of what it means to talk about the “current state” of any domain object.
January 18, 2016 | Software Consultancy
Last time in this series I summarised all the Akka Persistence related improvements in Akka 2.4. Since then Akka 2.4.1 has been released with some additional bug fixes and improvements so perhaps now is a perfect time to pick up this mini-series and introduce some other new features included in Akka 2.4.x.
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 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).
October 16, 2015 | Software Consultancy
OpenCredo is helping Skillsmatter with the organisation of the inaugural ContainerSched conference, and we were last night in attendance at CodeNode, working our way to finalising the program alongside the Skillsmatter team. I’m pleased to say that the provisional lineup looks great (speaker acceptance emails are being sent out over the next few days), and so I wanted to share the details of some of the great content we have confirmed already.
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 7, 2015 | Kubernetes
Learning about the benefits of Kubernetes from the Kismatic Team
As part of my writing for InfoQ, I recently had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Joseph Jacks and Patrick Reilly from Kismatic Inc, a company offering enterprise Kubernetes support, and asked about their thoughts on the recent Kubernetes v1.0 launch, the history of the project, and how this container orchestration platform may impact the future of microservice deployment.
August 5, 2015 | Cloud, GCP, Kubernetes
Why OpenCredo partnered with Google
Recently OpenCredo chose to partner with Google in order to share knowledge and resources around the Google Cloud Platform offerings. Our clients come in many shapes and sizes, but typically all of them realise three disruptive truths of the modern IT industry: the (economic) value of cloud; the competitive advantage of continuous delivery; and the potential of hypothesis and data-driven product development to increase innovation (as popularised by the Lean Startup / Lean Enterprise motto of ‘build, measure, learn’).
May 13, 2015 | Software Consultancy
Listen to Brenden Matthews discuss Elastic Analytics with Spark, Mesos and Docker as filmed at the most recent London Mesos User Group Meetup.
In this talk, Brenden Matthews discusses how he provided elastic analytics to Airbnb and how the Mesosphere DCOS can easily bring the same type of infrastructure to your own environments.
October 23, 2014 | Cassandra
Spring Data Cassandra (SDC) is a community project under the Spring Data (SD) umbrella that provides convenient and familiar APIs to work with Apache Cassandra.
January 6, 2014 | Cassandra
The team over at Cucumber Pro recently posted a sneak peek on their blog, demonstrating some key features of their offering.
As more of a technical user of Cucumber, there isn’t much that’s new or ground-breaking for me – almost every feature is already available through your preferred IDE combined with a few plugins.
December 2, 2013 | Cassandra
Perhaps the most important of Cassandra’s selling points is its completely distributed architecture and its ability to easily extend the cluster with virtually any number of nodes. Implementing a classical RDBMS-style transaction consisting of “put locks on the database, modify the data, then commit the transaction”-style operations are simply not feasible in such an architecture (i.e. that doesn’t scale well).
November 14, 2013 | Cassandra
Cassandra 2.0 was released in early September this year and came with some interesting new features, including “lightweight transactions” and triggers.
Despite the rising interest in the various non-relational databases in recent years, there are still numerous use-cases for which a relational database system is a better choice. The latest major release of Cassandra (version 2.0) provides some interesting features that aim to close this gap, and offers its fast and distributed storage engine enhanced with new options that will make users’ lives easier.
July 4, 2013 | Software Consultancy
In which situations Spring Data Hadoop (SDH) can add value, and in which situations would it be a poor choice? This article follows on from an objective summary of the features of SDH.
June 30, 2013 | Software Consultancy
Spring Data Hadoop (SDH) is a Spring offshoot project that allows the invocation and configuration of Hadoop tasks within a Spring application context. It offers support for Hadoop jobs, HBase, Pig, Hive, Cascading and additionally JSR-223 scripting for job preparation and tidy-up.
It is most suited for use in organisations with existing Spring applications or investment in Spring expertise. Some SDH features replicate functionality of tools in the Hadoop ecosystem that DevOps engineers who maintain a Hadoop cluster will be more familiar with.
February 13, 2012 | Software Consultancy
Recently we were approached by a client to do some performance testing of the web application they had written. The budget allowed two days for this task. Ok. No problem. Yes, we can. Naturally I had one or another question though…
June 3, 2011 | Neo4j
Neo4J is one of the first graph databases to appear on the global market. Being open source, in addition to its power and simplicity in supporting graph data model it represents good choice for production-ready graph database.
However, there has been one area I have struggled to get good-enough performance from Neo4j recently – super nodes.
