96 items found: Search results for "aws" in all categories x
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.
February 6, 2018 | Cloud
Among the many announcements made at Re:Invent 2017 was the release of AWS Privatelink for Customer and Partner services. We believe that the opportunity signalled by this modest announcement may have an impact far broader than first impressions suggest.
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.
Join us as we conclude our recent Apache Spark series with a webinar that will explore the use case of “Detecting stolen AWS credential usage with Spark”
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 16, 2012 | Neo4j
It’s been more than a year now since I rolled out Neo4j Graph Database Server image in Amazon EC2.
In May 2011 the version of Neo4j was 1.3 and just recently guys at Neo Technology published version 1.7.2 so I thought now is the time to revisit this exercise and make fresh AMIs available.
Last year I created Neo4j AMI manually in one region then copied it across to the remaining AWS regions. Due to the size of the AMI and the latency between regions this process was slow.
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.
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.
May 5, 2022 | Culture, Software Consultancy
Watch Simon Copsey’s talk from the Agnostic Agile Meetup on “Systems Thinking for Happy Staff and Elated Customers.”
March 3, 2022 | AWS, Open Source, Software Consultancy
Watch our Lunch & Learn by Hieu Doan and Alberto Faedda as they share how engineers and security teams can secure their software development processes with the Secure Pipelines application.
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.
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.
September 2, 2021 | Blog, Cloud, 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.
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.
March 20, 2020
Traditionally, Usability and Security have been set in opposition to each other: with tight security, we end up with painful user experience. In this blog, Guy focuses on financial services as an exemplar of how we can introduce usability into a vertical with challenging security and compliance requirements.
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.
Thanks to our hosts Mintel, the HashiCorp User Group is back on the 14th of August with speakers from applyingAgile and Grafana labs.
Join us this month the Hashicorp User Group! Thanks to the lovely people at Elsevier who are hosting and providing the food and drink, the Hashicorp meetup will be back on the 17th of July.
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 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.
We’re back with our second meetup with lightning talks from Tareq Abedrabbo, CTO of OpenCredo, David Dawson, Software Engineer and Systems Architect and Allison Wells, Data Engineer of Kobalt Music followed by discussion over beer and pizza!
We are excited to be hosting the first Muon User Group at our London office for an Intro to Muon – How to build Polyglot Message and Event Microservices!
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.
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.
Applied Data Engineering is a meetup for all things Data! Join us for our first meetup on the 19th of July
July 11, 2017 | Cloud, Cloud Native
Over the years, OpenCredo’s projects have become increasingly tied to the public cloud. Our skills in delivering cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications have deepened and the range of cloud projects we are able to take on has grown. From enterprise cloud brokers to cloud platform migration in restricted compliance environments, our ability to deliver on the cloud is now a core component of our value proposition.
Join us for the second installment of OpenCredo’s Summer training schedule. On the 21st and 22nd of June we will be running our “Programmable Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture Training” course in Manchester.
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.
We are excited to announce that we are sponosring this years Agile Manchester conference that will run from the 10th to the 12th of May. Our lead consultant, Tristan McCarthy will also be speaking on his experience in both agile testing and project management to help you get the most out of your processes and avoid some common pitfalls.
It’s all about Containers, Serverless and Reactive Programming right now! ProgSCon London 2017 will explore these trends through engaging talks delivered by leading industry experts. Several talks will also feature various aspect of Blockchain, Microservices and Big Data. If you are a software developer looking to sharpen your skills and learn from the best in the industry, then ProgSCon London 2017 is the place you need to be at!
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 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.
We are pleased to announce that we are sponsors of QCon 2017, where our Lead Consultant, Rafal Gancarz and Consultant Matt Long will be speaking. Our Chief Scientist, Daniel Bryant will also be hosting the track: Observability Done Right – Automating Insight & Software Telemetry.
We are excited to announce that we are sponsoring the Linuxing In London Meetup this month! Brett Mack, DevOps Consultant will be doing an introduction to userland rootkits, software engineer at notonthehighstreet, Nick Jackson, will be speaking about Swift coding on Linux and organiser of Linuxing In London, Brian Byrne will give a quick talk on Raspberry Pi.
Our Lead Consultant, Rafal Gancarz will be speaking at the Serverless London February Meetup. This month the meetup will be hosted by onefinestay and will kick off at 6:30pm. There will also be some great talks on Serverless by James Thomas from IBM and Dave Blooman from FundApps.
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 […]
We are back with the 4th installment of the London Hashicorp Meetup with Hotels.com providing the venue, beers, and pizza! Kicking off at the usual time of 6.30pm, this time round, we have talks from Senior Applications Engineer, Sammy Conway-Rahman from hotels.com and Steve Wade, Technical Consultant at Steven Wade Consulting.
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 […]
July 3, 2016 | DevOps
Several of us from the OpenCredo team were in attendance at the inaugural EU edition of the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference. We have been big fans of the two previous US versions, and have watched the video recordings of talks (2014, 2015) with keen interest as many of our DevOps transformation clients are very much operating in the ‘enterprise’ space.
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 | DevOps, Microservices
Many of our clients are currently implementing applications using a ‘microservice’-based architecture. Increasingly we are hearing from organisations that are part way through a migration to microservices, and they want our help with validating and improving their current solution. These ‘microservices checkup’ projects have revealed some interesting patterns, and because we have experience of working in a wide-range of industries (and also have ‘fresh eyes’ when looking at a project), we are often able to work alongside teams to make significant improvements and create a strategic roadmap for future improvements.
News | February 18, 2016
Pizza, beer, socialising; we are coming back with a bang with Mesos in Production. We also have amazing speakers lined up presenting case studies on building a production-ready PaaS and on notonhighstreet.com.
January 8, 2016 | Microservices
Many of our clients are in the process of investigating or implementing ‘microservices’, and a popular question we often get asked is “what’s the most common mistake you see when moving towards a microservice architecture?”. We’ve seen plenty of good things with this architectural pattern, but we have also seen a few recurring issues and anti-patterns, which I’m keen to share here.
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).
September 20, 2015 | Microservices
Over the past five years I have worked within several projects that used a ‘microservice’-based architecture, and one constant issue I have encountered is the absence of standardised patterns for local development and ‘off the shelf’ development tooling that support this. When working with monoliths we have become quite adept at streamlining the development, build, test and deploy cycles. Development tooling to help with these processes is also readily available (and often integrated with our IDEs). For example, many platforms provide ‘hot reloading’ for viewing the effects of code changes in near-real time, automated execution of tests, regular local feedback from continuous integration servers, and tooling to enable the creation of a local environment that mimics the production stack.
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 16, 2015 | Kubernetes
Over the last few years there has been exponential growth in the interest of containers and schedulers – technology such as Docker, rkt, Mesos, and Kubernetes are now commonplace within the IT domain, and with the rise of microservices, these technologies are set to become even more popular. Skillsmatter are keen to drive forward the discussions and knowledge sharing within this area of technology, and have created a conference focused exclusively on containers and schedulers: ContainerSched!
August 12, 2015 | Microservices
Over the last few months one of my main projects at OpenCredo has involved creating various microservices which are interacted with via REST. We’ve been working with a relatively rich domain model, which in turn has presented a lot of challenges in how to design our various resources. This blog post aims to summarise various techniques and practices which I’ve found helpful in overcoming these challenges.
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.
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’).
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.
February 16, 2015 | Software Consultancy
Apache Mesos is often explained as being a kernel for the data-centre; meaning that cluster resources (CPU, RAM, …) are tracked and offered to “user space” programs (i.e. frameworks) to do computations on the cluster.
November 21, 2014 | White Paper
In our latest white paper we cover the high level fundamentals of test automation, discuss the primary problems test automation solves and take a look at the steps required to implement this within your development process – all aimed at improving software delivery.
February 17, 2014 | Cassandra
In our previous posts we gave an overview of Cassandra’s new compare-and-set (lightweight transaction) commands and a more detailed look into the API for using them when inserting new rows into the database.
In this third post, we are going to cover update statements. We recommend reading the previous posts, as there are some details which are the same for inserts and updates which are not repeated here.
January 28, 2014 | Software Consultancy
A while ago I published this blog post about writing tests for mobile applications using Appium and cucumber-jvm.
In this post, I will look at an alternative approach to testing an Android native application using Cucumber-Android.
Throughout the post I will draw comparisons between Appium and Cucumber-Android, the goal being to determine the best approach for testing an android application using Cucumber. I will focus on the ease of configuration and use, speed of test runs and quality of reporting.
News | November 14, 2013
September 19, 2013 | Software Consultancy
This post will give an overview of mobile testing using Appium. We will integrate tests for a native Android application into an existing Cucumber-JVM based set of acceptance tests and demonstrate multi platform testing from a single set of BDD scenarios. The sample code for this can be found here.
February 19, 2013 | Software Consultancy
This blog post continues on from Part 1 which discussed types of tests and how to create robust tests. Part 2 will examine techniques to help whip a test suite in to shape and resolve common issues that slow everything down. The approaches in this post will focus on spring based applications, but the concepts can be applied to other frameworks too.
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.
News | November 24, 2010
