Open source software — software that is free to the user and whose source code can be modified and distributed freely — is ubiquitous and offers solutions to a wide range of needs. Open source as a business strategy is a complex mix of product, marketing, politics, and sales strategies. And, as a personal endeavor, open source can achieve […]
Photo by Julian Link on Unsplash The Elephant in the Giraffe House I listen to podcasts on my commute, and the a16z podcast never disappoints. On the episode “On Mentors and Mentees”, the guest Ken Coleman narrated an interesting fable that got me thinking. To paraphrase: It was raining heavily but the Giraffe’s in the Giraffe […]
Programming is hard. I relearned this lesson recently. From time to time, I go on a decluttering spree at home, throwing / donating / recycling things I haven’t used in a while. Last week, the bottom row of my bookshelf caught my eye — because it had a number of programming books. I do write code as […]
Tora!Tora!Tora! was the code word used to signify complete surprise had been achieved in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Photo Credit: Ebdon on Wikimedia WORA — Write Once, Run Anywhere was the term coined by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990’s to signify that Java apps were portable. Byte code generated by the Java compiler could run on […]
Most datacenter automation tools operate on the basis of desired state. Desired state describes what should be the end state but not how to get there. To simplify a great deal, if the thing being automated is the speed of a car, the desired state may be “60mph”. How to get there (braking, accelerator, gear […]
This is part of a series on design patterns in building orchestration systems. The focus is on orchestrators found in clouds, data-centers, networking systems, etc, but the principles should be broadly applicable. In a previous post we touched on an important issue that is a side effect of performing orchestration over a network: idempotent operations. The […]
Orchestration is a somewhat overloaded term in the context of automation. Generally, it implies a central controller that tries to bring a complicated system to a desired state. There are usually a large number of subsystems that the controller manages. Changing the state of the system involves communicating with the subsystems in order to get […]
Can you generate Go code from a Java binary jar? This need arose from writing a prototype Ingress Controller for Kubernetes that uses a NetScaler to provide the Ingress function. Another need was a Terraform driver for NetScaler. (While the NetScaler Ingress controller didn’t need a Golang client, it is customary to write Kubernetes integrations using Go). NITRO is the REST API to program the Citrix NetScaler load […]
Consul-template (consul-template) is a tool that can drive reconfiguration of applications and infrastructure in response to changes in the keys/values stored in Consul. Usually it is used to populate changes into a local file in the filesystem. Following the change, the application or infrastructure software is usually restarted. Previously I’d written up integrations between container […]
Apple device users have probably taken and stored 100 billion photos: In early 2013, the number was 9 billion There are 100 million iPhones in active use in 2015. If each iPhone takes 1000 pictures per year, that’s 100 billion photos in 2015 alone. Photos are automatically backed up to iCloud since iOS 5 Update: […]
Cloudier Than Thou 