News Aggregator

RESTful Web Services: How To Create a Context Path for Spring Boot Application or Web Service

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 21:06:00

In the video below, we take a closer look at RESTful Web Services and how to create a context path for Spring Boot application or Web Service. Let's get started!

How to Move Containers to IBM App Connect Enterprise

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 21:06:00

Many enterprises have IBM Integration Bus environments running hundreds of integration flows in production. You have likely read about the benefits of moving to containers, perhaps even more generally of agile integration, and you’d like to explore that. You’d also like to move to a more recent version of the product (now named IBM App Connect Enterprise). However, it is likely you have no, or at least a very limited background in container technology. How do you take the first steps to explore these new platforms and product versions? In this series, we are going to describe how you move to containers running IBM App Connect Enterprise. We’ll build up to more complex examples, but for this first one we’ll take the simplest possible flow, and we’ll use a Docker container environment that can easily be run on a laptop.

TiDB Operator Source Code Reading (Part 4): Implementing a Component Control Loop

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 19:51:00

In our last article, we introduced how TiDB Operator orchestrates control loop events to manage the lifecycles of TiDB components. The TidbCluster controller manages TiDB components' lifecycles, and the member manager of each TiDB component encapsulates that component's specific management logic. In this post, I'll explain in detail how we implement a component control loop by taking PD as an example. You'll learn about the PD member manager and its lifecycle management operations. I'll also compare other components with PD and show their differences.

CSS Pixel Art Generator

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 18:51:00

Recently, I read an article outlining how to create CSS pixel art with box shadows. I thought it was a really cool idea - and thought it'd be interesting to make a generator to let you create exportable pixel art from the browser using this effect. In the Codepen demo below, you can draw your pixel creations, and then click "Generate CSS" to get your pixel art in CSS, which you can copy into your web pages. Works better in full screen! How it Works As described in the article, we use scaled-up box shadows to act as pixels on the screen. We can scale these up and down to make our pixel art bigger or smaller.

Here's What SLIs AREN'T

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 18:21:00

SLIs, or service level indicators, are powerful metrics of service health. They’re often built up from simpler metrics that are monitored from the system. SLIs transform lower-level machine data into something that captures user happiness. Your organization might already have processes with this same goal. Techniques like real-time telemetry and using synthetic data also build metrics that meaningfully represent service health. In this article, we’ll break down how these techniques vary, and the unique benefits of adopting SLIs.

7 Formats for Great Team Retrospectives

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 17:51:00

A team retrospective is a meeting at the end of a sprint, project, or milestone where the team reflects on the past work cycle and identifies improvements. It involves celebrating achievements to raise the team spirit, gathering feedback on challenges, and planning how to execute better in upcoming sprints or projects. Retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement and team growth. Retrospective meetings are structured to facilitate team discussions and beneficial outcomes. They usually start with an introduction, then input from each team member is gathered, presented, and discussed, and finally, the next steps are determined. Gathering input usually happens in parallel. Guided by the questions of a retrospective format, each team member writes up their thoughts on sticky notes and puts them on a whiteboard (or the digital equivalent in remote meetings).

How To Promote a Growth Mindset in the Workplace

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 17:21:00

I have worked with two different kinds of leaders and managers over the years. The one who believes in fixed abilities and promotes a fixed mindset “those who don’t perform well can never do better” and the other who believes in growing those abilities thereby promoting a growth mindset “people can be coached into improving their skills.” The first kind engages with the workplace to boost their self-esteem, establish their superiority and prove their smartness. They focus on their employees' weaknesses, refuse to coach them, blame others for failure, do not seek feedback, divide people into competent or incompetent and hire for natural talent instead of looking for ways to grow talent within their organization. They praise people for their intelligence while failing to take notice of those who show improvement through effort and hard work. After all, their fixed mindset leads them with the belief that people can’t get any better, and that makes them stick with their initial impression about them.

Incident Review: Google Cloud Outage

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 16:51:00

Outages on the Internet always catch you by surprise, whether you are the end user or the Head of Site Reliability trying to keep a clear mind while you execute your incident playbook. As people in charge of ensuring reliable services for our customers, our normal experience of outages involves surfing a deluge of fire alarms and crisis calls as we work to solve the problem as quickly as we can. We often forget, therefore, what an outage means to the end user.

Flight Recorder: Examining Java and Kotlin Apps

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 16:51:00

Foreword This article is inspired by the JUG talk I gave about utilising Java Flight Recorder to profile Kotlin applications deployed into the cloud. It's a very interesting subject that deserves definitely more attention. Introduction The goal of this article is to examine the possibilities of profiling a Kotlin and a similar Java application with JMC/Java Flight Recorder to get a better understanding of their behavior compared to each other. Nowadays the IT world often spells terms like SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) or latencies, but how to measure this in an accurate way without relying on “random” samples. The exact answer to this question is out of the scope, but we can show what possibilities there are for understanding and measuring the behaviour of an application in regard to these aspects based on simple examples using the JFR.

How to Be an Information-Flow Superhero

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 16:21:00

Everyone participates in information flow, although they may or may not realize it. Information flow is the act of consciously pushing information to the people that need it. It is an important part of any job, and I am going to share two techniques for being successful at it. The first is a common technique, but often one that is poorly practiced: a weekly email. The second is a new method I use which tracks what to communicate out to whom: infobits. It’s made a huge difference in my communication, to the extent that my colleagues seem blown away by the level of communication. My first introduction to information flow was when I screwed up. I didn’t tell my manager about an important change to a project I was running. Someone asked him about it during a meeting, and he was caught flat-footed.

Linking Jekyll Pages Back to Their Git Source Code

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 16:06:00

I’m a huge fan of open-source! One of the little ways I’ve supported the cause is by keeping this blog open since the very beginning. You can always browse the full source code here. The reason is partly to let people see the history of changes behind each page. But also because I didn’t find many open-source Jekyll blogs to learn from when I started down this road. So I keep this website open in the hopes that my trials and errors will save someone else a lot of time. I was recently asked by someone (shout-out to Seth!) to send them the Markdown source of one of my articles. This gave me the idea to add a permanent “View source” button to the footer of every article page. I’ll walk you through the process of adding this to your own Jekyll website.

No-Code: How To Translate Text With Zapier

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 16:06:00

In this article, we show how easy it is to integrate a translation service into your Backendless app using Zapier integration. Backendless is incredibly feature-rich, but no platform can cover every niche use case. That’s why Backendless has a Zapier integration, allowing you to access thousands of third-party tools and quickly integrate them into your Backendless app.

DevOps and SRE Words Matter: How Our Language has Evolved

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 11:06:00

As the tech world changes, language changes with it. New technologies will always introduce new terms and descriptions to provide a clear understanding. For example, the emergence of the cloud introduced language to describe the changing relationship between servers and clients. Then, of course, product providers will also dictate how their products are to be described, i.e. describing services as “cloud-native”. On other occasions, language changes through deliberate effort to influence behavior. Thought leaders will often invent alternative words to describe existing ideas in order to effect cultural change. Even a slight change in diction can massively affect one’s engagement, attitude, and even worldview. In this blog, we’ll look at how language colors how we perceive our environments, and we’ll break down three examples of how language has evolved in tech.

Spinning up a Node.js Server in a Container on AWS with EC2

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 10:51:00

For a project at work, I needed to get a Node.js Express server running in a Docker container, then deploy that container to an EC2 instance on AWS. I took notes along the way because I was sure I'd need to do something like this again someday. Then, I figured—since I took notes—I might as well share my notes. You can generalize my use case for your own needs. It doesn't have to be a Node.js server. It can be any Docker container image that you need to deploy to AWS EC2, as long as you know what port(s) on the container you need to expose to the outside world.

Understanding Persistent Volumes and PVCs in Kubernetes and OpenEBS

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 10:21:00

Overview: What is a Volume in Kubernetes? In Kubernetes, volume abstractions are used to provide an API that abstracts the physical implementation of storage from how it is consumed by application resources. Containers running on Kubernetes do not store the data they create or process. A Volume essentially provides a storage directory that can be used by containers running in PODs to store and share data. Kubernetes supports two major types of Volumes:

Code Injection – Examples and Prevention

Aggregated on: 2021-11-21 10:21:00

The Online Web Application Security Project (OWASP) helps organizations improve their security posture by offering guidelines based on real-world scenarios and community-led open-source projects. Out of the various threats, OWASP considers Code Injection to be a commonly known threat mechanism in which attackers exploit input validation flaws to introduce malicious code in an application. This article explores how a code injection attack is performed, the types of attacks, and how software teams can protect their web applications from injection flaws.

AWS AI Image Recognition Using Serverless on NodeJS

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 17:06:00

Introduction In this post, we are going to see how we can identify images using AWS image recognition service called AWS Rekognition on NodeJS, at the end of the guide you will have a system in which you will upload a file to S3, and identification details of that image will be sent to your email address. Project Setup We will need to set up a basic serverless project with a serverless.yml file and our lambda function, we also need to install aws-sdk to interact with AWS services,

4 Keys to Designing a Neural Network Model

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 15:36:00

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a commonly used tool in deep learning. In this tutorial, you can learn what they are, learn their basic structure, and code a simple neural network with only one neuron. When you design your own neural networks, there are a number of considerations to take into account. This article will describe a few. Layout of Network Layers Rarely if ever are neural networks as simple as one neuron. For example, the majority of neural networks have at least several layers. You will need hidden layers, layers of artificial neurons between the input and output neuron layers if the data are to be separated in a non-linear fashion.

Otomi: OSS Developer Self-Service for Kubernetes

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 15:36:00

Otomi, an open-source project from Red Kubes, offers developer self-service on top of any Kubernetes cluster. With Otomi, developers can deploy and manage applications, create Kubernetes jobs and cron jobs, create and manage secrets, and publicly expose services with only a couple of clicks. And all of this without writing any Kubernetes YAML manifests. Why Developer Self-Service for Kubernetes The ultimate goal of developer self-service is to have less friction in the development process and ensure that developers can deliver customer value faster. This can be achieved by enabling the separation of concerns for both dev and ops teams. The ops team manages the stack and enforces governance and compliance to security policies and best practices. Dev teams can create new environments on-demand, create and expose services using best practices, use ready-made templatized options, and get direct access to all the tools they need for visibility. Think of it as paving the road towards fast delivery and minimizing risks by providing safeguards and standards. Developers can do what they need to do and do it when they like to. And yes, sometimes not always how they would like to do it. The only challenge here is, building a platform like this takes a lot of time and not all organizations have the resources to do so.

Going Beyond Java 8: Text Blocks

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 14:51:00

Introduction String is undoubtedly the most used class in Java, and represents an exception among the classes of the standard library. In fact, its objects are always immutable, and these can be instantiated with a simplified syntax that makes us avoid the verbosity of the new operator and the call to the constructor, as is standard for almost all other classes. In addition, the memory management of these String objects is characterized by the reuse of instances already created through an internally-managed pool of strings. In the latest versions, other improvements are being made to this fundamental class to make its use more efficient, simpler to use, and less verbose. The compact strings introduced in Java 9 have undoubtedly made strings more performing. Then with Java 13, a new feature called text blocks has been introduced that allows us to use the String class in a more profitable and easier way.

AWS IoT MQTT Tutorial Using Lua

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 10:51:00

In this hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to connect securely to an AWS IoT MQTT broker using mutual certificate authentication. An online interactive Lua tutorial includes ready-to-use Lua code, enabling you to connect to your own AWS IoT core instance after signing up for a free AWS account. When the MQTT protocol uses TLS, the MQTT clients verify the brokers' identities with X.509 certificates. TLS also supports mutual authentication, where the brokers use certificates to verify the clients' identities. If this all sounds Greek to you, check out my previous article, A Gentle Introduction to Asymmetric Encryption, which explains the core principles behind X.509 certificate authentication.

Check Point vs. Palo Alto - Enterprise Cybersecurity Top Contenders

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 10:06:00

Two of the leading cybersecurity platforms are Check Point and Palo Alto. Many tend to think that these top contenders are largely the same, so choosing any of the two wouldn’t be a bad idea. However, there are a few details that can spell major differences. To arrive at a better cybersecurity platform choice, it certainly helps to get acquainted with this duo of options better. Presented below are some of the most important points you need to know as you decide on the right cybersecurity solution to get.

SQL Server Data Classification Comes Alive

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 09:51:00

Overview Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduced a feature called data classification, which allows you to mark certain columns with labels, indicating that these columns contain sensitive or special-handling data. For instance, you may want to mark a column containing credit card numbers as "confidential", or sales numbers as "management only". The problem is that you can mark these columns all you want, but it won't have any immediate effect. SQL Server does not actually change its behavior with these labels: it's up to you to actually do whatever you need to do in your applications.

Types of Technical Debt and How To Manage Them

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 09:06:00

Technical debt is complicated to handle and has no specific metrics attached to it. Moreover, quantifying the principal debt amount from the point the shortcut was first taken and estimating the accurate resources needed to pay off the interest and the principal is no easy job. It is equally difficult to predict the expenditure of resources on technical debt over the years. All this uncertainty around the quantification of technical debt eventually leads to ignorance. For starters, as there is no definite loss associated with it, you will ignore it for as long as you can. However, there’s only so much time you can go before the debt becomes a burden you can no longer carry. The repercussions of unattended technical debt are visible at all levels within the company. There are 3 types of debts that organizations experience:-

Types of Test Cases to Apply When Testing Financial Applications

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 09:06:00

The test cases that you can work with effectively are the test cases you can quickly write and manage without correcting all the dependencies. Testing financial applications require specific knowledge of writing test cases and what type of test cases to apply at the beginning of the development and when deploying an app. We will go over some examples of writing efficient and manageable test cases when testing financial applications, what test cases to write when deploying the app, and highlight the checklist for writing test cases for banking or financial applications to help you and your testing team.

Extract Text With AWS Textract Using AWS Step Functions

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 08:36:00

Introduction In this post, we will look into how we can extract text from an image with AWS Textract and then generate a pdf file and upload it to the S3 bucket using AWS Step Functions. We are going to deploy a serverless stack with three lambda functions, one lambda will be triggering our AWS step functions state machine and other lambdas will be used to extract the text from the image, generate the pdf and then upload it to the S3 bucket. Project Setup Our project structure will look like this:

Git Clone Command vs. GitHub Backup - Best Practices

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 08:06:00

Cloning is a popular theme in science fiction movies and literature. Just to mention Star Wars and Attack of the Clones. But it’s not science fiction at all – in the real world probably everyone has heard of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. Since then, mankind has managed to clone, among others horse, pig, or dog. Wait, we are interested in the IT world, right? The world of over 87.2% programmers using the Git version control system, 60M GitHub users, 10M Bitbucket teams, and over 30M GitLab enthusiasts – so let’s focus on a very in-depth look at the git clone command topic. Do we have your attention? What Is a Git Clone? To work with Git, we need to have a copy of the repo on our device. In an event of failure and the lack of backups, we can restore the entire repository on the basis of such a copy. So what is a clone? This is a complete copy of the repository with an entire history of changes. But a clone is also the name of a specific function in Git that allows us to do this.

Beyond Compliance: Fable’s Mission to Improve Digital Accessibility

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 04:06:00

It's time we recognize that the way we build digital products is broken. That's because the products we use today represent the people who build them more than the people who use them. There is a digital divide between the experiences of people with disabilities and people who are able-bodied. Bridging this divide is about more than compliance or checking a box.

Using Cursors and Loops in MySQL

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 00:50:59

If you've ever wanted to learn how to write a MySQL cursor or a MySQL loop, you've come to the right place. Let's iterate! Consider loops in general programming. They help you execute a specific sequence of instructions repeatedly until a particular condition breaks the loop. MySQL also provides a way to execute instructions on individual rows using cursors. Cursors in MySQL will execute a set of instructions on rows returned from SQL queries. Properties of MySQL Cursors Non-Scrollable: You can only iterate through rows in one direction. You can't skip a row; you can't jump to a row; you can't go back to a row. Read-only: You can't update or delete rows using cursors. Asensitive: MySQL cursors point to the underlying data. It runs faster than an insensitive cursor. Insensitive cursors point to a snapshot of the underlying data, making it slower than the asenstive cursors. Creating a MySQL Cursor To create a MySQL cursor, you'll need to work with the DECLARE, OPEN, FETCH, and CLOSE statements.

Use Cases for Apache Kafka in the Public Sector

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 00:05:59

The public sector includes many different areas. Some groups leverage cutting-edge technology, like military leverage. Others like the public administration are years or even decades behind. This blog series explores how the public sector leverages data in motion powered by Apache Kafka to add value for innovative new applications and modernize legacy IT infrastructures. Life is a stream of events. Therefore, examples include a broad spectrum of use cases across smart cities, citizen services, energy and utilities, and national security deployed across the edge, hybrid, and multi-cloud scenarios. Blog Series: Apache Kafka in the Public Sector and Government This blog series explores why many governments and public infrastructure sectors leverage event streaming for various use cases. Learn about real-world deployments and different architectures for Kafka in the public sector:

What BDD Is and Why You Need It: Java and Behavior Driven Development

Aggregated on: 2021-11-20 00:05:59

Is Behavior Driven Development Just Another Religion? You might hear about BDD but still don't have a clear understanding of what it is. Here I'll try to simplify the main ideas and provide clear examples. This article is useful not only for developers but all people involved in the development process like analysts, product owners, and even guys from the business. BDD Makes Application Logic More Transparent Low Transparency in Application is a very known problem in IT. Quite often domain knowledge belongs only to the development team. As a consequence, to get even a simple answer you have to ask the developer to explain.

How to Explain Kubernetes to a Business Team

Aggregated on: 2021-11-19 23:35:59

Kubernetes gets a lot of attention in the tech world. But it is almost completely unknown to anyone in the business world. This situation isn’t unusual. Technology is moving so fast the business teams are less and less familiar with the systems they rely on. This makes it much harder when you need to talk to the business about a particular technology. So how do you explain something like Kubernetes to a business team?

Thinking of Models as Graphs

Aggregated on: 2021-11-19 22:50:59

The first step in any big data visualization and analysis process is to ingest your data. In the past, most developers thought of models as rows with attributes and references to other row identifiers. In keeping with that mentality, Perspectives pulled data from a relational database into its session-scoped model. Relational social network data are shown in rows of elements and attributes. Modern graph visualization developers tend to conceptualize data differently. While many users still pull data from an RDBMS, an increasing number use graph-based data storage and think about their data in graph-like ways.

Business Activity Monitoring in Serverless360 With Real-Time Scenarios

Aggregated on: 2021-11-19 21:05:59

This blog gives some interesting use cases of Business Activity Monitoring in Serverless360 using Cab Booking Management System. Let's take the booking scenario of this system backed with the Azure Serverless services and see how the business activity monitoring in Serverless360 will be useful in detecting the exceptions and tracking the custom properties of the messages flowing through the business process. Scenario The above is a Cab booking application built with Azure Serverless. Consider a business user who would need to track message flows through every stage in the above business activity. They should be informed of any exceptions in the business transaction along with the reasons behind the failure. A business development manager would need to have analytic information on the booking trends at various locations.

Data Visualization With Charts in 7.0.2 Couchbase

Aggregated on: 2021-11-19 21:05:59

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” The 7.0.2 Couchbase Query Workbench (and the Analytics Workbench) introduces the charts tab, which allows users to create charts based on the results of the query. A Closer Look at Charts Internally we use D3 to render the charts themselves. Each individual value can be seen using the hover tooltip, and the legend (colors and what they represent) for the multicolored charts are seen in the right-hand corner of the canvas. The charts can also be downloaded as an SVG using the button on the right-hand side of the canvas. Sizing the canvas or the screen itself auto-adjusts the charts to fit.