Cheapskate’s Journey to On-Demand Load Tests on Heroku with Locust

• June 20, 2020

I want to stretch every dollar that I spend on the cloud. I run a handful of web applications on Heroku, and like everyone else, run a suite of smoke tests and load tests on every release increment in a non-production environment. Load tests are important: they help us not only to understand the limits of our systems but also bring up issues that arise due to concurrency, which often escape the realms of unit tests and integration tests.

Using Startup Command to Pass Command Line Arguments to Azure App Service for Linux

• June 6, 2020

Azure App Service on Linux has several pre-fabricated Docker images that support applications written in languages such as .NET core, PHP, and Node.js. App Service also supports using your own Docker image to spin up a container for your application. A useful configuration feature of App Service on Linux is the Startup File configuration that you can set as part of configuring the runtime stack. The value that you specify for the configuration overrides the CMD instruction of the Dockerfile that creates the runtime of the application.

VS Code Remote Development with Docker Compose: Developing services in Standalone and Integrated Modes

• May 26, 2020

VS Code remote development is a brilliant feature from the VS Code team. Using the extensions available in the VS Code remote extension pack, you can develop your applications in an external development environment viz. a remote server (through SSH), containers, and WSL. The premise of the three modes of development is the same. The application code is stored either on your local system (on container and WSL through volume mount) or remote server (through SSH), and the local instance of the VS Code attaches itself to the external system through an exposed port (container and WSL), or SSH tunnel (remote server).

Istio Succinctly

• April 21, 2020

I am super happy to announce the release of my new eBook: Istio Succictly, published by Syncfusion. You can grab a copy of the book for free by clicking this link. If you are familiar with Kubernetes and want to augment your Kubernetes clusters with the most popular Service Mesh implementation, Istio, then this book is for you. In Istio Succinctly, we have tried to comprehensively cover the quintessence of Istio without sacrificing the necessary concepts and theory behind it.

Durable Cloud Event Production from Knative Container Source with Azure Durable Task Framework

• January 15, 2020

Knative is an excellent platform for building, deploying and managing serverless workloads on Kubernetes. The Serving resources of Knative extend Istio to support serverless applications. Another class of resources of Knative called Eventing extend Istio to support the production and consumption of Cloud Events. Knative offloads the responsibility of scaling the workloads from the users by only activating pods when they receive a request. It scales out the workload pods based on the number of requests and scales pods down to zero when they are idle.

Enhance Integrated CI and CD in Azure Pipelines as Code With Key Utils: Binary Logger and Report Generator

• December 3, 2019

If you are using Azure DevOps for building and deploying your .NET core applications, then you should consider the following. Azure Pipelines now supports composing both the build and release stages as code. You can now combine your CI and CD pipeline definitions into a single pipeline definition that lives within the same repository as the application code. Turn on binary logging in MSBuild so that you receive exhaustive structured logs from the build process.

Origin Authentication and RBAC in Istio with Custom Identity Provider

• November 11, 2019

The concept of access control can be boiled down to two factors: authentication (AuthN) and authorization (AuthZ). While authentication determines the identity of a client based on the data presented to the identity provider (e.g., Google and Microsoft AD), authorization determines whether an authenticated principal may interact with the resource. I am not going to delve deep into the security architecture of Istio since I have covered this topic in detail in my upcoming FREE quick start guide on Istio.

Using CoreDNS to Conceal Network Identities of Services in Istio

• October 31, 2019

A crucial feature of the Istio Service Mesh is that it grants you absolute control over how you want to route traffic to a service. Each service on the Istio service mesh has a unique network identity that it receives from the underlying host, i.e., Kubernetes. For example, a service named foo provisioned in a namespace named bar will have the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) foo.bar.svc.cluster.local, which also serves as its network identity.

Save Your Precious Dev Time With Command Aliases In Windows Terminal

• September 23, 2019

Developers are always looking for ways to optimize their productivity. The latest addition that I did to improve mine was to create aliases for the most common commands that I use every day. I have entirely pivoted to using the new Windows Terminal for my day-to-day command line activities. Windows Terminal is a modern, open-source application that aggregates multiple terminals and shells such as command prompt, PowerShell, and WSL and adds features such tab support, rich text, configuration, and visual themes to them.

Continuous TeX Document Production with GitHub Actions

• July 21, 2019

Here is my little secret: My résumé lives in a private GitHub repository. I use TeX, which is a popular typesetting language, to compose my résumé. TeX helps you separate document text from formatting. Major publishers whose content and design teams work independently of each other use TeX. The content team produces content, and the design team makes the content presentable. In a typical publishing workflow, the author marks the various parts of content such as headers, and footers with inbuilt, or custom TeX commands.

IoT Edge Device Monitoring and Management with Azure Durable Entities Functions - Part 2

• July 13, 2019

In this series IoT Edge Application Azure Durable Entities Function In the last article, we built and tested a simple IoT Edge application that simulates temperature telemetry based on the command that it receives. We also created a test client that can invoke Direct Method on the device. Today we will build monitoring and management capabilities for our IoT Edge device using Azure Functions. One critical consideration that I would like to bring to your attention is the demand for this solution to stay mostly connected.

IoT Edge Device Monitoring and Management with Azure Durable Entities Functions - Part 1

• July 1, 2019

In this series IoT Edge Application Azure Durable Entities Function IoT systems involve many devices, each of which maintains a small internal state. The Actor Model is a good fit for representing IoT devices in the cloud because of its inherent fault tolerance, concurrency controls, performance, and scalability. I wrote about the Actor Model and Orleans (virtual actor based implementation) in one of my previous articles here.

Building a GraphQL Application with ASP.Net Core and TypeScript - Part 2

• May 19, 2019

In this series Building a GraphQL server Building a GraphQL client In the first part of this series, we discussed steps to develop a GraphQL server using ASP.Net core. Since we have a server up and running now, we will build a client that works with the API we just created. We will build a minimal client using TypeScript that has no dependency on frameworks or libraries such as Angular and React.

Building a GraphQL Application with ASP.Net Core and TypeScript - Part 1

• May 4, 2019

In this series Building a GraphQL server Building a GraphQL client GraphQL (QL: Query Language) is a query language for your APIs. For a long time API clients have been dictated the format of data that they can receive from the backend API. For example, if a client sends a GET request to this endpoint: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json (see developer guide), it will get all the data in the format dictated by the API which the client will then have to filter to get just the desired field/s, e.

Integration Tests in Azure Pipelines with ASP.Net Core and SQL on Docker

• April 17, 2019

I usually like to keep my application dependencies such as the database, and emulators packaged in containers. Running the dependencies in containers gives me the ability to keep my development process fluid as I can bring up the dependencies to the desired state no matter how massively I deform them. In my CI pipelines, I enforce the execution of unit tests and integration tests on every build. Usually, running integration tests involve running test cases along with the dependency, which is a database most of the time.