AWS reInvent 2018 Announcements Nov 29, 2018

As usual, AWS announced a slew of new services and updates to it’s existing services at reInvent 2018. Here are the most significant ones that I am maintaining a list of. I will be updating the list as more services get announced. Werner Vogels is on stage right now announcing new Serverless services and updates.

How to build long-running serverless apps using Lambda and AWS Fargate with Stackery Oct 16, 2018

This is a multi-part blog series that explores building serverless applications with Stackery. In the first part, we discussed why Stackery is a great platform for visually building and deploying serverless applications on AWS.

The application we will build is a video processing application that will take a video file dropped into a S3 bucket, along with some user-defined parameters and extract a thumbnail of the specified frame, and store it into another S3 bucket. Since the video processing bit is a long-running process, we will use AWS Fargate to process the video.

Building an API using the Swagger toolchain Oct 3, 2018

We have been building APIs for ages, with varying standards and design styles - SOAP web services, gRPC, REST, and until recently GraphQL. Instead of declaring a winning design style, I believe that each one of these design styles stands their ground, and it depends on the use case when to use which style.

Building Serverless Apps Using Stackery Sep 21, 2018 This is a multi-part blog series that will explore building serverless application with Stackery. In this post, the first part in the series, we discuss why Stackery is a great platform for visually building and deploying serverless applications on AWS. We will also look at setting up Stackery, linking an AWS account securely with least privileges, and using a boilerplate template to build and deploy a serverless application to AWS.

Roundup of API Platforms and Specifications Aug 31, 2018

While researching for full, end-to-end, lifecycle API management tools, I discovered many that fit the bill. In this post, I compare some popular API platforms and specification formats.

How to build a Serverless Alexa Skill Aug 29, 2018

When I was a kid, I was intrigued by the Starship Enterprise’s onboard computer featured in the science fiction series Star Trek. Although cheeky at times in it’s portrayal of technologies beyond our imagination, the voice-controlled computer always made me wonder. And, here we are in the same lifetime, realiziing similar technolgies - inside our homes, on a small device… Amazing, I think! 🖖

Personal Brand May 1, 2018 Over the years, I have built lot of applications and written about software and its practices. Most of the applications were internal facing and hence could not be shared in public. Many articles I wrote were hosted on internal knowledge bases or those sites have evolved over time. Many of those applications and writings were never made public. Building a personal brand is crucial. So I have decided to post all my writings here, and publish all my applications on Github.

Monitoring Docker Services With Prometheus Jul 21, 2015 With the advent of the ‘micro-services’ architecture and the evolving trend for using Docker, monolithic applications are being broken up into smaller and independent services. The idea is to keep the services small so that small groups of developers can work on them, upgrade or patch them quickly, and build & release them continuously. Although that vision is promising, it introduces complexity as the number of services grow. With that also grows the need to monitor these services around the clock, to maintain the healthy functioning of the application.

CenturyLink Labs Goes to DockerCon 2015 Jul 15, 2015 It was an exciting time for us again to be attending DockerCon 2015 this year. It was the 2nd DockerCon, and was way bigger than the first one. Our whole CenturyLink Labs team was there, excited to hear the new announcements from Docker and the rest of the community. The opening keynote by Ben Golub, CEO of Docker, was followed by Docker’s Founder & CTO, Solomon Hykes. The keynote session was followed by a variety of breakout tracks taking place throughout the day.

Lorry.io: Pathway to Docker Composable Apps May 26, 2015 Recently, Docker released the Compose tool for defining and running complex applications with Docker. The basic component of that tool is the file, docker-compose.yml. We at CenturyLink were big fans of Fig, the basis for Compose and the docker-compose.yml, but always envisioned a utility that could facilitate creating the docker-compose.yml files easily and intuitively. From that idea, we are happy to announce our latest project, Lorry.io, a docker-compose.yml validator, editor and composer.

Managing Application Code in Linux Containers Oct 10, 2014 Many developers have heard of Linux containers and Docker. But how do you deploy your code to an application running in Linux containers? Let’s go over that in this article, using a very simple yet effective workflow. We’ll focus on WordPress, but these principles can be used with Ruby, Python, or even Go applications. I think most of the time, users need to manage Wordpress for adding/updating plugins, themes etc.