A Java geek

Differentiating rate limits in Apache APISIX

In my talk Evolving your APIs, I mention that an API Gateways is a Reverse Proxy 'on steroids'. One key difference between the former and the latter is that the API Gateway is not unfriendly to business logic. The poster child is rate-limiting. Rate-limiting is an age-old Reverse Proxy feature focused on protecting against DDoS attacks. It treats all clients the same and is purely technical.

Technical

Advanced URL rewriting with Apache APISIX

I spoke at Swiss PgDay in Switzerland in late June. The talk was about how to create a no-code API with the famous PostgreSQL database, the related PostgREST, and Apache APISIX, of course. I already wrote about the idea in a previous post. However, I wanted to improve it, if only slightly. PostgREST offers a powerful SELECT mechanism. To list all entities with a column equal to a value, you need the following command: curl /products?id=eq.1 id is the columneq.

Technical

Dynamic watermarking with imgproxy and Apache APISIX

Last week, I described how to add a dynamic watermark to your images on the JVM. I didn’t find any library, so I had to develop the feature, or, more precisely, an embryo of a feature, by myself. Depending on your tech stack, you must search for an existing library or roll up your sleeves. For example, Rust offers such an out-of-the-box library. Worse, this approach might be impossible to implement if you don’t have access to the source image.

Technical

Dynamic watermarking on the JVM

Displaying images on your website makes for an interesting problem: on one side, you want to make them publicly available; on the other, you want to protect them against undue use. The age-long method to achieve it is watermarking: A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal.

Technical

Renovate for everything

In my earlier post about moving from Kotlin Scripting to Python, I mentioned several reasons: Separating the content from the scriptKotlin Scripting is an unloved child of JetBrainsRenovate cannot update Kotlin Scripting files I was wrong on the third point. Here’s my mea culpa. First things first, Renovate does indeed manages Kotlin Scripting files - since 2022. Even better, Renovate can manage any type of file.

Technical

A refresher on GitHub Pages

I moved my blog from WordPress to GitLab Pages in… 2016. I’m happy with the solution. However, I used GitHub Pages when I was teaching for both the courses and the exercises, e.g., Java EE. At the time, there was no GitHub Actions: I used Travis CI to build and deploy. Recently, I had to use GitHub Pages to publish my Apache APISIX workshop. Travis is no longer free. GitHub Actions are a thing. I used the now nominal path and faced a few hurdles; here are my findings.

DevOps

Random and fixed routes with Apache APISIX

My ideas for blog posts inevitably start to dry up after over two years at Apache APISIX. Hence, I did some triage on the APISIX repo. I stumbled upon this one question: We have a requirement to use a plugin, where we need to route the traffic on percentage basis. I’ll give an example for better understanding. We have an URL https://xyz.com/ca/fr/index.html where ca is country (canada) and fr is french language. Now the traffic needs to routed 10% to https://xyz.com/ca/en/index.

DevOps

Even more Opentelemetry!

I continue to work on my Opentelemetry demo. Its main idea is to showcase traces across various technology stacks, including asynchronous communication via an MQTT queue. This week, I added a couple of components and changed the architecture. Here are some noteworthy learnings; note that some of them might not be entirely connected to OpenTelemetry. Here’s an updated diagram. New components appear in violet, and updated components appear in green.

Development

Parsing structured environment variables in Rust

I’m in the process of adding more components to my OpenTelemetry demo (again!). The new design deploys several warehouse services behind the inventory service so the latter can query the former for data via their respective HTTP interface. I implemented each warehouse on top of a different technology stack. This way, I can show OpenTelemetry traces across several stacks.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog