A Java geek

Introduction to the Tower library

One of the components of my OpenTelemetry demo is a Rust application built with the Axum web framework. In its description, axum mentions: axum doesn’t have its own middleware system but instead uses tower::Service. This means axum gets timeouts, tracing, compression, authorization, and more, for free. It also enables you to share middleware with applications written using hyper or tonic.

Technical

Ops friendly Apache APISIX

Though I always worked on the Dev side of IT, I was also interested in the Ops side. I even had a short experience being a WebSphere admin: I used it several times, helping Ops deal with the Admin console while being a developer. Providing a single package that Ops can configure and deploy in different environments is very important.

Java

My final take on Gradle (vs. Maven)

I tweet technical content that I consider interesting, but the funny tweets are the ones that get the most engagement. I attended the JavaLand conference in March, stumbled upon the Gradle booth, and found this gem: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/nicolas_frankel/status/1638549568957861889' Of course, at some point, a fanboy hijacked the thread and claimed the so-called superiority of Gradle.

Technical

System architecture: move authentication to the API Gateway

When exposing an application to the outside world, consider a Reverse-Proxy or an API Gateway to protect it from attacks. Rate Limiting comes to mind first, but it shouldn’t stop there. We can factor many features in the API Gateway and should be bold in moving them from our apps. In this post, I’ll show how to implement authentication at the Gateway API stage.

Technical

Apache APISIX without etcd

etcd is an excellent key-value distributed database used internally by Kubernetes and managed by the CNCF. It’s a great option, and that’s the reason why Apache APISIX uses it too. Yet, it’s not devoid of issues. First, some mention scalability, but one can expect this from a distributed data store that values consistency. Another issue may be the need for more familiarity with etcd.

Book

Designing APIs with Swagger and OpenAPI

I’m continuing my API journey by reading books, viewing relevant YouTube videos, and reading relevant IETF RFCs. Today is a book review. Facts 21 chapters$38.

Java

Reactive database access on the JVM

A couple of years ago, Reactive Programming was all the rage, but it had one big issue: reactive stopped as soon as you accessed a SQL database. You had a nice reactive chain up to the database, defeating the whole purpose. Given the prevalence of SQL databases in existing and new apps, one couldn’t enjoy the full benefits of Reactive Programming but still pay the full price of complexity. Since then, the landscape has changed tremendously.

Technical

Sticky sessions with Apache APISIX - the demo

Last week, we described the concept behind sticky sessions: you forward a request to the same upstream because there’s context data associated with the session on that node. However, if necessary, you should replicate the data to other upstreams because this one might go down. In this post, we are going to illustrate it with a demo. The overall design Design options are limitless. I’ll keep myself to a familiar stack, the JVM.

Technical

Sticky sessions with Apache APISIX - Theory

Sticky sessions, also known as session affinity, is a mechanism by which a routing component that acts as a facade always routes a request to the same underlying upstream node. In this post, I’ll describe the reason behind sticky sessions, available alternatives, and how to implement them via Apache APISIX. Why sticky sessions? Sticky sessions became popular when we stored the state on the upstream node, not the database.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog