A Java geek

Introduction to Kubernetes extensibility

Kubernetes offers a lot of benefits: an enormous ecosystem with plenty of actors, self-healing capabilities, etc. There’s no free lunch, though. It also comes with downsides, chief among them its complexity and operating costs. However, the more I work with Kubernetes, the more I think its most significant asset is extensibility. If you need something that the platform doesn’t provide by default, there’s an option to develop it yourself and integrate it.

Development

The maze of Python dependency management

For over 20 years, I’ve developed code for the JVM, first in Java, then in Kotlin. However, the JVM is not a silver bullet, e.g., in scripts: Virtual machines incur additional memory requirementsIn many cases, the script doesn’t run long enough to gain any benefit performance-wise. The bytecode is interpreted and never compiles to native code. For these reasons, I now write my scripts in Python.

Technical

A quick glance at the Kubernetes Gateway API

In one of my recent blog posts, I described several ways to access Kubernetes pods. One can access a pod through its IP, but pods are naturally transient. The nominal way is to configure a Service: its IP is stable, and Kubernetes' job is to keep the mapping between a Service and its underlying pods up-to-date.

Technical

End-to-end tracing with OpenTelemetry

Whether you implement or not microservices (and you probably shouldn’t), your system is most probably composed of multiple components. The most straightforward system is probably made of a reverse proxy, an app, and a database. In this case, monitoring is not only a good idea; it’s a requirement. The higher the number of components through which a request may flow, the strongest the requirement. However, monitoring is only the beginning of the journey.

Technical

Renovate, a Dependabot alternative

I won’t introduce Dependabot. Lots and lots of developers use it daily on GitHub. I do use it as well. However, it suffers from two drawbacks: While it’s perfectly integrated with GitHub, integrations with other platforms are less seamless.It’s limited in the list of ecosystems it supports For example, I generally use Docker Compose files for my demos. When necessary, I use Kubernetes. Dependabot supports none.

Technical

Backend-for-Frontend: the demo

In one of my earlier posts, I described the Backend-for-Frontend pattern. In short, it offers a single facade over multiple backend parts. Moreover, it provides each client type, e.g. desktop, mobile, exactly the data that it needs and not more in the format required by this client type. The use-case Imagine the following use-case. In a e-commerce shop, the home page should display multiple unrelated data at once. Products: The business could configure which items are shown on the home page.

Technical

Back to basics: accessing Kubernetes pods

Kubernetes is a colossal beast. You need to understand many different concepts before it starts being useful. When everything is set up, you’ll probably want to expose some pods to the outside of the cluster. Kubernetes provides different ways to do it: I’ll describe them in this post.

Development

On cosmetics vs. intrinsics in programming

A ruthless battle occurs every day on the World Wide Web. Its goal is to decide which programming flavor is the best: OOP or FP? I assume that imperative and procedural programming are not part of the contenders. Arguments range from the factual to the irrelevant to the utterly stupid. A couple of years ago, I wanted to listen to a video of Martin Odersky (of Scala fame). I remember neither the exact talk nor the subject.

Technical

Discussing Backend For Front-end

In the good old days, applications were simple. A browser sent a request to a webapp endpoint; the latter fetched data from a database and returned the response. The rise of mobile clients and integrations with other apps upset this simplicity. I want to discuss one solution to handle the complexity in this post. The increased complexity of system architecture Let’s first model the above simple architecture. Mobile clients changed this approach.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog