Yes!, What you learn matters!

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In my professional career, I’ve passed through several ways to think. The last one, from 2013

If a good opportunity passes in front of you, take it right away.

At that time I learned the same but for renting an apartment in Geneva area… but that’s another story :).

Past April 2021, I had a great opportunity and I took it. Hoping that my professional experience could help people that are just finishing their studies in Computer Science, I’ve performed a talk for the Escuela de Ingeniería Informática, which belongs to the University of Oviedo.

In this article, I’ll talk about this experience and why I think it’s important that a close collaboration between universities and companies happens. Engage!

Continue reading Yes!, What you learn matters!

Multi-tenant Feature Flag Manager

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I’ve been searching on the Internet for some already builtin Feature Flag Manager for multi-tenant systems, with not much luck. There are some companies and products that offer Feature Flag as a Service (let’s call it like that), which permits managing this contraption for your microservice architecture, but unsure about if they support multi-tenancy.

Sunset Railroad Tracks
Railway tracks in the sunset. Taken at Frankfurt Central Station.

In this article, I’ll propose a system for a real multi-tenant Feature Flag Manager system. Engage!

Continue reading Multi-tenant Feature Flag Manager

Review Course Containers Fundamentals (LFS253)

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’ve recently started with the training platform from The Linux Foundation, and my first course has been “Containers Fundamentals (LFS253)“. This is the first out of an unknown number of reviews dedicated to the courses I take from The Linux Foundation.

The Internship Movie Promotion
The Internship Movie Promotion

On all these articles, I’ll write a small review with the highlights I consider important for a professional profile oriented to Tech Leads of teams of Software Engineers that delivers microservice-based systems in Kubernetes platforms. Engage!

Continue reading Review Course Containers Fundamentals (LFS253)

Adopting a distributed key/value storage

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Organization of the information. This is one of the most important challenges in the current era where a massive amount of data is managed. Looking for a distributed key/value store for your system is something not easy.

Library

In this article, we will define some desirable features for these kinds of systems and then we will address some of the options in the current market: TiKV, etcd and Consul. Engage!

Continue reading Adopting a distributed key/value storage

How to create a Cloud Native Community Group

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation supports the worldwide community of the Cloud Native Community Groups (CNCG) and currently, they are working on expanding the Cloud Native community around the globe, and they are happy to accept the new local communities to join their network.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation logo
Cloud Native Computing Foundation logo

In this short article, I will describe the few steps and a couple of tips for creating a Cloud Native Community Group. Engage!

Continue reading How to create a Cloud Native Community Group

New Kids On The Block

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Opening new frontiers. That’s the feeling that I had when the CNCF promoted the opportunity to create new Community Groups across the world. I saw it on Twitter, and I thought, “what if.. ?”. Yes, there it is again, the feeling that comes together with that sentence. After that, I thought, “but it would be pretty hard to manage a Community Group only by myself…”. The rest of the story I will tell on another occasion, but the result of the whole thing is what I want to introduce to all of you today: The Cloud Native Asturias Community Group. Engage!

Cloud Native Asturias official logo

Continue reading New Kids On The Block

The Butterfly Effect

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A butterfly flaps its wings in Pekin and a storm is created in Florida“. This is one of the typical sentences heard when chaos theory comes along. How leadership and mentoring could be introduced using this concept?.

In this post, you will not find a deep analysis of the chaos theory neither the mathematical analysis from Edward Lorenz, but you will find how this theory is reflected in the leadership and mentoring aspects of professional life. Engage!.

A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3;
A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3. CC BY-SA 3.0

Continue reading The Butterfly Effect

Enter, The NATS

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Deliver a message from point A to point B as fast as possible. This is a requirement for humankind for a long time ago. History says there are records from 900 B.C. about Royal Post system in China to practice communication by written documents carried by an intermediary from one person or place to another. As you can imagine, since then, the way to deliver a message has been changed a lot not only the envelope but also the means of transmission.

Nowadays, in the era of communication between machines, there is still the need of delivering messages, and as fast as possible too. In some cases, you need speed, other cases you prefer to be sure about the reception of the message delivered besides the speed, and you may have many other needs. The systems to deliver messages were called just queue systems, just a couple of decades ago, but today they are frequently called message brokers.

There are several message brokers in the market in the current time. In this post, you will read about NATS. Engage!

nats.io logo

Continue reading Enter, The NATS

Leading a team, not a family

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Have you ever had the feeling of belonging to a family in your workplace?. What about that sentence “we are not a company, we are a family”?. Maybe, as a leader, you had the feeling that you are failing to your team members because they are not doing what they want all the time. Within your family or your bunch, you do almost what you want to. And here is where the magic question comes. Are you leading a family, a gang of friends, or are you leading a team?

I’d like to share my vision about the important difference between leading as a family or as a team. Engage!

Continue reading Leading a team, not a family

Auto-Scaling No Jutsu

Reading Time: 6 minutes

You knew that could happen… it’s part of life and shit happens. Your precious distributed system has been deployed on Monday for the first time in the production environment, with real traffic, brilliant!, all good so far… and on Friday evening, “that” happened. The system starts to raise HTTP 500 status code, just dropping requests like hell, and your dashboards turn from a beautiful green to bloody red. What do you do now?

kubectl scale deployment.v1.apps/my-critial-deployment --replicas=10 #No Jutsu!!

That’s a lesson learned: Implement auto-scaling for the Kubernetes deployment by next Monday morning so I don’t have to keep an eye open on the alert system (at least for this).

In this article we will address the Kubernetes auto-scaling feature, how does it work, the complexity of this feature, and some bad practices. Engage!

Continue reading Auto-Scaling No Jutsu