Got some excellent coding and systems setup coming up in the next few days. Also a meetup on the 28th with Tim Kellogg and Alena Hall presenting on some interesting topics around distributed database data working on Kubernetes and WebAssembly of the hot temperament type. A new surprise guest addition on my Twitch channel that is scheduled to swing into Valhalla and help build out a cluster and respective needed DHCP, DNS, and related configuration for a setup on the metal!
August 23rd 10:00am DataStax Academy Twitch Stream – This session will include David and I as we dig into the Killrvideo Reference Application and discuss the pull request with the SSL additions to the code base. We’ll talk through the changes, why they’ve been made, and what advantage they provide for deployment into a multi-cloud environment.
August 24th 1:30pm~ish – Systems Configuration Setup and Cluster Setup on the metal! – This session will include a guest who’s going to step in and help in setup and configuration of a 5 node cluster of systems plus bastion server. Join for a how-to of setup, configuration, and clustering details.
August 24th, 3:33pm – Go Coding on Colligere – In this session I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can start filling out some of the CLI functionality. I’ll be adding over the next few days items to the issues list on Github too. Feel free to add content, or related items to the issue log too!
August 31st, 3:33pm – More Go, More Feature Additions – This session isn’t 100% clarified and ready just yet. But I’ll be there, ready to sling some more Go code and get more features done, more code refactored, and progress made.
Over the last few weeks the I’ve been putting together multi-cloud conversations and material related to multi-cloud implementation, conversations, and operational situations that exist today. I took a quick look at some of my repos on Github and realized I’d put together a multi-cloud Node.js sample app some time ago and should update it. I’ll get to that, hopefully, but I also stumbled into some tweets and other material I wanted to collect a few of them together.
Our Killrvideo Reference Application Work @ DataStax which we’ll have more coverage of, blog entries, and related material coming out in the coming weeks about what we’ve been doing to make this reference application multi-cloud ready and then multi-cloud capable.
A well worded tweet… lot’s of talk per Google’s somewhat underlying push for GKE on prem. Which means more clouds, more zones, and more multi-cloud options.
MyPOV: @googlecloud announces GKE on prem. It's just another zone.
Here's to #multicloud and a consistent approach across all deployment types
— @ces R “Ray” Wang 王瑞光 #1A #RuleTheWorld #CES2021 (@rwang0) July 24, 2018
Distributed Data Show Conversations
Leave a comment, tweet at me (@adron), let me know your thoughts or what you’re working on re: multi-cloud. I’m curious to learn about and know more war stories.
Another way to get up and running with a DataStax Enterprise 6 setup on your local machine is to use the available (and supported by DataStax) Docker images. For additional description of what each of the images is, what is contained on the images, I read up on via Kathryn Erickson’s (@012345) blog entry “DataStax Now Offering Docker Images for Development“. Also there’s a video Jeff Carpenter (@jscarp) put together which talks from the 5.x version of the release (since v6 wasn’t released at the time).
As I have stepped full speed into work and research at DataStax there were a few things I needed as soon as I could possibly get them put together. Before even diving into development, use case examples, or reference application development I needed to have some clusters built up. The Docker image is great for some simple local development, but beyond that I wanted to have some live 3+ node clusters to work with. The specific deployed and configured use cases I had included:
I wanted to have a DataStax Enterprise 6 Cassandra Cluster up and running ASAP. A cluster that would be long lived that I could developer sample applications against, use for testing purposes, and generally develop against from a Cassandra and DSE purpose.
I wanted to have an easy to use cluster setup for Cassandra – just the OSS deployment – possibly coded and configured for deployment with Terraform and related scripts necessary to get a 3 node cluster up and running in Google Cloud Platform, Azure, or AWS.
I wanted a DataStax Enterprise 6 enabled deployment, that would showcase some of the excellent tooling DataStax has built around the database itself.
I immediately set out to build solutions for these three requirements.
The first cluster system I decided to aim for was figuring out a way to get some reasonably priced hardware to actually build a physical cluster. Something that would make it absurdly easy to just have something to work with anytime I want without incurring additional expenses. Kind of the ultimate local development environment. With that I began scouring the interwebs and checking out where or how I could get some boxes to build this cluster with. I also reached out to a few people to see if I could be gifted some boxes from Dell or another manufacturer.
.NET Fringe took place this last week. It’s been a rather long time since my last actual conference that I actually got to really attend, meet people, and talk to people about all the different projects, aspirations, goals, and ideas about what’s next for the future. This conference was perfect to jump into, first and foremost, I knew it was an effort in being inclusive of the existing community and newcomers. We’d reached out to many brave souls to come and attend this conference about pushing technology into the future.
I met some truly excellent people. Smart, focused, intent, and a whole lot of great conversations followed meeting these people. Here’s a few people you’ll want to keep an eye on based on the technology they’re working on. I got to sit down and talk to every one of these coders and they’re in top form, smart, inventive, witty and full of great humor to boot!
I met Maria and one of the first things I saw was her crafty and most excellent art sketches around lifestyles, heroes, and more. I love art like this, and was really impressed with what Maria had done with her’s.
I was able to hang out with Maria a bit more and had some good conversation time talking about evangelism, tech fun and nonsense all around. I also was able to attend her talk on “Legacy… What?” which was excellent. The question she posed in the description states a common question posed, “When students think about .Net they think: legacy , enterprise , retired, and what is that?” which I too find to be a valid thought. Is .NET purely legacy these days? For many getting into the field it generally isn’ the landscape of greenfield applications and is far more commonly associated with legacy applications. Hearing her vantage point on this as an evangelist was eye opening. I gained more ideas, thoughts, and was pushed to really get that question answered for students in a different way… which I’ll add to sometime in the future in another blog entry.
I spoke to Kathleen while we took a break across the street from the conference at Grendal’s Coffee Shop. We talked a lot about education and what is effective training, diving heavily into what works around video, samples, and related things. You see, we’re both authors at Pluralsight too and spend a lot of time thinking about these things. It was great to be able to sit down and really discuss these topics face to face.
We also dived into a discussion about city livability and how Portland’s transit system works, what is and isn’t working in the city and what it’s like to live here. I was, of course, more than happy to provide as much information as I could.
We also discussed her interest in taking legacy shops (i.e. pre-C# even, maybe Delphi or whatever might exist) and helping them modernize their shop. I found this interesting, as it could be a lot of fun figuring out large gaps in technology like that and helping a company to step forward into the future.
Kathleen gave two presentations at the conference – excellent presentations. One was the “Your Code, Your Brain” presentation, talking about exactly the topic of legacy shops moving forward without disruption.
If you’re interested in Kathleen’s courses, give a look here.
Amy had a wicked great slides and samples that were probably the most flawless I’ve seen in a while. Matter of fact, a short while after the conference Amy put together a blog entry about those great slides and samples “Super Smooth Technical Demoes“.
An intent and listening audience.
An intent and listening audience.Amy’s talked at the conference was titled “Space, Time, and State“. It almost sounds like we could just turn that into an acronym. The talk was great, touched on the aspects of reactiveness and the battle of state that we developers fight every day while building solutions.
We also got to talk a little after the presentation, the horror of times zones, and a slew of good conversation.
AAAAAaggghhhhhh! I missed half of Tomasz’s talk! It always happens at every conference right! You get to talking to people, excited about this topic or that topic and BOOM, you’ve missed half of a talk that you fully intended to attend. But hey, the good part is I still got to see half the talk!
If you’re not familiar with Tomasz’ work and you do anything with Node.js you should pay close attention. Tomasz has been largely responsible for the great work behind Edge.js and influencing the effort to get Node.js running (and running damn well might I add) on Windows. For more on Edge.js check out Act I and Act II and the Github repository.
The Big Hit for Me, Distributed Systems
First some context. About 4 years ago I left the .NET Community almost entirely. Even though I was still doing a little work with C# I primarily switched stacks to other things to push forward with Riak, distributed systems usage, devops deployment of client apps, and a whole host of other things. At the time I basically had gotten real burned out on where the .NET Community had ended up worldwide, while some pushed onward with the technologies I loved to work with, I was tired of waiting and dived into some esoteric stuff and learned strange programming techniques in JavaScript, Ruby, Erlang and dived deeper into distributed technologies for use in application construction.
However some in the community didn’t stop moving the ball forward, and at this conference I got a great view into some of that progress! I’m stoked to see this technology and where it is now, because there is a LOT of potential for a number of things. Here’s the two talks and two more great people I got to see speak. One I knew already (great to see you again and hang out Aaron!) and one I had the privilege & honor to meet (it was most excellent hanging out and seeing your presentation Lena).
Aaron I’d met back when Troy & I put together the first Node PDX. Aaron had swung into Portland to present on “Building Node.js Applications on Windows Azure“. At .NET Fringe however Aaron was diving into a topic that was super exciting to me. The first line of the description from the topic really says it all “Distributed computing in .NET isn’t something you often hear about, but it’s becoming an increasingly important area for growing .NET businesses around the globe. And frankly it’s an area where .NET has lagged behind other runtimes and platforms for years – but this is changing!“. Yup, that’s my exact pain point, it’s awesome to know Aaron & Petabridge are kicking ass in this space now.
Aaron’s presentation was solid, as to be expected. We also had some good conversations after and before the presentation about the state of distributed compute and systems within the Microsoft and Windows ecosystem. To check out more about Akka .NET that Aaron & Andrew Skotzko … follow @AkkaDotNet, @aaronontheweb, @petabridge, and @askotzko.
…Lena traveled all the way from Kiev in the Ukraine to provide the .NET Fringe crowd with some serious F# distributed and parallel compute knowledge in “Embracing the Cloud“! (Slides here)
Here’s a short dive into F# here if you’re unfamiliar, which you can install on OS-X, Windows or whatever. So don’t use the “well, I don’t use windows” excuse to not give it a try! Here’s info about MBrace that Lena also used in her demo. Also dive into brisk from elastacloud…
In addition to the excellent talk that Lena gave I also got to hang out with her, Phil Haack, Ryan Riley, and others over food at Biwa on the last day of the conference. After speaking with Lena about the Ukraine, computing, coding and other topics around hacking and the OSS Community she really inspired me to take a dive into these tools for some of the work that I’m working on now and what I’ll be doing in the near future.
All The Things
Now of course, there were a ton of other people I got to meet, people I got to catch up with I haven’t seen in ages and others I didn’t get to write about. It was a really great conference with great content. I’m looking forward to round 2 and spending more time with everybody in the future!
The whole bunch of us at the end of the conference!
Cheers everybody! \m/
An Aside of Blog Entries on .NET Fringe
Here are some additional blog entries that others wrote about the event. In addition to these blog entries I’ll be updating this entry with any additional entries that I see pop up – so if you post one let me know, and I’ll also update these talks above that I’ve discussed with videos when they’re posted live.
TODAY @ 3:33pm – Thrashing Code Session A004 C# Environment Variable Chaos Resolved? – In this session, I’m planning to have the environment variable issues with .NET core figured out, so I’ll provide those. Then we’ll dive into actually getting something built in that black box.
August 23rd 10:00am DataStax Academy Twitch Stream – This session will include David and I as we dig into the Killrvideo Reference Application and discuss the pull request with the SSL additions to the code base. We’ll talk through the changes, why they’ve been made, and what advantage they provide for deployment into a multi-cloud environment.
August 24th 1:30pm~ish – Systems Configuration Setup and Cluster Setup on the metal! – This session will include a guest who’s going to step in and help in setup and configuration of a 5 node cluster of systems plus bastion server. Join for a how-to of setup, configuration, and clustering details.
August 24th, 3:33pm – Go Coding on Colligere – In this session I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can start filling out some of the CLI functionality. I’ll be adding over the next few days items to the issues list on Github too. Feel free to add content, or related items to the issue log too!
August 28th, 6:30pm – Operators and Developers of Distributed Systems – Two presentations are lined up for this meetup: “Extreme Temperature WebAssembly!” by Tim Kellogg and “So You Want To Run a Data-Intensive System On Kubernetes” by Alena Hall.
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