What goes into scaling a web application today? What are resources for learning and practicing DevOps skills? This week on the show, Calvin Hendryx-Parker is back to discuss the tools and infrastructure for autoscaling web applications with Kubernetes and Karpenter.

Calvin is the co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, a Python and AI consultancy. He shares how they recently helped a client scale a web application that employs video, audio, and chat sessions. We dig deep into the tooling behind modern Kubernetes systems management and performance monitoring.

Calvin shares a project bootstrap tool for streamlining the development and deployment of a web application. The tool includes a complete blueprint for the infrastructure needed to get started.

We also dig into a collection of coding tools Calvin has been experimenting with. We discuss his recent IndyPy presentation, “Battle of the Bots,” which put several AI code assistants through their paces.

This episode is sponsored by AMD.

Course Spotlight: First Steps With LangChain

Large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm. In this step-by-step video course, you’ll learn to use the LangChain library to build LLM-assisted applications.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:23 – Scaling a Django project using Kubernetes
00:05:35 – Elastic Kubernets Service (EKS)
00:09:10 – Kubernetes terminology and improvements in tooling
00:11:29 – The Control Plane and the API
00:14:06 – Video Course Spotlight
00:15:11 – scaf: providing DevOps engineers a blueprint for new projects
00:17:21 – What have been the benefits of scaf for internal teams?
00:20:18 – How do you identify and reproduce scaling issues?
00:22:44 – Dealing with IP address scaling
00:26:03 – Why use other observability tools beyond AWS internal ones?
00:29:22 – Other lessons learned and moving toward refactoring code
00:33:53 – Scaling a voice-based LLM application
00:35:35 – Sponsor: AMD
00:36:11 – Looking at limitations and bottlenecks
00:38:08 – Configuring a Kubernetes operator to act on itself
00:39:47 – What project components are within a pod of containers?
00:42:31 – Budgeting for scale using Karpenter
00:43:58 – Tools for running containers locally
00:46:01 – Are containers still a primary development tool for you?
00:50:58 – Resources for learning DevOps and Kubernetes
00:52:54 – Conferences and talks
00:53:56 – Battle of the Bots: comparing coding agents
00:55:15 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
00:56:20 – What do you want to learn next?
01:02:42 – What’s the best way for people to follow your work online?
01:03:33 – Thanks and goodbye

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Episode 152: Aggressively Political Philanthropy