Cloud Engineering Archives - Software Engineering Daily

When you are working on a program, a lot of things are going through your head. In some sense, you become part machine when you are programming. Learnable Programming is a concept that facilitates this, by showing developers what the computer is doing in real time, before compiling. In this episode, Josh Varty, co-founder of Code Connect Inc., talks to Edaena Salinas about incorporating concepts from Learnable Programming into Visual Studio and C# by showing developers what the computer is thinking while they are typing. Code Connect lets a developer immediately see what value a variable is taking, and provide test values to troubleshoot a portion of code to understand how different code paths are going to work. This is instead of having to compile and run the full program. If you have ever thought about making developer tools for an IDE or a programming language, this episode provides some great information. The post Developer Tools with Josh Varty appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Microservices are a widely adopted pattern for breaking an application up into pieces that can be well-understood by the individual teams within the company. Microservices also allow these individual pieces to be scaled independently and updated in isolation. Past Software Engineering Daily episodes have covered the microservice architectures of Twitter, Netflix, Google, Uber, and other companies. In today’s episode, I sit down with Rafael Schloming, who is building tools for microservices at Datawire. The post Microservices with Rafi Schloming appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Slack is a chat client that has reached wide adoption. The rise of Slack has coincided with the rise of chatbots. A chatbot is a simple, conversational interface into a computer program that may have simple functionality, like telling you some simple statistics, or more complex functionality, like helping you manage your continuous integration pipeline. Bot design and engineering is a new field, and a vast array of resources and techniques are available for developers looking to hack on it. Amir Shevat is the director of developer relations at Slack, and is responsible for communicating with developers about the best ways to build bots for Slack. After seeing his talk at O’Reilly Bot Day, I had a number of questions about where we are with bots today and where we are going. I enjoyed this conversation with Amir, and if you aren’t already convinced that bots are an important platform for engineers to understand, this conversation will convince you. The post Slack Bots with Amir Shevat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become insufficient. As an answer to this, Joshua Levy initiated The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services, an open-source collection of resources available on github. Joshua has experience at a variety of companies, including Viv, the conversational interface that was recently acquired by Samsung. In our conversation, Josh brought his years of experience to the table to explain the risks, benefits, and alternatives of Amazon Web Services. Josh has become a friend over the last year, and if you get the chance to have a conversation with him, I highly recommend it. He will be at the re:Invent conference in Vegas at the end of this month (November) and if you are interested in talking to him about the AWS Open Guide, or anything else, reach out to him. The post AWS Open Guide with Joshua Levy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The blueprint for a typical startup involves investing heavily in cloud services–either from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The high costs can quickly eat away at all of the money that startup has raised. In today’s episode, Avi Freedman outlines some of the infrastructure mistakes that can set back a company severely–cloud jail, hipster tools, and lack of monitorability. Avi is the CEO of Kentik, network traffic, performance, and security visibility company, so he gets lots of perspective on the infrastructure of the average company. We also discussed the business of running a software company, contrasted with the life of a poker player. Avi and I both have some experience playing high-stakes poker, so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on the parallels between the two fields. The post Infrastructure Mistakes with Avi Freedman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Chat bots are your newest co-worker. Slack, HipChat, and other chat clients allow developers and other team members to communicate more dynamically than the limits of email. Companies have started to add bots to their chat rooms. These bots can give you technical information, restart a server, or notify you that a build has finished. Jason Hand is the author of ChatOps: Managing Infrastructure in Group Chat. He joins the show today to discuss how ChatOps improves development and operations by centralizing lots of functionality in group chat. Edaena Salinas is the host for today’s show. She also hosts the excellent Women In Tech Show–a podcast we highly recommend. Since we are on the subject of bots–we want to thank O’Reilly Media for recently providing Software Engineering Daily a ticket to Bot Day. The post ChatOps with Jason Hand appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Kafka is a distributed log for producers and consumers to publish messages to each other. We’ve done many shows about Kafka as a key building block for distributed systems, but we often leave out the discussion of the complexities of setting up Kafka and monitoring it. Kafka deployments can be a complex piece of software to manage. Tom Crayford is an engineer at Heroku, where he helped engineer the recent Heroku Kafka product, which is a managed version of Apache Kafka. Our conversation explored the use cases of Kafka and how to build Kafka as a cloud service at scale. For more information about Heroku Kafka, check out an upcoming webinar. Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. That said, this is a topic I am genuinely interested in–it is often difficult to get cloud providers to talk in detail about how they are architecting their services. The post Managed Kafka with Tom Crayford appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Google Compute Engine is the public cloud built by Google. It provides infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service capabilities that rival Amazon Web Services. Today’s guest Joe Beda was there from the beginning of GCE, and he was also one of the early engineers on the Kubernetes project. Google’s internal systems have made it easy for employees to spin up compute resources, but it was not a simple task to make this internal cloud consumable by the public–not to mention competitive with AWS.  In order for a cloud provider to be successful, it needs to offer self-healing, self-managing infrastructure that can run microservices. The post Google Cloudbuilding with Joe Beda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cloud computing was something much different in 2011, when Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp started The Cloudcast, a podcast I listen to on a regular basis. The Cloudcast features technical discussions about cloud infrastructure technology, and one of the most recent shows was a monologue by Brian Gracely where he explained his perspective on the industry rumblings about a Docker fork. The utility of a container for so many different purposes leads to different organizations having differing preferences for what use case is optimized for. The impression that I took away from this conversation, as well as the next episode that will air with Joe Beda, is that the diverse opinions and products in the container and orchestration ecosystem is quite healthy. Brian does a great job explaining his perspective on The Cloudcast, and he discusses his beliefs further in this episode. The post Docker Cloudcasting with Brian Gracely appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a user of a social network updates her profile, that profile update needs to propagate to several databases that want to know about such an update–search indexes, user databases, caches, and other services. When Neha Narkhede was at LinkedIn, she helped develop Kafka, which was deployed at LinkedIn to help solve this very problem. Using Kafka as an event queue, LinkedIn adopted the CQRS architectural pattern together with event sourcing. Event sourcing is an architectural pattern that allows changes to our application model to be represented as events. Each event is published to an event queue, and is pulled off of the queue by each of the various services that need to consume that event. Event sourcing and the related architectural pattern CQRS allow for a flow of information through an application that is easy to reason about, and has several other desirable properties. In today’s episode, Neha explains how to use Kafka for event sourcing and how related software patterns are improving the architectures of companies like Netflix and Uber. For more information, check out this Confluent blog entry. The post Kafka Event Sourcing with Neha Narkhede appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.