According to GitHub, GitHub Actions allows you to automate, customize, and execute your software development workflows right in your repository. You can discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you would like, including continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), and combine actions in a completely customized workflow.

This brief post will examine a simple use case for GitHub Actions — automatically build and push a new Docker image to Docker Hub. A GitHub Actions workflow will be triggered every time a new Git tag is pushed to the GitHub repository.

GitHub Project Repository

For the demonstration, we will be using…

In part two of this two-part post, we will continue to explore the set of popular open-source observability tools easily integrated with the Istio service mesh. While these tools are not a part of Istio, they are essential to making the most of Istio’s observability features. The tools include Jaeger and Zipkin for distributed transaction monitoring, Prometheus for metrics collection and alerting, Grafana for metrics querying, visualization, and alerting, and Kiali for overall observability and management of Istio. We will round out the toolset with the addition of Fluent Bit for log processing and aggregation. We will use these tools…

This two-part post explores a set of popular open-source observability tools easily integrated with the Istio service mesh. While these tools are not a part of Istio, they are essential to making the most of Istio’s observability features. The tools include Jaeger and Zipkin for distributed transaction monitoring, Prometheus for metrics collection and alerting, Grafana for metrics querying, visualization, and alerting, and Kiali for overall observability and management of Istio. We will round out the toolset with the addition of Fluent Bit for log processing and aggregation. We will use these tools to observe a distributed, RESTful, microservices-based reference application…

As discussed in Part One of this post, given a modern distributed system composed of multiple microservices, each possessing a sub-set of a domain’s aggregate data, the system will almost assuredly have some data duplication. Given this duplication, how do we maintain data consistency? In this two-part post, we explore one possible solution to this challenge — Apache Kafka and the model of eventual consistency.

Part Two

In Part Two of this post, we will review how to deploy and run the storefront API components in a local development environment running on Kubernetes with Istio, using minikube. For simplicity’s sake, we will…

Given a modern distributed system composed of multiple microservices, each possessing a sub-set of a domain’s aggregate data, that system will almost assuredly have some data duplication. Given this duplication, how do we maintain data consistency? In this two-part post, we will explore one possible solution to this challenge — Apache Kafka and the model of eventual consistency.

Introduction

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of messages. According to Confluent, initially conceived as a messaging queue, Kafka is based on an abstraction of a distributed commit log. …

This is an updated version of a post, originally published in October 2019. This post uses AWS CLI version 2 and contains updated versions of all Docker images.

Introduction

There are two scenarios I frequently encounter that require sharing Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)-based Docker images across multiple AWS Accounts. In the first scenario, a vendor wants to share a Docker image with their customer, stored in the vendor’s private container registry. Many popular container security and observability solutions function in this manner.

Below, we see an example of an application consisting of three containers. Two of the container images originated…

In the following post, we will learn how to monitor indoor air quality (IAQ) using a private LoRaWAN sensor device network. The devices transmit their sensor telemetry to AWS through a LoRaWAN gateway using the newly released AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN service. We will then analyze and visualize the sensor data using AWS IoT Analytics and Amazon QuickSight.

Introduction

On December 15, 2020, AWS announced support for Semtech’s low-power, long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) connectivity. LoRaWAN devices and gateways can now connect to AWS IoT Core using AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN. AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN is a fully…

In the following post, we explore the integration of several open source applications to build an IoT edge analytics stack designed to operate on low-cost, ARM-based edge nodes. We will use the stack to collect, analyze, and visualize IoT data without first shipping the data to the Cloud or other external systems.

This post is a revised version of an earlier post, featuring major version updates of TimescaleDB (v1.7.4-pg12 to v2.0.0-pg12), Grafana (v7.1.5 to v7.5.2), and Mosquitto (v1.6.12 to v2.0.9). All source code and SQL scripts are revised. …