EKS vs. AKS vs. GKE from a Developer’s Perspective (2021 Edition)
Kubernetes turns seven on June 7th, with the stable release now at v1.21. As Kubernetes began to rule the container orchestration world, use of containers in production also quickly became the norm, with more than 23% of CNCF survey respondents running more than 5,000 containers in their organization, up 109% from 2016. However, managing Kubernetes remains a difficult task, which is growing the demand for managed Kubernetes offerings from the major cloud vendors.
Last year, I published my second managed Kubernetes service comparison piece, detailing the differences between Amazon’s…
Read everything from Yitaek Hwang — and more.
Upgrade to Medium membership to directly support independent writers and get unlimited access to everything on Medium.
How concentrated liquidity and multiple fee tiers in Uniswap v3 transforms automated market makers and the future of decentralized exchanges.
Uniswap is undoubtedly one of the most important DeFi applications today. It consistently ranks in the top 10 cryptocurrency projects by market cap, and its monthly trade volume even exceeded those of Coinbase last September ($15.4 bn vs. $13.6 bn).
Key takeaways from the DevOps Conference Keynote by Cheryl Hung
Back in January, I wrote a recap of the 2020 CNCF Annual Report, summarizing the key updates from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Recently at the DevOps Conference 2021, Cheryl Hung, the VP Ecosystem at CNCF, gave her predictions for cloud native in 2021. Cheryl has a unique perspective from her role at CNCF, overseeing all the activity within CNCF and interfacing with contributors and companies actively building on or looking to migrate to the cloud. …
A brief introduction to the “third-generation” proof-of-stake blockchain platform aiming to dethrone Ethereum as the go-to blockchain infrastructure layer.
Since the summer of 2020, DeFi assets saw explosive growth, riding on the coattails of the latest Bitcoin bull rally. Then in early February, DeFi projects surpassed the milestone of $1 billion Total Value Locked. Given that most DeFi projects build on top of Ethereum’s infrastructure, Ethereum seemed to further cement its dominance as the default blockchain provider. …
An opinionated list of technologies to assess for DevOps Engineers and SREs
Managing Cloud Services via Kubernetes CRDs
All three major cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP) now support a way to provision and manage cloud services from Kubernetes via custom resource definitions (CRDs). AWS has AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) in developer preview; Azure recently launched Azure Service Operator (deprecating Open Service Broker for Azure); GCP has Config Connector as an add-on to GKE. While Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and Puppet are still widely used to manage cloud infrastructure, the support for Kubernetes-managed cloud services suggests a huge shift towards organizations making Kubernetes the focal…
Leveraging QuestDB’s data ingestion via InfluxDB line protocol to build a high-throughput cryptocurrency price tracker capable of handling out-of-order records on the fly.
Crypto investors saw $1T wiped out of the market in May, as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies nosedived to their lowest in 2021. Given the volatile nature of this asset class, traders looking to navigate the market need fast and reliable price data from multiple exchanges. Earlier this year, I shared a way to analyze cryptocurrency price trends in realtime via Kafka and QuestDB. That project polled the Coinbase API for the latest price and calculated moving averages prior to sending it to a timeseries database for further analysis.
Using Infura, Blockchain ETL, and QuestDB to stream Ethereum data to a time-series database.
Previously, I wrote about using Coinbase API and Kafka Connect to track the price of various cryptocurrencies in realtime. While price is an important factor for a potential investor, on-chain data like block information (gas used, difficulty), transactions, and smart contracts also provide useful metrics for technical analysis. In this tutorial, we will pull on-chain data from Ethereum and stream it to QuestDB for further analysis and visualization.
Prerequisites
- Python 3.6+
- Docker
- Infura account
Accessing Ethereum On-Chain Data
Infura is a development platform powered by Consensys with a generous free tier…
An abstraction layer on top of Kubernetes to allow developers to focus on code and less on configuration.
Earlier this year I wrote about popular multi-cluster Kubernetes management solutions, including Rancher, Google Anthos, Volterra, and other open-source approaches. In the article, I focused on products solving the challenges of administrating and managing multiple clusters. Afterwards some of my readers pointed out that there are other challenges to operating multi-cluster Kubernetes, namely the development experience. Kubernetes already presents a steep learning curve for application developers who want to “simply deploy” their application. …
Extending the QuestDB Helm chart with monitoring and automated backups for a production-ready setup.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with QuestDB as the primary time-series database to stream and analyze IoT/financial data:
While I was able to validate the power of QuestDB in storing massive amounts of data and querying them quickly in those two projects, I was mostly running them on my laptop via Docker. In order to scale my experiments, I wanted to create a more production-ready setup, including monitoring and disaster recovery…
A deep-dive into the recent crypto-collectible or NFT craze and separating the hype from the facts.
I recently watched “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art” on Netflix, which tells the story of a multi-million dollar fake painting scam that fooled the super-rich into buying forged works in the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and other iconic Abstract Expressionism artists. The con artists sold their counterfeit artwork to Ann Freedman at the Knoedler Gallery, who then (un)knowingly sold to the rich despite questionable provenance (history of ownership). The documentary poses the question of criminality in Freedman’s involvement…
Yitaek Hwang
Sr. Software Engineer at Axoni writing about cloud, DevOps/SRE, and crypto topics: https://yitaekhwang.com
