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. …

The wild rally of Gamestop stock and other meme stocks stole the headlines in January, formulating various narratives on the social class divide (the masses — r/WallStreetBets vs. the establishment —hedge funds, Wall Street). The frenzy exploded when Robinhood and other brokerages placed temporary limitations on trading activity, spurring up conspiracy theories regarding Robinhood’s relationship with Citadel (who also bailed out Melvin Capital due to the GME short squeeze). Conspiracy theories aside (which is already drawing regulatory scrutiny from Washington), this situation highlighted the complicated plumbing underneath the stock settlement process. …

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…

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:

• Streaming Heart Rate Data with IoT Core and QuestDB
• Realtime Crypto Tracker with Kafka and QuestDB

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…