A quick history of money and how Bitcoin challenges our understanding of financial systems.
Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has seen both tremendous growth and periods of disillusionment. From a valuation of $0.08 per coin in 2010, Bitcoin is now a successful institutional investment asset held by Tesla, Square, and Microstrategy, as well as a global currency accepted by fintech giants such as PayPal and Mastercard. …
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. …
Why the $GME mania is a giant endorsement of decentralized finance and the underlying blockchain technology to replace the current settlement systems.
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. …
A collection of awesome Kubernetes tools and projects to deploy, secure, and monitor your Kubernetes clusters.
Previously I shared top Technologies & Tools to Watch in 2021, which received a ton of support from the DevOps and SRE community. So today I’m listing my top Kubernetes tools for testing and development.
Lens
For a while, I was an exclusive GKE user, spoiled by its simplicity and the managed dashboard on the GCP console. For local development, running the Kubernetes Dashboard maintained by the Kubernetes community fit most of my needs. …
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…
Analyze cryptocurrency price trends in realtime via Kafka and store for further investigation in a timeseries database.
“Bitcoin soars past $50,000 for the first time” — CNN
“Tesla invests $1.5 billion in bitcoin, will start accepting it as payment” — Washington Post
Not a day goes by without some crypto news stealing the headlines these days. From institutional support of Bitcoin to central banks around the world exploring some form of digital currency, interest in cryptocurrency has never been higher. This is also reflected in the daily exchange volume:
Streamline the deployment of fluentbit, fluentd, and integration with popular logging outputs such as Elasticsearch, Splunk, Grafana Loki, and CloudWatch.
Despite a plethora of popular open-source and mature commercial products available today, logging remains a hard problem for many development teams. The problem is compounded by the continued growth of data as more devices and applications connect to the internet. Capturing all of this vast output of logs is not only expensive, but also hard to manage and analyze to detect key events. …
An end-to-end demo of a simple IoT system to stream and visualize heart rate data.
Thanks to the growing popularity of fitness trackers and smartwatches, more people are tracking their biometrics data closely and integrating IoT into their everyday lives. In my search for a DIY heart rate tracker, I found an excellent walkthrough from Brandon Freitag and Gabe Weiss, using Google Cloud services to stream data from a Raspberry Pi with a heart rate sensor to BigQuery via IoT Core and Cloud Dataflow.
How to mount a unique configuration per pod for a stateful application (e.g. how to mount separate configurations for master and slave database pods)
StatefulSets in Kubernetes are used to manage stateful application that require one or more of the following:
- Stable, unique network identifiers
- Stable, persistent storage
- Ordered, graceful deployment and scaling
- Ordered, automated rolling updates
In practice, StatefulSets are most commonly used to deploy databases (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch) onto Kubernetes. The declarative nature of Kubernetes makes it easy to run replicated stateful applications. …
An overview of popular SaaS solutions including Rancher, Google Anthos, Azure Arc, and Volterra as well as open-source alternatives.
As more organizations migrate their infrastructure to Kubernetes, the question is no longer just “How do I manage all of my applications on a single Kubernetes cluster?” Now more cluster administrators are grappling with how to manage multi-clusters within their organization. While Kubernetes supports namespaces for soft-isolation and virtual clusters for hard multi-tenancy within a single cluster, running multiple clusters may sometimes be required.
The most common reasons for running multiple clusters include:
- Strict isolation: this may be driven by compliance…
Yitaek Hwang
Sr. Software Engineer at Axoni writing about cloud, DevOps/SRE, and crypto topics: https://yitaekhwang.com
