Daniel Watrous on Software Engineering

Container orchestration is at the heart of a successful container architecture. Orchestration takes as input a definition of how a deployed application should look. This usually includes how many containers for a certain image are needed, volumes for persistent data, networking for communication between containers and awareness of various discovery mechanisms. Discovery may include such […]

I’m interested in allowing a user to register on my site/app using their social account credentials (e.g. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). It should also be possible to register using an email address. Since the site/app will be composed of a handful of microservices, I would want to provide my own identity service, which might includes […]

Infrastructure as a Service, like OpenStack and AWS, have made it possible to consume infrastructure on demand. It’s important to understand the ways in which both humans and machines interact with IaaS offerings in order to design optimal systems that leverage all possible automation opportunities. I drew the diagram below to help illustrate. Everything is […]

Someone asked me today whether he should use HEAT or Ansible to automate his OpenStack deployment. My answer is that he should use both! It’s helpful to understand the original design decisions for each tool in order to use each effectively. OpenStack HEAT and Ansible were designed to do different things, although in the opensource […]

I’ve recently had some people ask how I deploy MongoDB. For a while I used their excellent online tool to deploy and monitor my clusters. Unfortunately they changed direction and I couldn’t afford their new tools, so I turned to Ansible. In order more easily share the process, I posted a simple example that you […]

Today I read an article on the Wall Street Journal about the benefits of taking handwritten notes over taking notes electronically. It’s a great article and I have seen parallels in my own professional work. For years I have trained computer programmers and others in various technology roles. I have observed a similar effect which […]

I hear a lot of people talking about cloud native applications these days. This includes technologists and business managers. I have found that there really is a spectrum of meaning for the term cloud native and that two people rarely mean the same thing when they say cloud native. At one end of the spectrum […]

All around me architects and business managers are beginning to mandate that internal software applications be built (and sometimes rebuilt) as microservices so that we can reuse them and compose applications more quickly. I do admit that the idea of a curated catalog of well designed microservices is attractive. Contrary to all the buzz that […]

In a previous post I demonstrated a method to deploy a multi-node Hadoop cluster using Vagrant and Ansible. This post builds on that and shows how to deploy a Hadoop cluster with an arbitrary number of slave nodes in minutes on OpenStack. This process makes use of the OpenStack orchestration layer HEAT to provision the […]

I’ve recently been involved with several groups interested in using Hadoop to process large sets of data, including use of higher level abstractions on top of Hadoop like Pig and Hive. What has surprised me most is that no one is automating their installation of Hadoop. In each case that I’ve observed they start by […]