Fluent Bit book update

22 Friday Dec 2023

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It’s been a busy time on the book front. With the book going into the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). Since then, we have got three more chapters ready, and we’re waiting for the Manning Technical Editor to come back on the content. Once that feedback is addressed, we go into another peer review round, and the chapters will be added to the MEAP edition.

The peer review process is insightful and helps drive improvements to the content, as the reviewers are deeply informed – after all, some of them coded the functionality I’m writing about. So, the comments and questions that come back deserve careful consideration.

It isn’t just more chapters; the appendices have been moving forward, and we should see the first two appendices in the MEAP content soon.

If that isn’t enough for you – as we developed Chapter 8 (probably ready for Manning by the New Year) and worked on the appendices, we identified content that doesn’t neatly fit the book, so we’ve incorporated that content on this blog and in other places (we’re expecting a blog to be published early in the New Year here). We’ve created a page on this website to help collect together content here, and you can see all the blog content here.

But there is plenty of work still to be done, as Fluent Bit supports both YAML and classic configuration formats. We have focussed on the classic format in the book as more people use that at the moment. But, eventually, the YAML format will become more dominant, so we’re providing the YAML equivalent configurations for all the examples. These need to be finalized and checked.

We think Chapter 9 will come quickly, but the final chapter will take time, as we’re expecting the peer review feedback to land as we start Chapter 10. But there is also a lot more effort involved in the final chapter. Then, it’s another peer review round.

Content Not here

22 Friday Dec 2023

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, manning, Technology

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book, DevRel, DZone, Oracle, publications

We’ve recently had several pieces published on other websites, so I thought we should link them together.

Here is a short piece on Ubuntu security on OCI here.
Another here (DZone) on the use of Solace for multi-cloud messaging.

We’re expecting another article to appear here in the New Year as well. Plus, the book is moving along at a very nice pace – we’ve got a separate post for that.

On the book front – watch out for the Manning and Packt festive promotions.

Fluent Bit config – Railroad Diagrams

13 Wednesday Dec 2023

Posted by mp3monster in Fluentbit, General, railroad diagrams, Technology

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configuration, diagram, FluentBit, railroad, stream processor, syntax

I’ve written about how railroad syntax diagrams (see here) are great for helping write code (or configuration files). Following the track through the diagram will give you the correct statement syntax, and generally, the diagrams don’t require you to jump around like BNF or eBNF representations.

As you may have seen, I’m currently writing a book on Fluent Bit, and guess what? We’re on the Stream Processor chapter. Looking broaching the use of syntax, it just felt right to have a railroad diagram. As the diagram is fairly large, it won’t print well, so here are the diagrams.

The master content is in GitHub here. If you want a quick reference to how the diagrams work, check here.

Stream Processor Configuration

While Fluent Bit’s core syntax is pretty straightforward, the syntax for the stream processing is a bit more complex, with a strong resemblance to SQL. As SQL is declarative in nature and can contain iterative and nested elements, RailRoad diagrams can really help.

The original BNF definition of the Stream SQL syntax is here.

Fluent Bit Configuration RailRoad Diagrams

When it comes to the core configuration files, RailRoad diagrams aren’t as effective because the configuration is more declarative in nature. But we’ve tried to capture the core essence here. The only issue is that representing things like the use of @include, which can show up in most parts of the file – arent so easy, and a list of attributes for each possible standard plugin would make the diagram enormously large and unwieldy.