Category Archives: Books

Book reviews, comments and recommended reading

Latest on book and APIs

15 Tuesday Dec 2020

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My blogging is way down compared with only a post about OKit – OCI Design (on Windows). It largely comes down to lots of work on our Fluentd book. Chapter 6 is now available in the MEAP. As the promo info says …

What’s new?

Chapter 6, “Filtering and Extrapolation”

Gain control and insight!

Last chapter, we touched on the use of the Filter directive. But that was just the tip of the iceberg! In Chapter 6, we’ll plunge below the surface, exploring the when, why, and how of applying filters to give us more insight and precise control over events.

Promo Email from Manning

Earlier chapters have been tweaked, with some additional improvements which will make the live reading experience better.

Another chapter and an appendix should be finding their way to MEAP very soon as it was handed over by our project editor. That will make it seven chapters available, and all the appendices.

Whilst the peer review is taking place the chapter covering plugin development is progressing. The development work has got the basics of the output plugin with log events being stored in Redis and the input being worked on as well. If you want a peak, keep an eye on my GitHub repository (here).

But is isn’t all writing…

I presented on Twitch – you can catch that at https://m.twitch.tv/videos/809295979 I’ve been offered the opportunity to present again, so keep an eye out for something next year.

We recorded a podcast with the excellent guys over at Adventures In DevOps. We don’t have the exact date for the podcast to be released, but I imagine it will sometime during Jan 2021. I’d recommend checking out the podcasts. I’ve been dipping into their back catalogue of recordings and the team ask some really thought provoking questions.

If that wasn’t enough, we’ve been fortunate enough to have some time to talk with leading members of the Fluentd and Fluent Bit projects which was a real pleasure. Hopefully, as we leave this horrendous year behind we’ll get to talk and possibly collaborate some more.

Fluentd Book Update

02 Monday Nov 2020

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Things have been very hectic, so much so we’ve not really had much time to write a blog. Most of which has been related to my Fluentd book, so what has been happening (and keep an eye on my Twitter account for a promo code 🙂 ) …

  • Several virtual conferences (Open Source Summit, SPOUG and Oracle APAC Groundbreakers to name just a few)
  • Perhaps the biggest bit has been the book:
    • First 4 chapters went through a rigorous peer review, as a result a number of improvements have been made,
    • with Chapter 5 having been reviewed by our technical editor, and little bit of refinement applied it should be reaching MEAP very very soon along with updated appendices,
    • Chapter 6 has been reviewed by our development editor, so some revisions to apply and then onto the technical editor,
    • Chapter 7 writing in progress, with about 1/3rd complete including examples of applying scaling configuration that can be run on a desktop

So what is to follow:

  • We’re on Manning’s Twitch channel to do a session, which will cover Fluentd, some examples, the book and what it will cover,
  • Once Chapter 7 is done, then we go through a comprehensive review with external input. Depending on the feedback from this, we make another sweep through the existing chapters to make further improvements,
  • Chapter 8 I suspect will be the hardest to write, as we actually get into creating our own Plugin. So I it maybe a little while before this gets completed. The subsequent chapters will come more easily as we’ve got them part written in a rough draft already,
  • We have another round of external peer reviewing to come which will cover everything, so I’m sure we’ll be doing some refinements
  • A podcast recording is scheduled in December.

Talking of Manning on Twitch, this looks like a bit of a hidden Gem – worth looking at not only because of the live stream, but all the previous recordings with other Manning authors are available to watch.

If that isn’t enough with a day job, we have had some major work done on our house. Now we’re moved back in, there are lots of DIY jobs to do, get all the furniture back from storage. Every room apart from the kitchen needs to be painted. But that is my sob story.

I’m hoping to find time to experiment with Oracle’s new cloud native Log Management as this is built on Fluentd foundations and a little bit with API tech – but this is likely to be the Christmas break.

Unified Logging with Fluentd – Sample and more

21 Monday Sep 2020

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Manning have made section of my book freely available. The excerpt from the first draft of my book Unified Logging with Fluentd illustrates the Fluentd take on Hello World – the extract can be found at http://mng.bz/nzm8. This is from the 1st chapter to help set the scene of how Fluentd can be configured. The following quote comes from one of the peer reviewers:

The extract includes the use of the log simulator tool – https://github.com/mp3monster/LogGenerator which takes some configuration and can either play synthetic data or replay real logs as current log events in what ever format you want to simulate – for example standard Log4J through to Apache Server logs with the relevant time separation between events.

Book Discount …

If this isnt enough temptations, then perhaps saying that on September 22: Deal of the Day book is my book Unified Logging with Fluentd. Use code dotd092220au at https://bit.ly/3mBRLK2

Book Project Unveiled – Unified Logging with Fluentd

03 Wednesday Jun 2020

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Fluentd is both an open source solution for making log management so much easier to work with, particularly for distributed / multi component solutions. But not only that it is supported by many log analytics tools, and central to several cloud vendors log management services.

The goal of the book is to explain how Fluentd can help us and to use the tool. We can’t cover every possible plugin, so we walk through the use of enough plugins and the way features interact you can extrapolate to other plugins.

GraphQL Mindmap

29 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in APIs & microservices, Books, development, mindmap, Technology

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We’ve added a new mindmap to our catalogue here. This covers the core of GraphQL. The catalogue contains both the image and a Word representation. The map is built based on a reading of Learning GraphQL by Eve Porcello  & Alex Banks on O’Reilly.

Packt XMas Promo

16 Monday Dec 2019

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As is Packt’s tradition, their Christmas book promotion has started. For the next week or two all books and videos are $5 in their ebook/video download format. Including the titles I have co-authored as well as others that I have contributed to as a reviewer.

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Mastering Distributed Tracing – book review

29 Saturday Jun 2019

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So recently we have been working on ‘knowing what I don’t know’ when it comes to Open Tracing and how such tech may intersect with traditional logging and the use of FluentD.

As part of that, I have read the Packt book Mastering Distributed Tracing written by Yuri Shkuro who has been key in the OpenTracing API and Jaeger and is the technical lead for Uber’s tracing team.

Whilst I have a good relationship with Packt, the fact they published the book is pretty much coincidental.

Understanding tracing over traditional logging is very important when moving into the world of microservices and reactive frameworks such as Node.js where threads are picked up and put down, you don’t know where and when the next service in a solution will pick up the next related activity. When you add to this solutions are more polyglot than ever – not only in the sense of different languages that may be used but a more diverse source of middle features e.g. historically you’d probably use JMS based messaging if you’re a Java developer and MSMQ for .net. Now you may be using AWS SNS as easily as Kafka. This means the mechanisms for passing and tracing events through these services need to be more unifying than ever.

Complexity of Observability

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Popping Up on the Net and more

28 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in APIs & microservices, Books, Dev Meetup, development, General, Oracle, Packt, Technology

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It’s been a quiet month for this blog, but I’ve been pretty busy with a raft of other activities…

  • a recent article on our sister site – oracle-integration.cloud on  RPA.
  • I also appear in an interview with K21 Academy here.
  • 4186btedcpl._sx403_bo1204203200_Reviewing a new book on Enterprise API Management for Packt which we would very highly recommend if you want to understand the more Enterprise perspectives of adopting APIs, particularly if you’re considering APIs as a potential new revenue stream.
  • UK Oracle User Group committees for TechFest (having been reviewing the paper submissions it looks like it’s going to be an excellent conference in December) and Southern Summit (next week).
  • Just launched a number of sessions for the Oracle London Developer Meetup, with another to be announced soon (Blockchain) and potentially two more before the end of the year (we’re working on the speakers now).

 

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API Driven Architecture – back by demand

18 Monday Mar 2019

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Screenshot 2019-03-18 01.29.11

Posted by | Filed under APIs & microservices, General, Packt, Technology

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Building Evolutionary Architectures

16 Saturday Mar 2019

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I have been working my way through Building Evolutionary Architectures by Neal Forward, Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua. Three senior and respected members of Thoughtworks (also the home of Martin Fowler). Having read and listened to Neal and Rebecca’s presentations and writing I had expected a deeply thought-provoking read, but have to admit to being disappointed. There are some good points without a doubt, but the book pretty much focuses on one idea, the application of fitness functions. But I’m not convinced it warrants several hundred pages of a book as a result the point does at times feel laboured.

There are some arguments made, that leaves me thinking that there is a view that the only answer is microservices in the conventional model of Kubernetes, Docker etc, which I agree is a powerful paradigm to allow solutions to evolve, but it isn’t a silver bullet and not always right in every case (if you have a team lacking the underlying appreciation of the goals, or put in to place in an ad-hoc manner (see Chris Richardson‘s work) it isn’t going to help.

Alongside this, there is little said about the interface definition for microservices (typically APIs of one form or another). Whilst mention of leaky abstractions are made, the material illustrations such as code lead API definitions are omitted (risk being, code changes, the API changes and the impact cascades).

What surprised me the most is the on more than one occasion the books points to ERPs not being sufficiently customisable. Yet, anyone working with ERPs will tell you that ERPs are at their best when you use them to leverage industry best practices rather than crowbar them to fit unconventional ways of operating. If you’re a manufacturer, is fiscal reporting part of your differentiator; probably not, so why not take best practice OOTB.

As usual, I have mind mapped things as I read through the book.  The dynamic/interactive version is here, the image (but not in full detail) is below.

evolutionary architectures.png