Speeding Ruby

30 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in development, Fluentbit, Fluentd, General, languages, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Development trends have shown a shift towards precompiled languages like Go and Rust away from interpreted or Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled languages like Java and Ruby as it removes the startup time of the language virtual machine and the JIT compiler as well as a smaller memory footprint. All desirable features when you’re scaling containerized solutions and percentage point savings can really add up.

Oracle has been leading the way with its work on GraalVM for some years now, and as a result, not only can GraalVM be used to produce native binary images from Java code, GraalVM also supports TuffleRuby and GraalPy, among others. As TruffleRuby is an open-source project, Oracle isn’t the only vendor contributing to it, work effort has also come from Shopify.

Helping Ruby move forward isn’t new for the Shopify engineering team, and part of that investment is that they have just announced the open-sourcing of a toolchain called Ruvy. Ruvy takes Ruby and creates a WebAssembly (WASM) from it the code. This builds on the existing project ruby.wasm. In doing so they’ve addressed the Ruby startup overhead of the language VM we mentioned. They have also simplified the process of deployment, eliminating the need for Web Assembly System Interface (WASI) arguments, and overcome constraints of class loading by reading files by having the code bundled within the assembly and then accessing the content using WASI-VFS, a simple virtual file system.

The published benchmarks show a massive performance boost in the process of executing where the Ruby code needs to be executed by the packaged JIT. For me, this is interesting as one of the related cloud-native trends is the shift from Fluentd to Fluent Bit. Fluentd was built with Ruby and has a huge portfolio of third-party extensions. But Fluent Bit is built using C to get those performance gains previously described. But it does support plugins through WASM. This raises an interesting question can we take existing Ruby plugins and wrap them so the required interfacing works – which should be minimal and more likely to be impacted by the fact Fluent Bit v2 has refined the internal data structure that was common to both Fluentd and Fluent Bit to allow Fluent Bit to more easily engaged with OpenTelemetry.

If the extra bit of wrapping code isn’t complex, then applying Ruvy should mean the core plugin can then work with Fluent Bit. If this can be templated, then Fluent Bit is going to make a big leap forward with the number of available plugins.

Clickbait headlines on open-source project maintenance

29 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in development, General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Infoworld published a rather clickbait incendiary new item the other week ‘few open source projects actively maintained’. Personally, I find these statements a little frustrating, as it would be easy for the less informed to assume that adopting open-source software is dangerous. There are several missed points here:

  • How well and frequently are close source solutions being maintained, and does that stop businesses from using end-of-life products? There is big business to be had in offering support to end-of-life solutions. Just look at companies like Rimini Street. Such organizations aren’t going to change software unless there is a major issue.
  • Not all open-source software is intended to be undergoing continuous maintenance? Shocking until you consider that open-source projects will remain open and available even when they have been declared end-of-life. Why? One of the things about open-source is you don’t know who is using the code, and suddenly pulling the code because the originator has decided they can no longer maintain their investment could put others in a difficult position. So, the right thing is to leave the source available and allow people to fork it so they can continue maintaining their own version of it or until they’ve migrated away. That way, the originator is not impacted by changes.
  • Next up, not all open-source projects need continued maintenance; many repositories exist to provide demo and sample solutions – so that developers can see how to use a product or service. These repositories shouldn’t need to change often. Frequent change could easily be a sign of an unstable product or service. These solutions may not be the most secure, as you don’t want to complicate the illustration with all the checks and balances that should be considered. Look at it this way: when we start learning a new language or tool, we start with the classic Hello World – which today means pointing your browser at a URL and seeing the words appear on the page. Do we insist that the initial implementation be secure? No, because it distracts from the basic message. For example, in my GitHub repository, I have multiple public repositories with Apache2 licenses attached to them – i.e., open-source. A number of them support the books I’ve written – they aren’t going to change – in fact, change would be a bad thing unless the associated book is corrected (this repo, for example).
  • When it comes to security vulnerabilities. This needs to be viewed with some intelligence. For several reasons:
    • As mentioned, our demo examples are unlikely to be patched with the latest versions of dependencies all the time. The point is to see how the code works. Unless the demo relates directly to something that has to be patched and that changes the demo itself. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect developers to apply some intelligence to ensure dependencies (and therefore the risk of known vulnerabilities) are checked rather than blindly cutting and pasting. The majority of the time, such content will be published with a minimum version number, not a maximum.
    • Sometimes, a security vulnerability isn’t an issue. For example, I rarely run vulnerability checks on my LogSimulator. Not because I have a cavalier attitude to security but because I don’t expect it to ever be near a production environment, and the data flowing through the tool will be known and controlled by the user in advance of any activity. Secondly, it shouldn’t be using sensitive data, and thirdly, if there was any malicious intent intended, then I’d be more concerned about how secure its data source and configuration is. The tool is a command-line solution. That said, I still apply development practices that minimize potential exploitation.

Don’t get me wrong, there are risks with all software – closed and open-source, whether it is maintained or has security vulnerabilities. A software development team has a responsibility to make informed, risk-aware selections of software (open or closed source). If you have the means to check for risks, then they are best used. It is worth not only scanning our own code but also considering whether the dependencies we use have been scanned if appropriate (e.g. used in production). Utilizing innovations like SBOM, and exercising routine checks and reviews can also help.

While I can’t prove it, I suspect there are more risks being carried by organizations adopting a library that was considered sufficiently secure when downloaded, but subsequent vulnerabilities have been found, or selected mitigations to risks have been eroded over time.

Java 21 & GraalVM — lots to be excited about

19 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by in General, java, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Today, Java 21 has reached General Availability (GA) with some important new features in the language mainstream (i.e., not requiring preview flags enabled), and Oracle will be supporting Java 21 as a Long long-term support (guaranteed at least 3years of free support (2years to the next LTS + 1 yr overlap) and then for at least an additional 5 years under support subscription). Everyone is talking about virtual threads. Interestingly the new virtual threads mean, in the majority of cases, we no longer need to handle the complexities of reactive programming – not my point of view, but a view expressed earlier today by Tomas Langer, the architect for Helidon. For old hands like myself – this is a blessing as the old-style threading comes more naturally. There are a lot of other smaller features coming through in the language with this, such as records, Z Garbage Collector, and better support for Key Encapsulation management. All the fine details can be found on the Oracle Java blog.

Java.dev has a new Playground, which allows you to write some Java code in the browser and run it. No local JDK or IDE is needed. Great for trying out code, like pattern matching for switch statements.

GraalVM gets a new release with Java 21. Along with some other cool features. Including being able to deploy Graal’s polyglot features with just the support for the languages you want, meaning that the GraalVM footprint is kept as small as you need in containers. This decoupling is supported with Maven and Gradle configurations. With this are enhancements for the Just-in-Time (JIT) and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) performance – read more about this in Alina Yurenko‘s blog.

Who is Claude Shannon?

30 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by in General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Anyone in IT will have heard of Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee. The majority of developers will know about Ada Lovelace. But what about Claude Shannon? Well, I have to admit that I didn’t until I had time to watch the documentary film The Bit Player. I am shocked I’d never come across Shannon’s name before, given the importance of his work.

So what did he do? Well, Claude was responsible for Information Theory, which some people will have heard of. His MIT thesis set the foundations for Boolean algebra and the use of switches to manage data. He published a couple of really important papers in the 1940s. The most important of these is the Mathematical Theory of Communication put forward a number of ideas:

  • All means of communication can be reduced to a logical representation:
  • Representation of information using bits
  • To optimize communication, we should compress data – and compression allows us to reduce the data to just enough before it becomes unintelligible. This is best illustrated by the fact we can write messages and omit characters and sometimes whole words and still be understood.
  • We can use mathematical formulas to determine and correct data corruption due to noise – using techniques such as checksums and error correction.
  • There is an upper limit to how much information can be communicated – now referred to as Shannon’s limit

While this may seem obvious today, in the 1940s, computers were still electromechanical – making it groundbreaking. Claude’s later work may not have been seen as seismic as these initial papers. But in the 50s, he demonstrated with basic telephone switches and magnets the underlying ideas of machine learning using a robotic mouse called Theseus who had to navigate a maze (read more here). Illustrated ideas of how to computationally beat chess masters, which is what eventually happened with IBM’s Deep Blue against Gary Kasparov.

It’s a lovely documentary film, which includes reconstructed interviews with Claude that happened in the 80s. Sadly, Shannon died in 2001 from Alzheimer’s, possibly the cruelest of illnesses for such an insightful and intelligent person,

If you’d like to know more about Shannon – then have a read of this paper. The film The Bit Player can be found on several streaming services and YouTube, and the film’s website is here.

Visualizing A Career Path

02 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by in General

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

I recently wrote a piece for DZone about visualizing career paths. As an enabler for people to make use of the diagrams to help the visualization, we’ve made the original PowerPoint diagrams used available here:

SimpleOrgDownload

Update

We’re excited to hear we’ve had another DZone article selected to be used on the homepage …

Architectural governance – decision matrices as way to reduce friction

24 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by in Enterprise architecture, General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

When it comes to software delivery processes, governance processes such as architectural governance boards can often be perceived as a hold-up to software delivery processes, so when a project is slipping against its forecast timelines, such processes can become the easy thing to blame (along with any other process that engages beyond the project team). Sometimes, the slip is happening for very good and legitimate reasons in these situations it is just very hard to defend the slip.

There are a number of things we can do, to simplify and streamline the process. One of these is the use of decision matrices – something I’ve written about in the past (Decision Matrix aka ‘Stress Test’ as a vehicle to make decisions easier). The value of the decision matrix when it comes to governance is that it can be used as a catalog of pre-approved solution approaches. Let’s give an example; we could provide a decision matrix to select the best type of application server, which perhaps covers whether a micro profile framework is used and which ones (e.g., Helidon but not Payara because of the support agreements in place) vs. J2EE (and again reflecting decisions relating implementations such as WebLogic but not WebSphere). Then when a team decides on the implementation or developing a roadmap, if they are working within the matrix’s guidance, then the decision could be approved on the spot by any member of the governance team. With the approval given by just checking the approach being adopted is sensible.

TOGAF – governance perspective

If the solution falls outside of the decision matrices recommendations, this comes down to one of the following reasons:

  • The approach represents a good approach that could and should be applied within the domain but not yet captured in the matrices – therefore, the matrix needs updating.
  • The solution makes sense and follows common industry strategies and/or tools but is addressing an outlier/anomalous situation for this organization – therefore should go to governance seeking a dispensation on this basis. In this situation, it is would beneficial for the designer(s) to highlight the case for dispensation. By highlighting how the existing decision options do not fit. In effect, sharing the assessment of the relevant matrix(ices) against the problem.
  • The approach reflects the development team’s preferences rather than perhaps aligning with the organization’s needs for the ability to maintain technologies. For example, keeping development language in use to the top 5 commonly used languages according to TIOBE rather than adopting a niche language such as Haskell or avoiding languages that have a reputation for being difficult to maintain, such as Perl. In these situations, a careful examination of the case is needed by any governance process.

What we are effectively doing is making the decision matrix not only a tool to help developers select the most effective options (given the ability to standardize approaches raises the chance of possible code reuse or refactoring to reuse) to being a way to lighten governance, or the perception of governance. Whatever mechanism is used to record decisions by a team just has to reference the decision matrices.

Road to Kubernetes – MEAP book review

22 Thursday Jun 2023

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

One of the benefits of being a Manning author is that we get access to the Manning book catalog, including those currently in the MEAP early access programme (MEAP). The Road to Kubernetes title was bought to my attention. The book has just become available as a MEAP title; this means that the book has just completed its first major review milestone, and about a third of the book has been written. It does mean our review only covers the first 3 chapters at the moment.

What got my attention with this book is that unlike other titles about Kubernetes \9of which there are a number of great titles in the Manning portfolio already) is that it has adopted a different approach.

Most books focus on one technology and deep dive into that technology and dig into the more advanced features of that specific area. For an experienced IT person, that is great. But, when it comes to Kubernetes, if you’re skills are largely just focused on largely coding with languages like Java, Python, and JavaScript – not unusual for a graduate or junior developers it means the amount of reading and learning curve to get to grips with developing and deploying containers to Kubernetes is considerable. Here, Justin has taken the approach of assuming basic development skills and then taking you on a journey of focussing on the basics of containers, deployment automation, and then Kubernetes with just enough to be able to deploy a simple solution using good practices. This makes the learning path to gaining the skills that allow you to work within a team and building containerized solutions a lot easier.

I imagine once the book is complete and you’ve followed it through, you’ll be in a position to focus on learning new, more advanced aspects of containers and Kubernetes in a focused manner to meet the needs of a day-to-day job.

Having coached and mentored junior developers and graduates, this is a book I’d recommend to help them along, and if my experience with the Manning book development process is anything to go by, as Justin goes through the major milestones, this book will go from good to great.

My only word of caution is that this book will take the reader on a journey of building and deploying microservices to Kubernetes. Don’t be fooled into thinking Kubernetes and microservices are easy – there is a lot of technologies that I don’t think the book will go into (but then not all developers need to understand details such the differences in network fabric (Calico, Flannel) or container engines cri-o, Docker Engine, deploying support tooling for things like observability). Without good design and, depending upon your solution, a handle in a variety of more specialized areas, it is still possible to get yourself into a mess, even for the most experienced of teams.

DZone article – IDE Changing as Fast as Cloud Native

12 Monday Jun 2023

Posted by in General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

While this might be my home for sharing thoughts and knowledge, my domain name can work against me when it comes to new potential readers (once people have found me – it’s a fairly easy domain name to remember and get back to). That does mean I occasionally write and publish content elsewhere (Software Engineering Daily, and Medium, for example). I’ve recently written a couple of posts on DZone, the latest of which looks at how IDEs have evolved.

Today we’ve just heard that the article is on the DZone homepage (top left in the image below). If you’re a bit old school, it feels like we’ve made the front page of the national press (for the really old, it would be fair to say as a More Articles piece, it is ‘below the fold’). Go check it out here.

Simplifying the escaping of JSON strings

08 Thursday Jun 2023

Posted by in development, General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

when you’re testing apps, it is pretty common to want to send JSON via CURL to a local endpoint. The problem is that this usually means that the string you provide curl needs to have characters escaped, such as quote marks. By hand, this can be irritating to sort out, particularly if you’re using an IDE to make sure the JSON is correct. I’d concluded this is hardly a new problem; someone must have produced a nice little multiple-platform command line utility that can do it for you. The result was a bit more surprising.

There are plenty of online utils that solve it, but if you’re working with data, you don’t want to publicly share (or the fiddling around with copy-pasting to your browser). Nothing wrong with these tools, but you can’t script them without resorting to RPA (Robotic Process Automation) either. Here are a couple of services I found that are straightforward, and when I’ve tried them, not plagued by annoying ads.

But finding command line tools, well, finding an answer, has proven a bit more challenging. For removing escaped characters, you could use jq, but we actually want to go the other way to use curl with JSON that has been escaped. I have come across conversations covering the use of bash (making use of awk and sed. Plus, details about how the manipulation could be done in various languages (so you could code your own solution if so inclined. Coding is unlikely to take much effort, but testing permutations is going to demand effort).

The one solution I have found that meant I could escape (or reverse) JSON locally is a plugin for VS Code called appropriately JSON-escaper, which does what is needed in a nice and clean manner. All credit to Joshua Poehls for the tool.

The solution JSON-escaper built on top of a more generic JavaScript utility which addresses escaping special characters which can be found here.

Bucharest Tech Week Conference – Monoliths in a Microservices World

29 Monday May 2023

Posted by in General, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present at the Software Architecture Summit as part of the Bucharest Tech Week conference. My presentation, Monoliths in a Microservice World, was all new content that, by chance, worked well, bringing together a number of points made by other speakers. The presentation aimed at the challenges of adopting Microservices and whether Monoliths had a place in modern IT, and for those of us not fortunate enough to be working for one of the poster children for microservices like Netflix, Amazon, etc, how we can get our existing monoliths playing nicely with microservices.

The conference may not have the size of Devoxx (yet), but it certainly had quality with presenters from globally recognized organizations such as Google (Abdelkfettah Sghiouar), Thoughtworks (Arne Lapõnin), Vodafone (IT Services business unit – _VOIS – Stefan Ciobanu), Bosch, as well as subsidiaries of companies like DXC (Luxsoft) and rapid growth SaaS vendor LucaNet.

As a presenter, you’re always wanting to walk the tightrope of being at the biggest conferences to maximize reach for your message while at the same time wanting the experience to be friendly and personable, which often means slightly smaller conferences. The Software Architecture Summit balanced that really well; rather than lots of smaller breakout sessions, the conference focussed on a single auditorium for a large number of attendees, with presentation slots varying in length depending upon the subject matter. If a session didn’t interest you, then there were plenty of exhibitors to talk with – although, from what I saw, the auditorium was full during the sessions, reflecting the interest in the content.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – John F. Woods

Quote of the conference – as cited by @DevPaco (Paco van Beckhoven)

The conference organizers (Universum) certainly put in the effort to ensure the presenters were looked after. It is the little touches that really make the difference, such as taking care of logistics which can be as simple as organizing airport transfers. A letter of thanks will be waiting for you at the hotel after the event, organizing a meal for the presenters at a local restaurant and so on.

Continue reading →