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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

~ from Technology to Music

Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Tag Archives: review

Building Evolutionary Architectures

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Technology

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architecture, book, evolutionary, mindmap, review, Technology

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

 

Blue Notebooks

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by mp3monster in General, Music, Music Reviews

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"Blue Notebooks", "Max Richter", Music, review, Sonos, Spotify

Whilst Sonos might be great for convenience, and Spotify for freedom and trying music out you still can’t beat well produced physical media (those round silver or black things) on some separates HiFi. I don’t have an extravagant setup, but what I can do with Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks Anniversary Edition makes the hairs on your arms standup.

Take On The Nature Of Daylight and the violins float over the Cellos and eventually resolve together. It sounds so elegiac and so sad it can take you to tears. Then Iconography sounds almost other worldly with a base notes so deep that you physically feel as much as hear them.

The piano of Vladimir’s Blues each note is distinct and you can hear the decay of each and every note, so very blue.

Old Song comes on incredibly cinematic, as if you are sat listening to someone in another room playing the piano with your window open. You hear ambient background of a plane flying past and a train in the distance, a wood pigeon in the garden cooing.

The Trees brings together strings and piano, a wonderfully written and performed piece as the melody seems to move between the different instruments he other parts take terms to propel the music along or provide notes emphasising the melody. As the piece progresses the momentum gains and the the dynamic range expands with greater deeper notes and the experience becomes ever more physical as an experience.

The album closes with Written In The Sky, which whilst still in a minor key, seems to evoke a small sense of hope. When it comes to an end, you sit wanting more, but routed to your seat not wanting to move away from centre of an amazing performance.

If you go to a proper separates HiFi shop, which has listening rooms to try out audio setups, I think this would apart from the musical beauty would help show you see if the kit being tried magic of the kit being tried.

Praise for Microservice Patterns

18 Friday May 2018

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

book, Chris Richardson, Microservices, review

richardson-mp-meap-hiI’ve been reading Chris Richardson’s new book Mixroservice Patterns published by Manning (here or here). Whilst I haven’t finished the book yet, I have read enough to feel I can provide worthwhile observation.

The book is supported by Chris’ website microservices.io which provides the patterns and related content in summarised form – great for a memory jogger and quick reference, but doesn’t make a substitute for the book.

When it comes to the book, Chris’ writing is extremly engaging whilst economic with its language – no long passages when a short sentence can convey everything necessary (unlike this one for example 🙂 ). For example, in three short paragraphs is an explination as to why there is a tendancy for IT people to point at particular technologies or techniques as silver bullets. As a result is incredibly informative and points to sources that inform the thinking – such references can be as diverse as Sam Newman’s Building Microservices to the (real) architect Christopher Alexander and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind).

The book is grounded in honest real world thinking being upfront and clearly pointing to when Microservices aren’t the right answer, to talking about the difficulties that can be expected in working with microservices. This won’t surprise anyone who has heard Chris speaking (here for example).

A recommended read.

microservicepatternlanguage

Innovators

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General

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Baarden, Babbage, book, Brattian, innovators, John Baarden, Lovelace, review, Technology, Vint Cerf, von Nuemann, Walter Brattain, Walter Isaacson

Recently I’ve given some time over to catching up on some reading. Which has included Walter Isaacson’s tremendous book Innovators. I picked this up  more because I liked Walter’s approach to the Steve Job’s biography. I thought this was going to be more focused on individuals and how they brought through new technology innovations. But actually it is a very good potted history of the development of modern computing.  Whilst I work in IT and thought I knew key contributors, from Babbage, Lovelace to von Neumann and Turing.  I was rather surprised at how many signficiant contributors I didnt know, or only vaguely aware of.  For example the work of Douglas Engelbart who pretty much lead the design for the mouse.  What about Vint Cerf who made key contributions to TCP/IP? Stephen Crocker who was responsible for the RFC that we all associate with the IETF now?

Not only is the history interesting, the book looks at the dynamics of innovation and how much innovation comes from the individuals working away on their own and having a eureka moment compared to that constant dialogue between people which sounding off each other lead to new ideas? The later is beautifully illustrated with the development of the transistor and the work of John Baarden and Walter Brattain. It’s interesting that as the history moves into the pre-internet era that more and more of advancements are a result of collective effort, but also recognised as such. I wonder whether that is because technologies made collaboration easier, or the effects of socio-cultural developments that meant people recognised the collaborative efforts?

I’d recommend this book to anyone who is interested in IT has developed or even just interested in the interplay of personalities and events such as World war II that influenced scientific advancement.

Review of Oracle API Management 12c

22 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Packt, Technology

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Tags

API, book, Oracle, review, UKOUG

3635en_4575_oracle20api20management2012c20implementation_0My review of the Oracle API Management 12c has been published the the UKOUG at http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/news/review-of-oracle-api-management-12c-implementation/ – rather than repeat the review here, I’d recommed people go read the page.  But I will say here is that it is an excellent book.  The book can be found at:

  • Packt
  • Amazon

Along with a range of other book sellers.

Packt Java EE with Eclipse 2nd Edition

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt

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Tags

books, ebook, free, Packt, review

Might be a little early for Packt, but I have completed reviewing the 2nd Edition of Java EE with Eclipse for Packt now.  So the book should be available in the next couple of months.

On the subject of Packt, the Free Learning scheme they are running continues. I’ve seen a couple of books repair since the start of the promotion. But for main part each day is new and different and covers a wide range of things from JQuery and Node, to Hadoop and into Drupal and WordPress. So worth checking back on a daily basis.

All of this means time to do some more Oracle writing.

Books Away

10 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, Packt

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Tags

Apache Camel, Apache Camel Developer's Cookbook, book, camel, mastering, Packt, Packt Publishing, review, SEDA

So aside from a horrible couple of weeks with everyone being ill and manic work loads.  Its been busy time with the books.

The final chapter review for a new Packt book on Apache Camel (Mastering Apache Camel) went back. So I’d expect the book to coming out soon.  I’d suggest this is a companion text to the exceedingly good Apache Camel Developer’s Cookbook (which I’ve blogged about previously here). The new book approaches Apache Camel more from a pure development platform mentality rather than from the integrator approach. If you’re familiar with Camel basics or want to focus on realising good pattern based integration then start with the Cookbook.  If you’re new to Camel and/or being asked to write custom Components or End Points then start with Mastering Apache Camel but go on to the  Cookbook as it should show best practise Camel integration will be applied. The Mastering Apache Camel doesn’t address advanced things such as SEDA which the Cookbook definitely does.  The Mastering book does an excellent job of covering things like Unit testing (in part because the Camel capability has developed).

 

 

As one book wraps up, another starts, with a 2nd Edition of Java EE Development with Eclipse which I expect will bring the book upto date with the latest capabilities of Eclipse and take in the JEE updates upto JEE v7; we’ll see where this takes us.

Ansible Book Review Part 4

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ansible, automation, AWS, book, Chef, configuration, deployment, DigitalOcean, Docker, Hadoop, Packt, Packt Publishing, Puppet, Puppet Labs, review

This the final part of the detailed look at Packt book, Learning Ansible. As the book says in the opening to chapter 6 we’re into the back straight, into the final mile. The first of  two final  chapters look at provisioning of platforms on Amazon AWS, DigitalOcean and the use of the very hip and cool Docker plus updating your inventory of systems given that we have dynamically introduced new ones.  The approach is illustrated by not only instantiating servers but delivering a configured Hadoop cluster. As with everything else we’ve seen in Ansible there isn’t a standardised approach to all IaaS platforms as that restricts you the lowest common denominator which is contrary to Ansible goals described early on. But deploying the Hadoop elements on the two cloud IaaS providers is common.  Although the chapter is pretty short, I did have to read through this more carefully, as the book leverages a lot of demonstrated features from previous chapters (configuration arrays etc) which meant seeing the key element of the interaction with AWS was harder. It does mean if you tried diving into this chapter straight away, although not impossible does require a bit more investment from the reader to see all the value points. That said it is great to see through the use of the various features how easy to setup the provisioning in the cloud is, and the inventory update. Perhaps the win would have been to just so the simple provision and then the clever approach.

Chapter 7 focuses on Deployment. When I read this, I was a little nonplussed, hadn’t we been reading about this in the previous 6 chapters. But when you look at the definition provided:

“To position (troops) in readiness for combat, as along a front or line.”
Excerpt From: “Learning Ansible.” Packt Publishing. 

You can start to see the true target of what we’re really thinking about, which is the process of going from software build to production readiness. So having  gone through the software packaging activities you need to orchestrate the deployment across potentially multiple servers across a server farm. This orchestration piece is really just pulling together everything that has been explained before but also share some Ansible best practise. Then finally an examination of the Ansible approach for the nodes to pull deployments and updates.

The final piece of the book is an Appendix which looks at the work to bring Ansible to the Windows platform, Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Tower.  Ansible Galaxy is a repository of roles build by the Ansible community. Ansible Tower provides a web front end to the Ansible server. The Tower product is the commercial side of the Ansible company – and effectively sales here fund the full time Ansible development effort.

Ansible Tower

So to summarise …

The Learning Ansible book explains from first principles to the very rich capabilities of building packaging software, instantiating cloud servers or containers through to configuring systems and deploying applications into new environments; and then capturing instantiated system details into the Ansible inventory. How Ansible compares with the more established solutions in this space in the form of Puppet and Chef is discussed, and the pros and cons of the different tools. All the way through, the books has been written in an easy engaging manner. You might even say wonderfully written. The examples are very good with the possible exception of 2 cases (just merely good in my opinion), the examples are supported with very clear explanations that demonstrate the power of the Ansible product. Even if you choose not to use Ansible, this book does an excellent job of showing the value of not resorting to the ‘black art’ of system build and configuration and suggesting good ways to realising automation of this kind of activity, in many place undoubtedly thought provoking

 

 

Prior Review Parts:

  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3

Learning Ansible Review Part 3

08 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ansible, book, ebook, error, learning, Packt, publishing, python, reporting, review, rollback

Chapters 4 & 5 of Packt’s Learning Ansible continue to build out strategies needed for enterprise class deployment and configuration management, for example error handling, rollback and reporting in chapter 4.  As chapter, the amount of new Ansible capabilities being introduced is not as substantive as prior chapters, and emphasis is more only what could be described as best practise. For example creating Playbooks that have the means to be invoked to re-establish a prior state if the the execution of the current playbook was to throw up an error.  The callback explanation does need a bit more understanding of how Python works as implementing a callback involves a little bit of Python coding, but the points into which you can hook actions is very rich.

From knowing how to trap callbacks it becomes possible to initiate notifications when events occur in playbooks which is where this chapter moves onto with monitoring and alerting. This really focuses on has my playbook executed as expected and reporting back through means such as email, nagios and graphite.  The examples with email and nagios miss a trick, although the text says you can incorporate output from tasks – it isn’t illustrated; yet if something falters you’d want to see the task output.

Chapter 5 goes into how you might write your own custom modules and test them. Ansible will support any language that is available in your target environment, although Python is the recommended language given its general availability and is the language used to write Ansible, and Ansible modules can be leveraged to shorten the effort in creating custom modules. The chapter then walks through examples using Python, Bash shell scripting and Ruby. A lot of the work appears to be centred on extracting the appropriate parameters to allow the module to run with. The final part of the chapter looks at testing with the Python Nose library.

Solid chapters, and perhaps a little shorter than the first few, but importantly continuing to be well written although perhaps a couple of small missed opportunities to be great chapters.

Prior chapter reviews:

  • Learning Ansible Part 2
  • Learning Ansible Part 1

 

Learning Ansible Review Part 2

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Packt, Technology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ansible, book, environments, Git, Packt, Playbooks, review, Spec

Example Ansible playbook

So having had a significant introduction to Ansible and its capabilities, chapter 2 gets into developing Ansible Playbooks. To do this the book confronts development practises of environment creation and management scripts, or the tendency for ops teams not to apply development like rigour. It is refreshing to read things like ….

… seen these practices at close quarters, we firmly believe that these are more or less similar to voodoo practices that need to be done away with.

Excerpt From: “Learning Ansible.” Packt Publishing.

 

The book does there for dig into the basics of using Git, and illustrating it using the configuration files from an earlier example. The next step would be if you follow development practises to use a Continuous Integration (CI). The book is surprisingly brief on this subject, compared to say Git.

In a development lifecycle the next step is to test, which elegantly introduces Ansible and Vagrant for instantiating virtual machines that the Ansible playbook can be tested against.

This creates the environment by which several additional capabilities provided by Ansible can aide testing activities particularly the ability to tag activities and then run the Ansible script targeting the specifically tagged activities. The additional ability that allows Ansible Playbooks to be executed in a way that allows it only tell what would be changed, rather than perform the change.

The book takes you on from there to introducing how Serverspec could be used. Things for me gain a little too much velocity, perhaps it doesn’t help that I am not familiar with Ruby.

The final part of the chapter and we’re back on solid ground with options on configuring SCM solutions such as Git to support deployment and how Ansible can support the same playbook in different environments such production, preproduction where the playbook is the same but you will be working with different server ids and credentials.

Even if you weren’t to use Ansible there are some thought provoking and good principles for config management and system scripting here.

So by having completed the first two chapters all the principle of Ansible are covered along a range of guiding practises that reflect good development practises in the context of producing environment management. There are limits and the next chapters then go into how to build upon the basics for so it is easy to create  more advanced Playbooks for real world environments with capabilities like playbook iteration, including Playbooks within Playbooks and conditionals for example.

The chapter builds upon the simple examples used on the first chapters showing how the Playbooks can be made to be a lot smarter. For example rather than a task to install each individual application required you can build a table of configuration values and get the task to iterate through the set of RPMs and versions for example. The structures to iterate over can be multi dimensional so you can define some advanced configuration and keep the tasks simple. By building on the earlier examples it helps highlight the benefits of the feature being explained which really helps.

Other features explained here include handlers, so you can trigger one or more activities to be performed once the playbook tasks have completed – so restarting processes can be executed only when all tasks are completed for example.  Other development like features like including other Playbooks are introduced (inline with the idea of DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself). This leads into using roles, where than identifying your target servers by name or IP you can bring everything together by assigning the server roles e.g. DBTier, AppTier etc. The final two elements are the approach to templating using the Python Jinga2 framework and most crucially given that you will be handling configuration data and passwords Security.

Another couple of well written chapters that embody both insight into Ansible but also hung on the good development ideas so even if you choose not to use Ansible, some of the thinking here could be applied or at-least used to formulate questions as to how the ideas might translate to chef or puppet for example.

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