Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Free AI Coding Assistants (commercial terms & conditions may change dynamically):  The Individual Tier of AWS CodeWhisperer is free for some IDEs. TabNine's Starter plan offers basic code completion. Tabnine’s generative AI uses open-source code with permissive licenses for its Public Code trained AI model (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause). Tabnine claims that whether you’re using Tabnine’s Pro plan or our Basic plan, your code, and AI data are NEVER used to train any models other than private code models. MutableAI for VS Code can autocomplete, document & refactor your code. Its free tier for individuals and open source devs. Blackbox VS Code Extension can autocomplete & search for code. Safurai is available as a VS Code Extension . The current alpha version is free . HF Code Autocomplete VS Code Extension from Hugging Face  was forked from tabnine-vscode & modified for making it compatible with open source code models...

This Week I Learned -  * Upcoming  Kubernetes 1.27 is about to close a bug that is almost 6 years old . * Oracle Database 19c is fully supported in containers. And there are Helm charts for configuring these images in Kubernetes. Container images for Oracle Database 19.3 and 21.3 were recently released. *  Foundational & Advanced Machine Learning courses from Google *  FinOps  is an evolving  cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice  that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions. At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice. It’s the way for teams to manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group. FinOps is a portmanteau of “Finance” and “DevOps” stressing the communications and collaboration business and engineering teams. Other names f...

This Week I Learned -  * Defender for Cloud provides Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) features for your AWS and GCP workloads. CSPM features are agentless and don’t rely on any other components except for successful onboarding of AWS/GCP connectors. Defender for Containers protects all weak links of your container deployment based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Risk Points of Container Environments *  Azure Chaos Studio  is a managed service that uses chaos engineering to help you measure, understand, and improve your cloud application and service resilience. Chaos engineering is a methodology by which you inject real-world faults into your application to run controlled fault injection experiments. * You can use chaos engineering for various resilience validation scenarios that span the service development and operations lifecycle. There are two types of scenarios: Shift right scenarios use a production or pre-production environment. Usually, you do shift rig...

From Netflix TechBlog (2020)  & a LinkedIn post - Netflix is known for its loosely coupled and highly scalable microservice architecture. Rather than exposing 100s of microservices to UI developers, Netflix offers a unified API aggregation layer at the edge. Netflix's Studio Ecosystem architecture has evolved in distinct phases, all motivated by reducing the time between idea and implementation, improving the developer experience, and streamlining operations. The architectural phases look like: 𝟭. 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗵 Like everyone else, Netflix started with a monolithic architecture where the entire application was packaged and deployed as a single entity. 𝟮. 𝗗𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 To improve team autonomy and speed, the monolith was split into microservices. Each client made direct requests to the microservices. But with hundreds of them, exposing everything wasn't ideal. 𝟯. 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗴𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 They built an API Gateway to bind all the serv...

This Week I Learned -  * Spring Cloud GCP version 4.0 officially supports Spring Boot 3.x. Java 17 is now a minimum requirement. * Free ebook:  Succeeding with AI - How to make AI work for your business by Veljko Krunic, Manning, 2023 * An array of new job types, functions and roles with titles like Cloud Cost Optimization Engineer, Hybrid Network Engineer, or Multi-Cloud Specialist have come into existence with the emergence of cloud technology. Current job roles which are focused on modernizing applications, migrating workloads, and other activities to get the most out of the cloud will stabilize over time, and native cloud architectures are going to become the norm leading to the need for new job functions. Google has role-based learning paths  to prepare for new roles. *  Flutter is Google’s open-source technology for creating mobile, desktop, and web apps with a single codebase. Unlike other popular solutions, Flutter is not a framework or library; i...

This Week I Learned -  *  “The Good and the Bad” series on the Altexsoft blog  details the pros and cons of the popular technologies. *  Outlook uses OST (Offline Storage Table) and PST (Personal Storage Table) file formats to store the mailbox data on the local storage . OST allows offline access to the mailbox data, and thus, users can compose, draft or send new messages even when the system is offline or disconnected from the Exchange server. The changes made, while offline, are synchronized with the mailbox on the server, and messages (if sent while offline) are delivered to the recipients. However, PST doesn't allow access or changes to the mailbox items while the system is offline. OST files are encrypted by default with MAPIEntryID GUID key while PST files are not encrypted. Unlike the PST file, OST files cannot be imported or accessed through any Outlook account other than the original MAPI profile. However, you can access the OST file and convert it to ...

Summary of the advice from Richard Seroter  - Kubernetes API is commoditized & consistent, but the platform experience isn’t.  Your Kubernetes experience isn’t uniform across Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), VMware PKS, Red Hat OpenShift, Minikube, and 130+ other options.  As you’re choosing a Kubernetes product to use, pay upfront attention to:  provisioning upgrades scaling/repair ingress software deployment logging/monitoring