Introduction

This article explains an approach to enable blue-green deployment for applications deployed in EKS. We will use existing AWS services like CodeBuild and CodePipeline to facilitate blue-green deployments for Kubernetes applications.

Wait… What?

Do you live in a world where:

• You need to turn off the regression tests in the nightly build because it never completes
• You check-in a piece of code, and it takes days and sometimes weeks to conduct the testing before it gets deployed to production

This article will talk about an approach that can help customers run integration and regression tests quicker and cheaper to improve the CI/CD process.

What is the AWS Lambda extension?

A month back AWS announced a preview of Lambda Extensions, a new way to easily integrate Lambda with your favorite monitoring, observability, security, and governance tools. Extensions can be published as Lambda layers, there are two types are extension:

• Internal extensions → Run as part of the runtime process, in-process with your code. Internal extensions enable use cases such as automatically instrumenting code.
• External extensions → Allow you to run separate processes from the runtime but still within the same execution environment as the Lambda function. External extensions can start before the runtime process and can continue after the runtime…

What is LeetCode.com?

It’s a website where people–mostly software engineers–practice their coding skills. It’s pretty similar to sites like HackerRank & Topcoder which will rank your code written for a particular problem against the ones submitted by other users

People who use them

Leetcode gets primarily used for two use cases:

• Solve interesting data structure problems
• Prepare and practice for coding interviews 🤔

Purpose of this post

I never had a clear understanding when it comes to data structures and algorithms, so being a software engineer for the last 12 years, I thought it’s not a bad idea to at least start now. So as of Dec 2019, I became a…

It goes without saying when you build a native cloud application. The system should expose health check endpoints. It will enable other cloud services (like AWS Cloudwatch, Kubernetes, etc.) to monitor the health of the application continuously and trigger corresponding alerts by listening to specific metrics. In this article, let us see how to write a simple yet efficient and modular health check using spring actuator which can help you to build a highly available system

Defining health checks

1. A health check response should not just contain the application server’s health; it should also provide the health of the subsystems that the application…

Problem statement

I am a big fan of leet code so when we decided to have a code challenge in our team I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to a build one which should include pretty basic functionalities like:

• Ability to register and sign in to the application
• Present the problem (questions)
• Provide an interface for the end-users to write, compile and execute code.

Overall it was an amazing learning experience and I am happy to walk through how I did it.

Guidelines

Before I start working on this I decided to come up with some guidelines so I don't over-engineer…

Problem statement

I would say Ehcache is the most popular and simpler framework anyone can adopt in order to implement server-side caching. It works perfectly fine if we have a single pod system. Once we move into a system which needs to be HA & autoscaling enabled then we will start running into the following problems:

• Cache replication
• Stale caches

Ehcache allows JMS based cache replication which would solve this issue but it involves opening up ports that may or may not be allowed in certain companies because of security restrictions.

Alternatives

A lot of frameworks like “Ignite”, “Redis cache”, “Hazelcast” and “Elastic…