DynamoDb - RUNNING locally using docker

DynamoDb from AWS is a major player in the cloud NoSQL database market. It can scale globally and is blazing fast when used appropriately. There are a bunch of reasons to use Dynamodb locally, the primary ones being development cost and integration testing. DynamoDB does not have a desktop install, however thankfully, AWS has created a Docker image to enable running DynamoDb locally. To run DynamoDb locally pull the docker image using the command ...

January 27, 2020 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 2 min · Pradeep Loganathan
Configuration in a .Net Core Console application

Configuration in a .Net Core Console application

Adding configuration to a .Net core Console application to read configuration from a json file, or environmental variables or command line arguments.

December 20, 2019 · (updated December 27, 2024) · 3 min · Pradeep Loganathan
What is HTTPS?

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is a network protocol used to serve up web pages. HTTPS, or HTTP Secure, was designed to secure communications between a client and the HTTP server. It is a protocol that uses a secure connection to transfer data over the internet.

September 27, 2019 · (updated December 27, 2024) · 7 min · Pradeep Loganathan

How do you increment a counter? -

Many moons ago I was working on an online eCommerce platform. The platform used to undergo massive traffic spikes periodically. I was trying to implement a distributed counter. I was using a distributed counter because I wanted to be able to increment the counter on multiple servers. CAP Theorem The CAP theorem was proposed by Eric Brewer. CRDT CRDT stands for conflict-free replicated datatype. Conflict-free replicated datatype describe data-types that can be replicated across multiple computation units or nodes, they can be updated concurrently without any coordination, and then merged to get a consistent state. It doesn’t matter in which order you execute operations on the data type or if you repeat operations the result is eventually correct. Each node in a distributed system has its own replica of the CRDT. Each replica can resolve queries in isolation and can also process commands that immediately alter its state. CRDTs they can be concurrently updated across nodes and any conflicts can be resolved sensibly. CRDTs always have a merge function that can take many data entries living on different nodes and merge these automatically into one consistent view of the data, without any coordination between the nodes. CRDTs allow two conflicting updates to be merged. All replicas will converge to the same state when all updates have been delivered. The most important properties of the merge function are that it is symmetric and monotonic. The issue that CRDTs address is conflict resolution when different versions of the structure appear due to network partitions and their eventual repair. For a general data structure, if there are two conflicting versions, the solution is either to choose one (according to some general rules, like take the random one or the latest one, or application-specific logic) or to keep both versions and defer conflict resolution to the client code. CRDTs are conflict-free, that is, the structures are devised so that any conflict is resolved automatically in a way that doesn’t bring any data loss or corruption. ...

September 2, 2019 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 3 min · Pradeep Loganathan

Chaos Engineering

Introduction “Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” Priciples of Chaos Engineering Introduction In modern, rapidly evolving distributed systems, components fail all the time. These failures can be complex as they can cascade across systems. System weaknesses such as latency, race conditions, byzantine failures etc can be exacerbated in the face of large traffic volumes. Chaos engineering is key to discovering how these complex failures may affect the system and then validating over time that the weaknesses have been overcome. ...

August 13, 2019 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 6 min · Pradeep Loganathan

Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of provisioning and managing your infrastructure resources through definition files or code.

July 29, 2019 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 7 min · Pradeep Loganathan

Service Mesh

Imagine a green, sustainable city, meticulously designed for environmental harmony and efficiency. The city has many distinct localities such as neighborhoods, districts, and even villages with their own identity and cultures. This city boasts an intricate public transport system, with buses, trams, and subways efficiently transporting citizens to their destinations from its various localities. Multiple such cities are connected together in a thriving, fast-paced ecosystem. The cities are also similarly connected in an efficient and sustainable design. Each locality in a city represents a microservice, and each city in this system, a domain operating within the larger ecosystem - the application. In an ideal world, this system not only ensures smooth transit but also maintains each city’s eco-friendly ethos; balancing efficiency with sustainability. But how does this ecosystem manage to keep its vast and varied transport network running so smoothly and eco-consciously, avoiding traffic jams, pollution, and inefficiencies? ...

July 24, 2019 · (updated November 17, 2023) · 4 min · Pradeep Loganathan

Sidecar container pattern

Sidecar pattern is a single-node pattern made up of two containers. It involves co-locating another container in a node/pod along with the main application container. The application container contains the core logic for the application. The role of the sidecar is to augment and improve the application container, often without the application container’s knowledge. In its simplest form, a sidecar container can be used to add functionality to a container that might otherwise be difficult to add. In addition to being co-located on the same machine, the application container and sidecar container share several resources, including parts of the filesystem, hostname and network, and many other namespaces. The sidecar can be plugged and unplugged from the main application, since it is isolated and cannot impact the application in case it starts misbehaving. ...

July 24, 2019 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 3 min · Pradeep Loganathan
Transactional Outbox Pattern

Transactional Outbox Pattern

Transactional Outbox is a pattern to reliably publish messages without the use of distributed transactions. It uses an Outbox and a message dispatcher to reliably persist state and publish messages.

July 16, 2019 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 10 min · Pradeep Loganathan
Idempotent Consumer Pattern

Idempotent Consumer Pattern

The Idempotent Consumer pattern provides the necessary safeguards to allows logic wrapped by it to be executed only once. It implements an unique identifier for each message and an idempotent repository.

July 6, 2019 · (updated December 21, 2024) · 5 min · Pradeep Loganathan