Archive for the ‘books’ Category

The rise of APIs

Saturday, August 12th, 2017

The rise of APIs is a phrase that is sometimes used to describe a trend in the software industry whereby requirements are met by consuming external services programmatically via the internet. Traditionally, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) developed and marketed their products as installable applications and charged per CPU or per the number of instances deployed. ISVs made money by selling software and customers were more or less forced to upgrade their on-premise installation every few years. A gradual shift from an installation model to a subscription model has been happening since the early years of world wide web, though mightiest vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle resisted that for some good reason.

By challenging the established delivery model, a new era of application vendors such as Salesforce was able to provide their services in a much faster and cheaper way. Small to medium sized customers who otherwise could not have afforded expensive on-premise installation and maintenance happily adopted the new Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

Application Programming Interfaces or APIs enable more fine grained, targeted and transparent consumption of services over the internet and can be seen as another major milestone in the evolution of SaaS. Nevertheless, until recently, the use of APIs was generally limited to developers who programmed components and services for a particular platform. Only during the last decade, businesses began to see APIs as a key enabler for innovations, ranging from internal process improvements to establishment of entirely new markets.

Microservices complement an API first architecture by forcing developers and architects to think about the service contract from the inception phase itself.

[Book review] Infrastructure As Code

Thursday, March 24th, 2016

I am currently reading the book Infrastructure As Code

Treating Infrastructure as Code requires not just automation and tools, rather a complete change of mindset from the traditional approaches to Infrastructure management.

Key Lessons:

  • Treat Infrastructure as Software and Data
  • Avoid Snowflake servers
  • Automate everything
  • Automate everything..and let the provisioning, maintenance and lifecycle management happen automatically
  • Automate using specialized DevOps tools rather than custom scripts
  • Implement standard and time tested Software engineering practices such as Testing, Version Control, Change and Release Management etc. for Infrastructure

Automation fear spiral

If you do not follow automation consistently, your automation scripts can get out of sync. with the physical reality which will make the use of automation script even more risky, resulting in a fear spiral.

ch01-automation-fear-spiral

(Image courtesy: Chapter 1 of the book)

I plan to write a review of the book, once finished reading

My current reading list

Friday, April 10th, 2015

Below list is a self-reminder as well to see how I would feel when I look back at this list at a later time towards the end of the year.

Currently reading

Technical

  • Building Microservices by Sam Newman (published 2015)
  • Release It by Michael Nygard (published 2007)
  • The Docker Book by James Turnbull (published 2015)
  • Learning Spring Boot by Greg L. Turnquist (published 2014)
  • Pro AngularJS by Adam Freeman
  • Spring in Action by Craig Walls

Non-technical

  • Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton (published 2014)
  • The Software Paradox

Reread

  • Domain driven Design by Eric Evans (published 2003)
  • Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun (published 2008)
  • Leadership and self-deception by Arbinger Institute (published 2000)

Planned for 2015

Technical

  • DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective by Len Bass and Ingo Weber (published 2015)
  • Continuous Integration by Jez Humble (published 2010)
  • Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Poppendieck (published 2006)
  • NoSQL Distilled by Pramodkumar J. Sadalage und Martin Fowler (published 2012)

Non-technical

  • Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (published 2005)
  • Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender (published 2015)
  • The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger (published 2012)
  • How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler (Autor), Charles Van Doren (published 1972)

Failed (started long back, still lying in the bookshelf unfinished)

  • Hadoop in Action by Chuck Lam
  • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (published 2011)

 Meta

Colour code

Actively reading/Succesfully finished 

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Occasionally reading  

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Inactive

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Given up