Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Editor's Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone's 2024 Trend Report, Low-Code Development: Elevating the Engineering Experience With Low and No Code.
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has led to a rush to shoehorn artificial intelligence (AI) into every product that makes sense, as well as into quite a few that don't. But there is one area where AI has already proven to be a powerful and useful addition: low- and no-code software development.
Cloud technology changes the way we reason about troubleshooting, maintaining, and deploying systems. We used to view hardware and software as separate entities. Different teams managed these entities with different priorities, using disparate methodologies. But that’s no longer the case; teams work together to improve resiliency and maximize agility. There’s no better example of this than Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Let’s take a deep dive into IaC. We'll examine how it makes your systems more reliable, manageable, and reproducible.
This is an article from DZone's 2022 Kubernetes in the Enterprise Trend Report.
For more:
Read the Report
Kubernetes and machine learning (ML) are a perfect match. As the leading container orchestrator, Kubernetes' scalability and flexibility make it the perfect platform for managing extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines and training ML models. That's why there's a thriving ecosystem for running ML tasks on Kubernetes. Let's look at how Kubernetes is uniquely suited for supporting machine learning, how you can use it to make your ML pipelines run faster and better, and some of the most popular Kubernetes tools for ETL and ML.
Serverless computing is pretty cool.
You need something done in the cloud. It might be storing a GPS location. Or pulling some from a DB based on a few query parameters. But building a complete server instance would be overkill. You just need an API endpoint to accept a query and spit back a result.
Running a database server is an expensive undertaking. You need to buy costly hardware, especially if you need your server to be fully redundant and resilient to errors. You need a monitoring system to keep track of its health, and you also need specialized staff to keep the database running smoothly.
Even if you run your database on cloud hardware, maintaining the server requires a lot of effort. This is especially true if you're running a specialized database for applications like time series or column stores.
Encryption encodes data, so only programs that know how to decode it can read it. It uses an algorithm—a set of ordered steps—to alter the information so that the receiving party can't read it without applying a similar algorithm to return it to its original state.
Encoding data is called encrypting. Decoding is called decrypting. The original unencrypted data is called plaintext, while we refer to the encrypted data as ciphertext. So, we encrypt plaintext into ciphertext and decrypt the ciphertext back into plaintext.
Containers and Virtual Machines (VMs) have a lot in common. They both make using IT infrastructure more efficient, but they do it in different ways. While both solutions can often solve the same problem, one of them is usually the better choice.
In this post, we're going to look at the security of containers and VMs. Is one more secure than the other?
Docker is an open-source platform for creating, deploying, and running containers. It's available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and enjoys wide support from all the major cloud providers. So, you can create your containers on your favorite operating system and deploy them anywhere.
Let's look at the Docker commands you need to know to manage Docker images and containers.
This is an article from DZone's 2022 Low Code and No Code Trend Report.
For more:
Read the Report
Low code accelerates and optimizes software development with a visual approach. It automates the development process and makes it easier to deliver solutions by providing visual tools that simplify and democratize development. But low code isn't just for new projects. It's a good candidate for migrating legacy applications, too. When moving an existing application to low code, you shorten development time and effort, save money, and take a big step toward cloud migration.
This is an article from DZone's 2022 DevOps Trend Report.
For more:
Read the Report
Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines have matured from new forms of automation to mission-critical systems. DevOps teams rely on pipelines to deliver value to their customers by tightening developer feedback loops and standardizing processes. When a system becomes more valuable and important, it tends to increase in complexity. It must support more users, be more reliable, and perform, despite the increased load. Soon the CI/CD system built for one team has grown to support every business line in the firm.
It’s an understatement to say that Docker is a game-changer for systems engineers and developers. You can run almost any application with a single command and customize it for your environment via a consistent container-based interface. But as containers proliferate, controlling them gets more complicated, too. Managing containers from the command line can be painful, but setting up an orchestration tool like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm is overkill for smaller systems.
Stopping and removing a container from the command line takes two steps. Stopping and removing two containers is four. And stopping and removing 10 containers is — well, you get the idea. Let’s look at how to make the Docker command line easier to use. We’ll focus on stopping and removing containers. Then, we’ll look at Docker Compose, another tool that makes managing smaller collections of containers easier.
I moved my blog to Hugo from Ghost over the holidays. This was after about a year of dissatisfaction with (very expensive) hosting on Ghost, after many years on WordPress.
While Hugo has fewer bells and whistles, it suits my purposes perfectly. I can write in Markdown, which I prefer over any other format. Ghost claims to support Markdown, but you can only input Markdown to its editor; you can't see it.
So far, you've unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser.
Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.
Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I've been playing with for hacking.
This week, I'm taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it's time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.
Last week, I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You'll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+.
The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where's the fun in simply relying on them?