ANAND MANI SANKAR thoughts.toString( )

Serverless Architecture

Serverless Architecture involves one or both of the following design choices:

  • Out-of-the-box third-party services that can be directly consumed from the front-end/client. E.g. Auth0, Firebase, etc. (Backend as a Service)

  • Custom logic written as Functions that run as standalone ephemeral instances (Function as a Service)

The focus of this blog will be on the latter, explained with a working example.

Serverless


Continue reading...

ReactJS and Flux course on Udemy

Udemy has offered 50 free coupons for the readers of my blog, for the course ‘Build Web Apps with React JS and Flux’.


Continue reading...

A sample Docker workflow with Nginx, Node.js and Redis

In my previous post I wrote about Containers and Docker, how they are influencing PaaS, microservices and the cloud in general. If you are new to Docker or the concept of containers, I would highly recommend reading my previous post first. In this post, as a continuation, I will elaborate on some of the concepts with a Docker based sample workflow. You can find all the code I’m discussing below on my Github.

For this example, I have a very simple Node.js applications that increments a counter stored on Redis. I want to run Redis and the node application independently as I want to have the ability to scale the node application depending on the load. To start off, I have 3 instances of the node server running the application. I have an Nginx server in front of node for load balancing the node instances.


Continue reading...

Containers (Docker): A disruptive force in cloud computing

One of the primary goals of any well designed software is to abstract the complexity and present a simple consumable solution to the problem. But what about the software development process itself? Modern day software development lifecycle has become tremendously complicated. The variety of software stacks and hardware infrastructures that applications run on these days has drastically increased.

Complex Stack


Continue reading...

Node.js vs io.js: Why the fork?!?

After a hiatus of a couple of months, I’m back with a topic that has invaded many technical discussions in the last months.

Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript runtime environment, has been forked!

OK! But then, Node.js has been forked in the past, e.g: JXcore which provides a multithreaded flavour of NodeJS. Why is this specific instance of forking so vastly discussed/debated? It was not just forking of the code, but also - so to speak - forking of some of the top contributors to the NodeJS project. Four of Node’s top 5 contributors are part of the forked project - io.js.

The possibility of forking has been discussed over the last few months, but the official first release of the forked project io.js came out early January 2015.


Continue reading...