DEV Community: Julia Flash

🛸 What is Distributed Cloud

Julia Flash — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 23:00:05 +0000

This is an infographic I made (with alt text) to show the evolving landscape that led to the distributed cloud model.

The distributed cloud computing model was formally defined by Gartner in 2019 as a new trend in cloud computing. You can see with the Wayback Machine that a lot of descriptions on web pages included distributed cloud starting around 2014.

Distributed cloud is different than distributed computing, which is when a bunch of computers working together as a single system/process in order to maximize computing performance.

The advent of containerization was a key development to the distributed cloud computing model being formally defined recently. Containers provide the ability to encapsulate applications to port across multiple clouds, data centers and edge locations. This is great but there is a lot to manage too along with that.

So what is distributed cloud?

Distributed cloud is the extension of public cloud infrastructure that can be deployed not only on your cloud provider's infrastructure but also at an on-prem location like a data center, another cloud providers' public cloud, a colocation data center or at edge locations. All of these deployments across the various environments are managed from a single control plane.

Kubernetes has been the strongest player in managing and orchestrating containerized workloads by providing the abstraction layer to administrate and deploy regardless of any physical location. This has been especially beneficial with the extensibility required for AI and IoT processes at edge locations.

^{Credit: Dinaaaaaah}

Distributed cloud is the next step coming out of public, private and hybrid cloud computing. With hybrid cloud, the cloud provider managed the public cloud and the customer managed their private cloud environment.

With distributed cloud, the customer uses the control plane to have visibility across locations that they administer and extend cloud services to as a single, distributed cloud. The cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure, security, updates and operations.

Why is this beneficial?

Traditional cloud computing offered a route for businesses to not have to build up their own infrastructure. Customers can use the cloud vendors such as AWS, Oracle, IBM Cloud, GCP and others who offer "pay for what you use" metered access to compute, networking, DBs, storage, microservices and more to businesses.

But there have been some problems with that.

Sometimes the data center being utilized is not close enough in its physical location for the network performance that is required. Data packets must travel physical distances to transmit.

^{Credit: Vince Mckelvie}

The greater the distance makes for the more time we must wait for those packets to transmit. So how do we shorten that distance for those data packets?

We consider how we approach cloud computing.

In the distributed model with public cloud infrastructure extended across varied physical locations, this lowers latency for better response time with workloads and increased throughput due to lower overall traffic.

The control plane of the distributed cloud model helps to centralize the management of multiple cloud platforms to increase the control businesses have over their IT environments and allows for better organizational efficiency.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of businesses have been looking to improve their digital presence, make more cost-effective IT decisions and unify their cloud strategy on the whole. The action steps to address those areas won't be stopping anytime soon post-pandemic.

It's going to be pretty exciting to see how companies evolve and adopt a more distributed cloud computing model given the advantages that multiple clouds and edge computing provides.

Thanks for reading my intro into distributed cloud! 😊

^{Credit: GIPHY}

37 Halloween Frontends🦇

Julia Flash — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 18:06:16 +0000

🎃 Allow for some load time 🎃

What's not to love with Halloween?
It is the candy corn of my sunken eye sockets!

So this October, I set out to find the spookiest designs.

Note: All works link to the creators for attribution and alternative text provided. Also if anyone knows of any Ghost Buster or Beetlejuice design themes, please share. I'm literally dying to see this...

Hope you enjoyed the horrorful compilation of super terror!

Ghoul's Note: My name is Julia Nash, I am an Offering Manager for the Center of Open Source Data & Artificial Intelligence Technologies, which may or may not specialize in Open Source Paranormal Data & Artificial Zombie (and Goblin) Intelligence.

CHECK US OUT, IF YOU DARE... 🧟‍♀️

Newly Released Datasets for ML/DL 💻

Julia Flash — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 20:19:50 +0000

Previously published on my personal blog

^{Credit: Marketscale}

Everyone knows about the datasets from Kaggle and other sources like UCI, but there are treasure troves of data out there at your fingertips right now that you might not know of!

One that you likely are not familiar with is the Data Asset Exchange which is a repo of open sourced datasets recently publicized from enterprise research teams. There are 30+ datasets with a ton released just this year!

The folks behind this effort are from the Center for Open-Source Data & AI Technologies (CODAIT) organization, a group of data scientists and open source developers dedicated to make open source AI easier to use. 🤗

^{An astounding llama depicted in the 4 styles available from the ‘Fast Neural Style Transfer’ model by CODAIT.

Credit: Nick Kasten}

Where are the datasets?

You can find all the open source datasets here.

How do I download them?

Go to the link above and click on a dataset.
Then when you are on the landing page, click Get this dataset.

That's all there is to it!

Keep reading if you want to preview your data before downloading it though! Its always smart to see what you are downloading first.

What are the data formats?

They come in CSV, JSON, WAV, JPG, PNG, IOB, HDF5 and others depending on what the data is collected for.

^{Credit: Vince McKelvie}

Can I look at the data before downloading it?

Of course! There are data previews for all the datasets here where you can explore it before downloading it.

Lets focus in on one dataset as an example to check this out!

Get Started with free DAX Datasets

Go to the datasets, then click on a dataset that interests you. That will take you to a landing page for particular dataset, like this dataset that I am going to walk through: "IBM Debater® Wikipedia Oriented Relatedness".

See the blue rectangle in the image that highlights the text Preview the data & notebooks?

Click on that button, which will take you to a page like this for the dataset:

Now you can then look through each tab to check it out!

I'll step through each of these 3 tabs here now so you can understand why they are provided for you.

^{Credit: Quasi Crystals}

Dataset Metadata

The Dataset Metadata section shows you what the dataset is used for (Domain), the authors and where it came from, as well as the business case on how you could use this dataset.

With the IBM Debater® Wikipedia Oriented Relatedness dataset, the business case is:

Automated Customer Service: Train a chatbot to label and compare user query's concept type with list of available concepts the chatbot is capable of discussing.

Dataset Preview

In the Dataset Preview tab, you actually see the dataset values as they are, be it images, POS (Parts of Speech), concept origins and other facets of the data itself.

Dataset Glossary

Last but not least, the Dataset Glossary tab!
This is for if you have no idea what certain words mean within the dataset, the glossary helps you understand terms more thoroughly. I think its cool because I tend to be one of those people. 🙃
For example, asking someone what "POS" was while doing ngram analysis.

Are there examples on how to use the data?

That was my question! Yes, I did find that there are example Jupyter notebooks provided for each dataset which shows an analysis using Python kernels.

Go back to the main page with all the datasets here.

Then click on a dataset, which will lead it to landing page and go through the process of clicking on the Preview the data & notebooks button in the top-right of the page.

Then you will see in the navigation bar of the window these buttons:

Click on Preview Notebook.

This will lead you straight to a notebook which shows how to start with or use the dataset in full!

Pretty cool, huh?

Thank you for going through this short tutorial on what, where and how you can get started with Data Asset Exchange datasets via the CODAIT.org team!

3 Favorite DAX Datasets

Forum Classify Dataset

"The dataset consists of 100 discussion threads crawled from Ubuntu Forums discussions. Each message in each individual thread is assigned a dialog label out of following eight classes: question, repeat question, clarification, further details, solution, positive feedback, negative feedback, junk."

Video-Text Compliance

"VTC contains 7920 samples, each consisting of a video-text instruction pair and a compliance/non-compliance label. The dataset has over 1.2 million frames. We take a unique approach in data collection so that the dataset can be automatically augmented from a set of core videos. To answer growing concerns on data privacy, we carefully followed privacy preserving safe-guards in the generation of VTC dataset."

WikiText-103

"The WikiText-103 dataset is a collection of over 100 million tokens extracted from the set of verified ‘Good’ and ‘Featured’ articles on Wikipedia."

Hope you enjoyed this article, comment if you have any questions! 🐬

^{Credit: Rebloggy}

Next.js on IBM Cloud

Julia Flash — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 01:02:01 +0000

Next.js w/ Custom Express Server example for IBM Cloud

A version of Next's example/custom-server-express revised to deploy to IBM Cloud.

Why use Next.js React Framework

Always is my advice to go to the people and look at the docs where the developers state the reasons they made it. Then look to read opinions, gossip magazines or additional articles outside of the developers. That is just my structure and person though.

The example app isn't anything special here. Shows routing. It will get you up and going on IBM Cloud in a few minutes using Next.

Why I did this

I was freaking out. I tend to use new stuff more than hang on anything I have used time and time again. My deployment failed a few times on IBM Cloud given the Zeit custom-server-using-express main example.

Mars and his Heroku implementation saved me thirty minutes at the very least of trying to get it deployed. So I decided to share this riffing for IBM Cloud platform to save other people some time too possibly.

How to set it up

First you need an account on IBM Cloud
Install IBM Cloud CLI and restart terminal, type ibmcloud to check
To minimize number of specifications per deploy to IBM Cloud you can use an application manifest like this one manifest.yml

Change the name and host to what you want them to be.

Go into root directory, make sure you have permissions for everything.
Now this next image - these are my actions I did for pushing up this application.

npm i --save
ibmcloud login --sso
ibmcloud target --cf 
ibmcloud app push

Watch deployment logs.

You should see ...

And that is it. You have Next.js example app on IBM Cloud. 🦑

https://testingnextjs.mybluemix.net/

If you are doing more than this example demo and it fails
ibmcloud cf logs [YOUR_APPSNAME] --recent
And watch it. I have been mostly able to troubleshoot from those logs and use cf docs.

Note: I altered the `production` to `dev` in the start script of package.json bc I hadn't installed dotenv and was first figuring out deployment of a live instance solely using next.js before actual implementation.

Zeit - The idea behind the example app

Most of the times the default Next server will be enough but sometimes you want to run your own server to customize routes or other kind of the app behavior. Next provides a Custom server and routing so you can customize as much as you want.

Because the Next.js server is just a node.js module you can combine it with any other part of the node.js ecosystem. in this case we are using express to build a custom router on top of Next.

The example shows a server that serves the component living in pages/a.js when the route /b is requested and pages/b.js when the route /a is accessed. This is obviously a non-standard routing strategy. You can see how this custom routing is being made inside server.js.

Possibly Odd Approach for Quick Authentication - User Registry API and Passport

Julia Flash — Wed, 15 May 2019 00:46:56 +0000

🌺 So I woke up last night thinking "This might be a bit weird." 🌺

Article

I want to walk through what I did and why. So this article will go over integrating my existing app with sample code generated by creating the API on the platform.

My Cloud Foundry application is Node with Express framework routing, .ejs view engine. This API called App ID has a user registry that comes with sample code | SDKs for Swift, Node, Java and Android. The API has a free tier for up to 1000 users and 1000 events (an 'event' being like someone logging in).

Best way to see all features of the app is the API Docs.

Friday Night

I was on my beanbag in my office using Passport-Local Mongoose for a quick login by email and password for this application.

Do I really need to store user information in MongoDB?
Nobody will need to sign-up for this application.

Currently, I am giving out the link to the application for a small pool of people that it could help. The application serves one purpose and zero APIs are used in it. Nothing sensitive really.

Since I was using Passport.js already, I faintly recalled that there was a service on IBM Cloud I might've seen that used Passport somehow - this API ended up being App ID. It has a Node SDK for mobile and web.

I was looking into the App ID documentation, and took note of something that might be really helpful: The Cloud Directory.

So, I decided to use this API to register my users for my application.
And this move saved me a heck of a lot of time on Friday evening.

Weird part is that I have to populate the passwords for users...

Time Spent - My First Time Using This API

Let's get into it. Here are the steps. Shouldn't take much.

📄 Register for IBM Cloud
📧 Confirm Registration by email
💻 Login to Account
😄 Configure IBM Cloud CLI
🎸 Create App ID Service
🎨 Download Sample Code
🌊 Integrate to Existing App
👽 Setup and Redirect from Login
🎀 Add users in Cloud Directory
👑 Deploy Application

Register

Does not require anything but name | email. No cards.

Confirmation

I did this sign up process in writing this to make sure I go through everything, took less than five minutes to get the confirmation email per registering to the platform.

Login

CLI

You will need this command line interface for IBM Cloud. This is for when you build locally and then want to re-deploy the sample code with regards to this tutorial.

Commands that you need to know (remember post-install to have a new terminal session to start using the CLI) =>

ibmcloud login
ibmcloud target --cf

API

Create the API for your own use. You can use my link or find App ID under the Security section of the Catalog. You can do this all by the IBM Cloud CLI.

Click

Once you reach the landing page for the service, there is a little button labeled 'Create' in furthest right-hand corner. Click that to create an instance of App ID for your own use.

Sample Code

Download the sample code for Swift, Node, Java or Android.

Integrate

You can use this service while hosting your application on other platforms. It does not have to be hosted on IBM Cloud.

Remember that sample code? It is really useful here.

I opened the /protected.ejs in Sublime and placed the code of my existing application's home page here.

Then I made sure all the paths to the files were correct so it renders properly.

Setup

For when you want to re-deploy this sample application to IBM Cloud with your integrations made, you will need to look at the alias connection for the sample code that is at the bottom of the manifest.yml.

This alias creates a connection between your App ID service and the sample code being a Cloud Foundry application. So, the IBM Cloud CLI needs to be configured for you to do this. The documentation on this part is actually very good.

BUT there is one funky thing to deal with that will save you some time.

If you look in your account's Resource List in the side panel:

Are there whitespaces in your service name? Upon re-deployment, having whitespace will mess things up. If your service name for App ID has whitespace, for example App ID-4343 then use the ellipsis on the right to Rename it to AppID-4343 to correct this.

Then go to your sample code locally and look at your manifest.yml file. Does the service name with the word alias in it have any whitespace?

Lets go take off that empty space that will only make for errors in our terminal, who has always been by our side!

Then follow the commands here and create that alias properly to bind to that service name. It should not spit out any errors now.

And one small note - this particular command in those instructions?

ibmcloud resource service-alias-create {ALIAS_NAME} --instance-name {SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME}

You can take off those curly brackets when you make this command for those names.

And if you mess up, you can delete the alias. To do this - you go into your IBM Cloud "Resource List" in your left-side navigation bar, find the instance of App ID with the word "alias" in the title of the service, click the ellipsis and select "Delete" in the drop-down.

Redirect

The manifest.yml is necessary for deploying the app with your modifications from the command line. You can read about its purpose in regards to the platform in the Cloud Foundry documentation if you would like to know more.

Lets go back to the App ID service home page on IBM Cloud.

We need to add the proper callback for your application.

Click on Manage Authentication in the service navigation bar.

And open the Authentication Settings tab.

Look at your application's name in the manifest.yml file. What is your domain name?

Right now you probably have not routed this to being a custom domain, so let's use the mybluemix.net domain and add /ibm/bluemix/appid/callback to the end of that.

You can add any other paths here too. In full, you are providing here the nameofyourapp.mybluemix.net/ibm/bluemix/appid/callback for that kosher callback.

Cloud Directory

Finally, now we can populate your Cloud Directory with users!

Make sure that your Cloud Directory is toggled On within the Identity Providers tab of the Manage Authentication management section.

And add your users within the Users section!

Live

Once you are ready to have a live link by configuration across these above steps, you can go into the root directory locally for your sample code app. Type the command ibmcloud app push to trigger the deployment of your application.

This process will give you a link to the live application when the deployment process has completed.

Try logging in with one of the emails/usernames to test it out.

There are a ton of great features to this service. Remember, you don't have to link your credit card here to make the service. But it will stop functioning per the 1000 free events occurring.

I think this threshold would be the first upper limit hit unless you can add multiple users in a batch by the API. This is due to my testing the login making for 6 events in itself. But for a demo | PoC or the secure login of an app with light amounts of web traffic, this is a possible temporary free solution.

Hope you liked this tutorial. Thanks!

Some Helpful Links