DEV Community: Luis Carbajal

Cloud Providers

Luis Carbajal — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 20:55:45 +0000

If you work in the IT industry, you probably have heard one of the following statements:

I store my files in the Cloud.
The application runs on the Cloud.
All of my servers are in the Cloud.

But what is the Cloud?

The Cloud is an IT paradigm that allows on-demand availability of computational resources and data stores without the user's direct active management.

That's it, thank you for reading!

No, no, just kidding. Let's go beyond that definition. Let's imagine that, just as you or me, the application needs a place to live. There are a lot of solutions for housing problems, but we are going to focus on two:

You can build a house. For that, you will need: a land, do the blueprints for the home, hire a bunch of people to work on the construction, wire it up, pipe it up, paint it, work on the finished, and a whole load of other things. Ah, I almost forget, you need to maintain it as well!

The other option is to rent a place. A monthly payment will give you access to an apartment that adjusts to the needs of your application. One of the coolest things is that the apartment has an elastic structure that allows it to expand or shrink its size!

And we are just starting! The applicatentants need to do many chores, for example, washing their clothes, for which some applicatentants take their clothes to an outside laundry, others have their washing center inside their apartments, and some others do not wash their clothes. The landlord started to offer a new service for all of its applicatentants: Washing machine rental! Now the applicatentants can use a washing machine or a dryer machine without leaving the apartment complex or bother about its maintenance. The only thing they should worry about is not to mix white clothes with colored clothes.

But there is more. The apartment complex has controlled access, 24/7 surveillance, and enormous warehouses so applicatentants can store anything they want. The apartment complex also provides a financial advisor, an alert system that applicatentants can configure however they want. There are more apartment complexes worldwide so that the applicatentants can move between them without any significant difficulty! And the landlord adds new services to improve the satisfaction of the applicatentants month by month.

Renting an apartment on the Cloud has more advantages than building your place from the ground.

In conclusion, having your own data center is often complicated. You must keep in mind the place, the servers, the network, the wires, controlled accesses, administration and maintenance, and more tasks that I am not listing here.

Meanwhile, renting a space at someone else's data center tends to be cheaper, scalable, easy to administrate, and integrated with other services offered by the provider.

The most popular cloud providers are:

AWS
Azure
GCP
DigitalOcean

TL;DR, Cloud Computing is to have virtual servers that you run on-demand on the provider's physical servers; they charge you for the time servers run.

Header image - "Clouds" by CSLmedia Productions is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Nubes de Internet

Luis Carbajal — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 16:56:10 +0000

Si trabajas en la industria de IT, habrás escuchado en más de una ocasión alguna frase de las siguientes:

Los archivos están almacenados en la nube.
La aplicación corre en la nube.
Mis servidores están en la nube.

Pero... ¿Qué es la nube?

La nube es un paradigma informático que permite la disponibilidad en demanda de recursos computacionales y de almacenamiento de datos sin ser manejados activamente por el usuario.

¡Gracias por leer!

No se crean, vamos a ir un poco más allá de esa definición. Digamos que las aplicaciones viven en casas, así como nosotros, y tú le estás buscando un lugar donde vivir a la tuya; hay por supuesto muchas soluciones al problema de vivienda, pero nos enfocaremos en dos:

Puedes construir un lugar para vivir. Necesitarás un terreno, diseñar el plano de la casa, contratar a una montón de personas para trabajar en la construcción, la electricidad, la plomería, la pintura, los acabados, y otro puño de tareas, ¡ah sí! ¡También debes de hacer cargo de darle mantenimiento periódicamente!

O puedes rentar un lugar para vivir. Por una cantidad de dinero mensual, tienes acceso a un departamento que se adecua a las necesidades de tu aplicación. Y lo más genial es que el departamento cuenta con una estructura elástica de última generación que le permite aumentar o disminuir su tamaño.

Pero eso no es todo, las app-inquilnas necesitan hacer muchas tareas, por ejemplo, lavar sus ropas, algunas llevan su ropa a lavar fuera, otras tienen sus propias lavadoras dentro de su departamento, y algunas ni siquiera lavan ropa. Dentro del edificio se empezó a ofrecer un nuevo servicio: ¡Renta de lavadoras y secadoras! Ahora las app-inquilnas pueden hacer uso de una lavadora o una secadora sin necesidad de salir del edificio, o de preocuparse por el mantenimiento. Lo único que deben tener en cuenta es en no mezclar ropa blanca y de color, o de echar cloro a la ropa de color.

Pero aún hay más, el edificio cuenta con acceso controlado, vigilancia 24/7, tienen almacenes gigantescos para que las app-inquilnas guarden sus pertenencias. El edificio también les proporciona un asesor financiero, un sistema de alertas que pueden configurar como les venga en gana, y el propio edificio tiene más edificios a lo largo del mundo al los que te puedes migrar con facilidad. ¡Mes con mes se agregan nuevos servicios para mejorar la comodidad de las app-inquilnas!

Existen muchas más ventajas de rentar un departamento en la nube a nosotros construir un lugar desde cero.

La conclusión es que tener tu propio centro de cómputo suele ser una tarea complicada y que involucra a muchas personas de alto expertise, ya que debemos tener en cuenta: el lugar, los servidores, el cableado de red, la red eléctrica, el acceso controlado, su administración, el mantenimiento, un plan de recuperación en caso de desastres, etc, etc.

Mientras que rentar un espacio dentro del centro de cómputo de alguien más suele ser más barato, escalable, fácil de administrar, y sencillo de integrar con otros servicios ofrecidos el proveedor ofrece.

Eso es la nube. Utilizar un espacio de cómputo que alguien más mantiene para tu propio beneficio.

Los proveedores más conocidos de la nube son:

AWS
Azure
GCP
DigitalOcean

Effective Logging

Luis Carbajal — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 04:50:12 +0000

In computing, a log is an activity record generated by a system event. Logs are highly useful for monitoring, traceability, analyzing, verification, and to measure all activities related to the system.

There is a misconception that debugging is the same as logging. It is not. Debug messages are usually cryptical and only make sense for those who wrote them. Logs are not just for developers but for support teams, auditors, system administrators, basically for everyone that interacts with the system.

What to log depends on the system’s type and the type of events that wants to be analyzed. The most common activities are:

Authentications, authorizations, and accesses.
Application’s changes or information changes.
Invalid inputs.
Resources issues.
Availability issues.

A log record should always answer the 5W’s, which are:

When the event happened (Timestamp).
Where it happened (Class, component, application).
Who triggered the event (User or service).
What action the event performed (Action).
Why the event was triggered (Reason).

Optional information can be added to the log record, such as:

Operation result (Was a success, or a failure)
Priority (Severity, rank, level).

Here is a list of recommendations to follow when you are planning the log:

Use a standard format for the system’s log (And if possible, spread the same log format across the company).
Use the same wording for the same context. It is easy to read and analyze logs when they use the same words to express meaning.
Do not (I repeat, do not) include any confidential information in your log, passwords, tokens, or secret keys, are out. You might ire your security engineer if you do.
Avoid subjective/interpretative messages, anyone familiar with the system should be able to interpret what exactly happened.
Non-human readable formats (like XML, blobs, stack-traces) are considered bad practice if a context is not provided. Always try to give them context.
And last but not least, make logging part of your coding workflow. You will be thankful to have logs when your system goes down.

Header image: "logs" by Rick Payette is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0