Nicolas Fränkel

One of my current talks focuses on Observability in general and Distributed Tracing in particular, with an OpenTelemetry implementation. In the demo, I show how you can see the traces of a simple distributed system consisting of: the Apache APISIX API Gateway, a Kotlin app with Spring Boot, a Python app with Flask, and a Rust app with Axum. Earlier this year, I spoke and attended the Observability room at FOSDEM. One of the talks demoed the Grafana stack: Mimir for metrics, Tempo for traces, and

One of the components of my OpenTelemetry demo is a Rust application built with the Axum web framework. In its description, axum mentions: axum doesn’t have its own middleware system but instead uses tower::Service. This means axum gets timeouts, tracing, compression, authorization, and more, for free. It also enables you to share middleware with applications written using hyper or tonic. — axum README So far, I was happy to let this cryptic explanation lurk in the corner of

Though I always worked on the Dev side of IT, I was also interested in the Ops side. I even had a short experience being a WebSphere admin: I used it several times, helping Ops deal with the Admin console while being a developer. Providing a single package that Ops can configure and deploy in different environments is very important. As a JVM developer, I’ve been happy using Spring Boot and its wealth of configuration options: command-line parameters, JVM parameters, files, profiles, enviro

I tweet technical content that I consider interesting, but the funny tweets are the ones that get the most engagement. I attended the JavaLand conference in March, stumbled upon the Gradle booth, and found this gem: Things have changed a lot 😂😂😂“When you can’t beat them, join them” pic.twitter.com/SnX3KN57o8— Nicolas Frankel 🇺🇦 (@nicolas_frankel) March 22, 2023 Of course, at some point, a fanboy hijacked the thread and claimed the so-called superiority of Gradle. In this post, I’

When exposing an application to the outside world, consider a Reverse-Proxy or an API Gateway to protect it from attacks. Rate Limiting comes to mind first, but it shouldn’t stop there. We can factor many features in the API Gateway and should be bold in moving them from our apps. In this post, I’ll show how to implement authentication at the Gateway API stage. Overall authentication flow The API Gateway doesn’t authenticate but delegates authentication to an authentication

etcd is an excellent key-value distributed database used internally by Kubernetes and managed by the CNCF. It’s a great option, and that’s the reason why Apache APISIX uses it too. Yet, it’s not devoid of issues. First, some mention scalability, but one can expect this from a distributed data store that values consistency. Another issue may be the need for more familiarity with etcd. It’s relatively new, so your Ops team may need help operating it correctly while having

I’m continuing my API journey by reading books, viewing relevant YouTube videos, and reading relevant IETF RFCs. Today is a book review. Facts 21 chapters$38.39 (eBook) Chapters Part 1: Describing APIsIntroducing APIs and OpenAPIGetting set up to make API requestsOur first taste of OpenAPI definitionsUsing Swagger Editor to write OpenAPI definitionsDescribing API responsesCreating resourcesAdding authentication and authorizationPreparing and hosting API documentationPart 2: Design

A couple of years ago, Reactive Programming was all the rage, but it had one big issue: reactive stopped as soon as you accessed a SQL database. You had a nice reactive chain up to the database, defeating the whole purpose. Given the prevalence of SQL databases in existing and new apps, one couldn’t enjoy the full benefits of Reactive Programming but still pay the full price of complexity. Since then, the landscape has changed tremendously. Most importantly, it offers many reactive driver

Last week, we described the concept behind sticky sessions: you forward a request to the same upstream because there’s context data associated with the session on that node. However, if necessary, you should replicate the data to other upstreams because this one might go down. In this post, we are going to illustrate it with a demo. The overall design Design options are limitless. I’ll keep myself to a familiar stack, the JVM. Also, as mentioned in the previous post, one should on