Tag: web development

Introduction to Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes

There is plenty of documentation, tutorials, and guides online, explaining Docker containers, Kubernetes container orchestration, and microservices. Here are a few that I found useful for the quick and simple introduction into these technologies and how to tie them together.

Firstly, some basic 101s:

Secondly, “Introduction to Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes” YouTube video nicely puts all the things together, with complete code and configuration examples, some glue, and extra tips.

And finally, a few bits that you might need to solve on the way, which are not necessarily related, but can throw you off:

  • Some of the virtualization bits (such as VirtualBox) might fail to run properly if you have Secure Boot enabled. To solve this problem, reboot the machine, go to the BIOS, and disable Secure Boot (enable Legacy Mode).
  • Additionally, while you are there, check for the Virtualization Technology settings. Enable Virtualization Technology in the BIOS to further smooth out VirtualBox and friends.
  • While working on your first minikube cluster (sorting out VirtualBox and such), it helps to completely remove and start again, after sorting out any issues that prevent Kubernetes to start (proxy timeouts, etc). A quick “minikube delete && minikube start” will save you some time on troubleshooting weird issues, than just “minikube start” after a failure.

Have fun!

Periodic Table of Amazon Web Services


A lot has been said about the wide range of Amazon Web Services (AWS). They are plenty and cover a whole lot of technologies – from low level infrastructure to artificial intelligence. It is difficult to grasp just how big and complex the AWS feature set. But I think the above periodic table of Amazon Web Services helps a lot.

How Many .com Domain Names Are Unused?

Here’s an interesting study of the .com domain names. It appears that only about 1/3 of the registered domains are in use by legitimate websites. The rest are either spam, email-only, empty, broken, etc.

Only about 100,000 domains were crawled to provide a representative sample. But to me, the numbers look quite realistic. If only, I would push the porn and gambling sites into the “in use” category, rather than have them separately.

When I started writing PHP…

“When I started writing PHP…” is a nice look at how PHP ecosystem has changed in the last 20 years. Those of us who have been using it since then, are guaranteed to drop a nostalgic tear.

The running joke “you’re not a real PHP developer until you’ve written your own CMS and discarded it” wasn’t a joke yet. It was just becoming reality, but it wasn’t old enough yet to be a joke. (Yes, I wrote my own CMS and discarded it.)

AWS CloudFormation Sample Templates

awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates is an extensive collection of Amazon AWS CloudFormation templates for a wide range of resources and services. Some of these can be used as is for deploying production infrastructure, others are good starting points for those of us who are still learning.