Learning a new programming language can seem like a daunting task, but with the right approach, it can be a rewarding experience. The process of learning a new programming language shows many similarities with that of learning a spoken language as a second language. Hence, a lot of the learnings…

Have you ever felt like this kid when programming? I sure did! When I got into Kotlin development I felt like this kid many many times. And even now I do have some experience, every once in a while, when conducting a Kotlin training or when on a Kotlin assignment…

What Is Mob Programming? Simply put, mob programming is about getting together with at least three developers and start coding on a single keyboard. At any given time one developer is actually typing, the ‘Driver’. All other developers take the ‘Navigator’ role. They all review, discuss and describe what the Driver should be doing…

using Scala and Akka Streams — Cloudflow is a relatively new framework that helps you build distributed streaming applications and deploy them on Kubernetes. Its powerful abstractions allow you to easily split your application into independent stream processing components, called streamlets. Streamlets can be developed using several runtimes such as Akka Streams and Flink. A streamlet…

with Pivotal’s Reactor — I’ve been doing Scala projects with Akka Streams for quite a few years now and I have a reasonably good feeling of things to watch out for. At my current project we are doing Java and we are using a different implementation of the Reactive Streams Specification: Reactor. While learning…

Scraping Consumer and Producer Metrics from any Scala or Java App — TL;DR This post focuses on monitoring your Kafka deployment in Kubernetes with Prometheus. Kafka exposes its metrics through JMX and so it does as well for apps using its Java SDK. To be able to have those metrics pulled in by Prometheus we need a way to extract them using the…

Deploying the Confluent platform Helm chart without Tiller — Say, you want to deploy Kafka to your company’s Kubernetes cluster. You search online how other people are doing this and quickly stumble upon some existing Helm charts that are doing EXACTLY what you need. Awesome, this is going to save you a lot of time and error-prone manual hassle…

Monitoring Kafka in Kubernetes without Prometheus — TL;DR This post focuses on monitoring your Kafka deployment in Kubernetes if you can’t or won’t use Prometheus. Kafka exposes its metrics through JMX. To be able to collect metrics in your favourite reporting backend (e.g. InfluxDB or Graphite) you need a way to query metrics using the JMX protocol and…

In this blog series we’ll discuss our journey at Cupenya of migrating our monolithic application to a microservice architecture running on Kubernetes. In the previous parts of the series we’ve seen how the core components of the infrastructure, the Api Gateway and the Authentication Service, were built, how we converted…