DevToolsDigest: Issue #89

This week's digest includes news and resources from Twitter, Citus Data, Cloudforecast, Dev.to, Amazon and more.

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DEC 1, 2018

7 MIN

The Week in Developer Tools

Twitter’s Kafka Adoption Story

The Messaging team at Twitter has been running an in-house Pub/Sub system for the last few years but have recently made the decision to pivot toward Apache Kafka, both migrating existing use cases and onboarding new use cases. In this blog post, the team discusses why theu chose to adopt Kafka as Twitter’s Pub/Sub system as well as the different challenges they faced along the way.

How Postgres Is More Than A Relational Database: Extensions

Postgres has been a great database for decades now, and has really come into its own in the last ten years. Databases more broadly have also gotten their own set of attention as well. But to Craig Kerstiens the most exciting part about Postgres isn’t how it continues to advance itself, rather it is how Postgres has shifted itself from simply a relational database to more of a data platform.

How Well Do You Know Your AWS logos?

Take Cloudforecast's clever quiz to find out just how much you actually know about the cloud.

Go 2, Here We Come!

In this post from the Go Blog, read about the future of Go, including all the issues and proposals surrounding Go 2. It’s now up to the Go community to provide feedback on the issues listed.

Useful Web Resources For Programmers

Check out this list of useful resources for programmers and developers from Dev.to.

Showing Kindness While Programming

Software development and programming is a difficult profession. It is very new and requires a lot of practice, learning and mental focus. It can get frustrating when you are working with others and mistakes are made. An angry response is not what we need in development.

Best Practices For Testing Code Under Feature Flags

Testing is a difficult subject, and there is no written standard. The two things customers want from testing with the LaunchDarkly SDK is the ability to control which variations the SDK serves, and preventing the SDK from polluting an important environment with a bunch of garbage test users. Generally speaking there are five main approaches to clean testing.

Industry Research

The Next Wave in Developer Tools: The Catalyst That Enables IoT

Matthew Gregory zooms out to take macro look at IoT developer tools, ‘platform’ markets, and what’s to come next.

AWS re:Invent 2018

New for AWS Lambda: Use Any Programming Language and Share Common Components

Amazon this week introduced two new features that are going to make serverless development even easier: Lambda Layers, and a Lambda Runtime API. Read the full announcement for more info.

AWS App Mesh: Service Mesh For Microservices On AWS

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that allows you to easily monitor and control communications across microservices applications on AWS. You can use App Mesh with microservices running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), and Kubernetes running on Amazon EC2.

AWS Transfer for SFTP

Many organizations use SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) as part of long-established data processing and partner integration workflows. While it would be easy to dismiss these systems as “legacy,” the reality is that they serve a useful purpose and will continue to do so for quite some time. Amazon wanted to help their customers move these workflows to the cloud in a smooth, non-disruptive way.

Amazon’s ‘Machine Learning University’ Available To All Developers

For the first time, the same machine learning courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now available to all developers through AWS. Read more on the AWS blog.

Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization For Serverless Computing

Firecracker is a new virtualization technology that makes use of KVM. You can launch lightweight micro-virtual machines (microVMs) in non-virtualized environments in a fraction of a second, taking advantage of the security and workload isolation provided by traditional VMs and the resource efficiency that comes along with containers.

Amazon Route 53 Resolver For Hybrid Clouds

This week Amazon announced Amazon Route 53 Resolver for Hybrid Clouds. It’s a set of features that enable bi-directional querying between on-premises and AWS over private connections.

From The Heavybit Library

Deployment Best Practices

Join HashiCorp CEO Mitchell Hashimoto, Heptio Co-founder Joe Beda and LaunchDarkly CEO Edith Harbaugh as they discuss the impact of architecture on a company’s deployment options, and their visions of the future of deployment.

Alexis Lê-Quôc: Advanced Reporting & Analytics

Join CTO and Co-Founder of Datadog, Alexis L-Quc as he covers the integral features required to support enterprise-level reporting.

High Leverage Ep. #2, Cloud Services With Corey Quinn

In episode 2 of High Leverage, Joe meets with Corey Quinn, cloud economist and founder of the Quinn Advisory group, to discuss the realities of using cloud providers at scale.

Carrots For Web Marketplaces And Platforms: How To Design Non-Monetary Incentives

In this post Connie Kwan outlines non-monetary incentive design for platform marketplace owners. Sometimes it’s simple, both Inventory and Buyer sides want monetary exchange. But sometimes it’s not, the Buyer side is willing to pay, but the Inventory side isn’t motivated by money. The latter is a common challenge among developer companies. Read on for insight.