Knative to Cloud Run

 Posted on 7 May 2019

Cloud Run In my Hands on Knative series (part 1, part 2, part 3), I showed how to use Knative Serving, Eventing and Build on any Kubernetes cluster anywhere. This is great for portability but with that portability comes the overhead of creating and managing a Kubernetes cluster. Not to mention the complexity of Istio which is a dependency of Knative. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) helps with managing the Kubernetes cluster a little but you still need to worry about all the bells and whistles of a Kubernetes cluster. Read More →
Kubernetes  Knative  Google Cloud Run  Google Cloud Platform  Serverless 

Professional Cloud Architect Certification

 Posted on 4 March 2019

TL;DR: I recently went through the preparation and exam of Google Cloud’s Professional Cloud Architect Certification. It was great learning experience and I highly recommend it. You can register here to get certified yourself! Why? As you might know, I’m a Googler and a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. Why do I want to be certified by Google Cloud when I already work at Google and know a great deal about Google Cloud? Read More →
Google Cloud Platform  Certification  Learning  Cloud Computing  Software Architecture 

Hands on Knative — Part 3

 Posted on 19 February 2019

In Part 1, I talked about Knative Serving for rapid deployment and autoscaling of serverless containers. In Part 2, I talked about how to connect services in a loosely coupled way with Knative Eventing. In third and last part of the series, I want to talk about Knative Build and show a few examples from my Knative Tutorial. What is Knative Build? Knative Build basically allows you to go from source code to a container image in a registry. Read More →
Knative  Kubernetes  Containers  Serverless  Open Source 

Hands on Knative — Part 2

 Posted on 11 February 2019

In my previous post, I talked about Knative Serving for rapid deployment and autoscaling of serverless containers. Knative Serving is great if you want your services to be synchronously triggered by HTTP calls. However, in the serverless microservices world, asynchronous triggers are more common and useful. That’s when Knative Eventing comes into play. In this second part of Hands on Knative series, I want to introduce Knative Eventing and show some examples from my Knative Tutorial on how to integrate it with various services. Read More →
Google Cloud Platform  Knative  Kubernetes  Microservices  Serverless 

Hands on Knative — Part 1

 Posted on 4 February 2019

I’ve been looking into Knative recently. In this 3-part blog series, I want to explain my learnings and show some hands on examples from the Knative Tutorial that I published on GitHub. What is Knative anyway? Knative is a collection of open source building blocks for serverless containers running on Kubernetes. At this point, you might be wondering: “Kubernetes, serverless, what’s going on?” But, when you think about it, it makes sense. Read More →
Knative  Kubernetes  Containers  Serverless  Open Source 

Application metrics in Istio

 Posted on 7 January 2019

The default metrics sent by Istio are useful to get an idea on how the traffic flows in your cluster. However, to understand how your application behaves, you also need application metrics. Prometheus has client libraries that you can use to instrument your application and send those metrics. This is good but it raises some questions: Where do you collect those metrics? Do you use Istio’s Prometheus or set up your own Prometheus? Read More →
Kubernetes  Istio  Prometheus  Metrics  Google Cloud Platform 

Istio Routing Basics

 Posted on 2 November 2018

When learning a new technology like Istio, it’s always a good idea to take a look at sample apps. Istio repo has a few sample apps but they fall short in various ways. BookInfo is covered in the docs and it is a good first step. However, it is too verbose with too many services for me and the docs seem to focus on managing the BookInfo app, rather than building it from ground up. Read More →
Kubernetes  Istio  Google Cloud Platform  Containers 

Dialogflow fulfillment with C# and App Engine

 Posted on 24 September 2018

Dialogflow is a developer platform for building voice or text-based conversational apps on a number of platforms such as Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Twilio, Skype and more. Earlier this year, we used Dialogflow to build a Google Assistant app and extended it to use the power of Google Cloud. You can read more about it on Google Cloud blog here, see the app code on GitHub here and one of my talk videos about the app is here. Read More →
Google Cloud Platform  CSharp  Google App Engine  Conversational UI  .NET 

Istio 101 (1.0) on GKE

 Posted on 6 August 2018

Istio 1.0 is finally announced! In this post, I updated my previous Istio 101 post with Istio 1.0 specific instructions. Most of the instructions are the same but with a few minor differences about where things live (folder names/locations changed) and also most commands now default to kubectl instead of istioctl. For those of you who haven’t read my Istio 101 post, I show how to install Istio 1.0 on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), deploy the sample BookInfo app and show some of the add-ons and traffic routing. Read More →
Kubernetes  Istio  Google Cloud Platform 

Google Home meets .NET containers using Dialogflow

 Posted on 13 July 2018

I use my Google Home all the time to check the weather before leaving home, set up alarms, listen to music, but I never considered writing an app for it. What does it take to write an app for the Google Home assistant? And can we make it smarter by leveraging Google Cloud? Those were the questions that my colleague Chris Bacon, and I were thinking about when we decided to build a demo for a conference talk. Read More ↗︎
Dialogflow  .NET  Google Cloud  How To