It is more than mid-way through 2021. I should not be writing an essay about the nuances of log out. Yet here I am writing one; it is still an area that can be confusing. Today we’ll explain some simple and some complex sign-on and sign-out integrations with examples. ...
Partition keys are a common concept among distributed software including CouchDB and Azure CosmosDB to other systems like Kafka and AWS Kinesis. They are a key input into the system that has consequences on how well it can be used to solve different end user problems and how well it performs under load. ...
What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? Continuing from our prior post in January, let’s know discuss some aspects of using these percentage values in the context of how to guarantee availability. ...
What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? ...
A couple incomplete thoughts and questions for those that need to automatically log end users out of web applications. ...
Have you ever considered a service or suite of services and thought, “that looks like a ball of yarn.” There is a tendency amongst those of us who write software for a living to consider systems that are not understood as garbage. Often, this suspicion of poorly understood systems turns out to be unwarranted. What look like obtuse decisions made for no apparent reason turn out to have solid foundation in rationality....
We often think about best practices while developing software. Sometimes it is also instructive to contemplate what not to do when writing software. Today’s post covers some logic in AngularJS services which should be avoided save for rare exceptions. ...
Networks are unreliable. Put more precisely, TCP networking can experience many different types of failures with resulting loss of connectivity. Do not let the linked post’s title fool you, it goes on to list a number of real-world computer networking failures. HTTP is a great way to communicate over the public internet, where failures may occur at any time, because the protocol itself is stateless and does not rely on a persistent connection. HTML5 WebSockets, however, do use a persistent TCP connection. A connection that can cut or closed without warning. Today’s post is a short commentary on adding error handlers and heartbeat messaging to WebSocket clients and servers. ...
It is a good practice to add logging capabilities to applications as they are built. There are a lot of good tutorials on how to setup logging within various applications and software frameworks. It is also instructive to discuss why something is a good practice since understanding why can lead to new insight in how, when, and where to apply said ’thing.’ The point of today’s post is to discuss some scenarios for why application logging is important. This post will be mostly non-technical because the how of logging can be learned with some decent web searches and there is already a wealth of information on logging software on the web. ...
Round robin DNS records are a technique for distributing load across public facing web servers. As an experiment we tried using them in order to distribute load inside of a cluster. We found this approach didn’t work. In this post I’ll discuss round robin load balancing, how it works at a high level, what we did with DNS, why it didn’t work, and what can be done instead. ...