Bridging the Gap: Azure App Insights to On-Prem Elastic Stack

Zach Gardner Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial 1 Comment

Recently, while working for a large healthcare client in New York, I ran into an interesting problem that had slim literature on how to solve it.

Our application is primarily on-prem, but it does leverage Azure for a few functions that are easier to solve in a cloud-native environment. We wanted to be able to monitor those functions using the same Elastic Stack that we use to monitor our on-prem application.

I was tasked with building a bridge between where our functionality logs to in Azure (App Insights), and getting that securely back into our Elasticsearch instance that powers our Elastic Stack.

This blog post will detail the solution I landed on. I hope it will be useful to others that need to solve a similar problem!

Microservices in the Wild: Three Types & How to Implement

Dallas Monson Architecture, Articles, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Microservices 1 Comment

Microservices has become a catch-all term in the industry used to describe anything from architecture patterns to actual service implementations.

With such a broad spectrum, it can be daunting to know what it is, what it isnโ€™t, and maybe more importantly, why we should care.

In this post, Iโ€™ll provide an overview of three kinds of Microservices that I have observed in client architectures: Domain, Integration, and Unit-of-Work. Iโ€™ll also discuss specific examples of their purposes and a method to implement each one.

Getting Started with Azure Data Studio

Todd Horn Articles, Azure, Cloud, Databases, Development Technologies & Tools, DevOps, Project Management Leave a Comment

On my last two projects, I decided to give Azure Data Studio a try to see how it measured up to SSMS. Azure Data Studio gives you a more modern editor experience. Itโ€™s comparable to Visual Studio Code with IntelliSense, source control with GIT, and an integrated terminal for Powershell or SQLMD commands.

Azure Data Studio was built with a data platform user in mind, and its easy editing and export options, built-in charting of query results, and customizable dashboards make it an incredibly valuable tool.

In this post, Iโ€™ll go over some of the basics of how to use Azure Data Studio.

GitOps Declarative Continuous Deployment

[Video] GitOps – Declarative CD Intro, Kubernetes + ArgoCD Demo

Keyhole Software Cloud, DevOps, Git, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Videos Leave a Comment

GitOps provides a declarative approach for improving the management of application delivery.

In this 50-minute video, Keyhole Principal Consultant Jaime Niswonger discusses basic GitOps fundamentals and various implementations in a Kubernetes environment. He covers GitOps best practices that unify deployment, management, and monitoring for containerized clusters and applications. Then he introduces ArgoCD and shows its capabilities in an OpenShift/Kubernetes environment. Jaime includes his own experiences and what he has seen working with companies across various industries.

JSON Server for API Mocking

JSON Server to Mock API Servers: A Quick and Easy Solution

Todd Leininger API Development, Articles, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Testing, Tutorial Leave a Comment

I have found myself in the following scenario many times throughout my career. Everyone is ready to get the project started. You know what you are going to be working on, and as the frontend developer, you get started right away. You get to the point that you are ready to test your code to see how the API calls work. Thereโ€™s one major thing in your way, though. The APIs aren’t done yet.

You could just create some static JSON files and read them in, but that doesn’t really test out calling an API. Thatโ€™s where JSON Server swoops in to save the day. In this post, Iโ€™ll walk through how to use JSON Server. Weโ€™ll set up our environment, serve a simple JSON file, and generate mock data.