PinnedMember-only50% off our AWS bill — What six months of studying our bill taught meHi there, I was the former Director of Engineering for a Singaporean startup, ZilLearn. And this was one of the most interesting engineering challenges that we faced in this last half-year, accumulating a ~50% in cost savings on our AWS bill. To begin, it should go without saying that saving…AWS12 min readAWS12 min read
Mar 16Member-onlyGoogle Translate API — Should you use V2 or V3? And what cool stuff are there in V3?In this rapidly globalized world today, “translation” has become a key component in many of our applications today. Translating direct communications between users and the business is critical, especially for business that are going global and reaching new markets. Beyond direct communications, localizations is another key area for outreach, such…Google Cloud Platform13 min readGoogle Cloud Platform13 min read
Published inDev Genius·Oct 23, 2022Member-onlyThe Benchmarking — PostgreSQL on Google CloudThis is the Part II of my breakdown of Google Cloud’s products — comparing the preview release of AlloyDB against Cloud SQL. See more on Part I for the detailed breakdown here. 1. IntroductionGoogle Cloud Platform10 min readGoogle Cloud Platform10 min read
Sep 18, 2022Member-onlyPostgreSQL on Google Cloud — AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, or Cloud SpannerA year ago, I wrote about how we can explore different ways to monitor and optimize SQL queries for PostgreSQL databases provisioned with Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) Cloud SQL, given that they previously released a new feature for doing that — Query Insights! In the recent Google I/O, a new…Google Cloud Platform7 min readGoogle Cloud Platform7 min read
Aug 22, 2022Member-onlyHidden Gems — Kibana/ElasticSearch, to interpreting + aggregated JSON results from unstructured logs?!If you’re here, you must have used Kibana and its dependency, ElasticSearch, before. If not, here’s a quick crash course. You log events in your running application, both as a “structured log” of different properties (e.g. JSON object log entry), or “unstructured log” (e.g. Single english sentence). …Kibana5 min readKibana5 min read
Published inAWS Tip·Jun 9, 2022Member-onlyFiguring It Out — Kubernetes, EKS, AWS | #3.0.1 — Scalability issue and fixesAs I was trudging through access control issues in the last chapter, I found that there were scalability issues with the current implementation. This short chapter will recap the issues and fixes for the tooling for scalability, as well as how to test whether full horizontal scalability has been achieved. …Kubernetes6 min readKubernetes6 min read
Published inBig O(n) Development·May 14, 2022Member-onlyCertified Kubernetes Admin (CKA) | Why it was my “natural” next step — and it could be yours tooAs of 30th April 2022, I’ve gotten CKA-certified!!! 🥳 🎉 Oops, not to say that this will be a self-congratulatory post (though I would be hard-pressed to admit that it kind of is). This is also not a post to teach you how to pass this exam, since there are…Kubernetes7 min readKubernetes7 min read
Apr 28, 2022Member-onlyFiguring It Out — Kubernetes, EKS, AWS | #3 — Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)In the last two chapters, we have been mostly occupied with the initial setup of EKS, along with initial monitoring tools for understanding our cluster better. What about onboarding our teammates onto our EKS Kubernetes cluster, and assigning different groups of teammates the appropriate access rights? Let’s explore that today! …Kubernetes6 min readKubernetes6 min read
Apr 15, 2022Member-only“Saving $35000 with one change!” — How does “value creation” start with me, as an Individual Contributor to an Engineering Lead?Let’s get to the point — what is “Value Creation”? Well, it is the process of transforming resources of any kind or form (time, money, materials, etc.) into something that an organization values. But…why does it matter to us? It matters because it justifies your reason for belonging to any…Development7 min readDevelopment7 min read
Published inAWS Tip·Apr 7, 2022Member-onlyFiguring It Out — Kubernetes, EKS, AWS | #2 — Interacting with your cluster? Web dashboards? Terminal?After a week or so of toiling, we’re back! This week, I want to discuss tools that we can use to monitor/manage our clusters. Each one of these tools can be used individually, but it doesn’t hurt to have them installed altogether. And they represent solutions from both the web…Kubernetes8 min readKubernetes8 min read