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
Published inLevel Up Coding·Nov 6Member-onlyTIL — Terraform’s “null_resource”, its usefulness is anything but “null”What does “null” mean? From Vocabulary.com — “Null means having no value; in other words null is zero, like if you put so little sugar in your coffee that it’s practically null” While the above is true in the context of the real world, in the programming world, the sentiment…DevOps4 min readDevOps4 min read
Published inGoogle Cloud - Community·Oct 8TIL — “Vampire Power” In Google Cloud? Debugging and understanding Network Service Directory BillingTL;DR — I found an unexplained billing in a supposedly empty project for the resource — “Networking Service Directory Registered Resource — D34A-7997–2D03”. Here’s how I got past and managed to remove this from my billing! As a very Asian dude in Singapore, I’m no stranger to what “Vampire power”…Google Cloud Platform6 min readGoogle Cloud Platform6 min read
Published inGoogle Cloud - Community·Sep 17Member-onlyFiguring It Out — It’s Google’s Cool-bernetes time | #1.0.1 — Budgeting woesSo…while I was working out on the code and post for the first part of this series, “Getting Started Again!”, I felt that one particular bit did not fit as part of that introductory post, but was large enough that I felt it should have its own article on. Without…Kubernetes4 min readKubernetes4 min read
Published inGoogle Cloud - Community·Aug 13Member-onlyFiguring It Out — It’s Google’s Cool-bernetes time | #1 — Getting Started Again!A year ago, I started a series of exploring EKS in AWS — as seen here. This year, I thought, “Why not do that in Google Kubernetes Engine, in Google Cloud”, and here we are again! Using what I have built in AWS and my knowledge in GCP, I sought…Kubernetes6 min readKubernetes6 min read
Jul 16Member-onlyMy engineering leadership manifesto “draft”It’s been around 4 years since I held my first official role which allowed me to dabble in my engineering leadership skills. Ever since, I have participated in different capacities as a Tech Lead, and Engineering Manager, across different companies of varying products and scale. Yet, the journey…Leadership6 min readLeadership6 min read
Jul 2Member-onlyTIL — Building a reusable prompt in a Shell/BASH scriptWriting shell scripts fascinates me a lot. Something about being able to quickly and easily bring up some utility to simplify or even automate the manual effort brings some level of joy to me. However, working with shell scripts has its own quirks as compared to regular programming languages. For…Software Development5 min readSoftware Development5 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