Finding Tech

HTTPS Everywhere: Secure You Requests

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:50:55 +0530

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox and Chrome extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure. Encrypt the web: Install HTTPS Everywhere today.

HTTPS Everywhere is produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site. The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by using a clever technology to rewrite requests to these sites to HTTPS.

Hapi: A Framework that tries to make you smile!

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:05:25 +0530

Hapi

A rich framework for building web applications and services. hapi is a simple to use configuration-centric framework with built-in support for input validation, caching, authentication, and other essential facilities. hapi enables developers to focus on writing reusable application logic instead of spending time building infrastructure. The framework supports a powerful plugin architecture for pain-free and scalable extensibility.

OpsMezzo: Completing Cloud Deployments

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:56:06 +0530

OpsMezzo

After more than 18 months of work, Nodejitsu announced the release of OpsMezzo at TXJS this week, a complete solution to provisioning, orchestration and configuration management.

The majority of OpsMezzo is now available as Open-Source. A related Press Release can be found at nodejitsu.com.

Cloud computing has matured dramatically since Amazon Web Services launched in 2006. A dizzying number of vendors have emerged in the market to solve a wide spectrum of specific problems.

These products have matured over the years, but they are built on a fundamentally flawed thesis: the parts are more important than the whole. In others words: organizations are on their own to integrate individual products into a complete system. Yes, there is a large amount of source material available through blogs, tutorials, and training, but the manual integration work remains.

At it’s core, this means that organizations running in “the cloud” are dealing with too many vendors to solve simple problems. Vendors using multiple languages, databases, operating systems and other operational internals. While we live in a polyglot world, the operational calculus of running these multi-vendor systems is challenging to even seasoned professionals.

At this point you are probably wondering: “What about PaaS solutions?” PaaS is great for individuals and organizations who do not have (or do not want to have) an operational competency. This concept of “NoOps”, while attractive to some, is also fundamentally flawed:

Too simple for larger organizations: In order to present users with a set of APIs that are simple enough even for novices massive operational details are hidden. Larger organizations (especially those running their own datacenters) already have an operational competency, so the PaaS abstraction is just too simple.
Still too many vendors: Heroku pioneered the concept of “add -ons” and since then every PaaS company has been quick on their heels to copy that model. This leaves their customers paying too much to too many vendors with little-to-no visibility behind the scenes.

We saw these problems two years ago in the early days of Nodejitsu and set out to make OpsMezzo a complete solution built entirely on a single platform: Node.js + CouchDB.

Keep reading to learn more about how OpsMezzo can streamline and simplify your devops workflow. Or if you’re interested in trying out OpsMezzo in your organization send an email to sales@nodejitsu to get a free evaluation!

OpenTSDB: HBased for Time Series

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:26:31 +0530

OpenTSDB

OpenTSDB is a distributed, scalable Time Series Database (TSDB) written on top of HBase. OpenTSDB was written to address a common need: store, index and serve metrics collected from computer systems (network gear, operating systems, applications) at a large scale, and make this data easily accessible and graphable.

Thanks to HBase’s scalability, OpenTSDB allows you to collect many thousands of metrics from thousands of hosts and applications, at a high rate (every few seconds). OpenTSDB will never delete or downsample data and can easily store billions of data points. As a matter of fact, StumbleUpon uses it to keep track of hundred of thousands of time series and collects over 1 billion data points per day in their main production datacenter. Other sites such as Box or Tumblr are pushing tens of billions of data points per day.

Imagine having the ability to quickly plot a graph showing the number of DELETE statements going to your MySQL database along with the number of slow queries and temporary files created, and correlate this with the 99th percentile of your service’s latency. OpenTSDB makes generating such graphs on the fly a trivial operation, while manipulating millions of data point for very fine grained, real-time monitoring.

ShellJS: Now all Shell goes Node

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:30:00 +0530

ShellJS

ShellJS is a portable (Windows/Linux/OS X) implementation of Unix shell commands on top of the Node.js API. You can use it to eliminate your shell script’s dependency on Unix while still keeping its familiar and powerful commands. You can also install it globally so you can run it from outside Node projects - say goodbye to those gnarly Bash scripts!

GitHub Archive is cool project to run Google’s Bigqueries...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:21:27 +0530

GitHub Archive is cool project to run Google’s Bigqueries on GitHub repositories.

Riak CS: Key Value to Storage

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:10:52 +0530

Riak CS (Cloud Storage) is simple, open source storage software built on top of Riak. It can be used to build public or private clouds, or as reliable storage to power applications and services. It features:

Highly available, fault-tolerant storage
Large object support and multipart upload
S3-compatible API and authentication
Multi-tenancy and per-user reporting
Simple operational model for adding capacity
Robust stats for monitoring and metrics

“Save what’s on your mind and remember anything you need...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:01:07 +0530

“Save what’s on your mind and remember anything you need wherever you are. With Google Keep, stay on top of your world by quickly accessing and organizing the information you want. Enter a note with your voice, add a photo, or just type a list. All your notes are instantly saved across your devices.”

Minuum is new way to type on your mobile device. But the buck...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:46:13 +0530

Minuum is new way to type on your mobile device. But the buck does not store there. Watch this video to see the possibilities. Good luck for the team at Minuum.

Now move to the tunes of NoSQL!

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:17:45 +0530

Now move to the tunes of NoSQL!

Gradle: DevOps for Enterprises

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:40:00 +0530

Gradle

Gradle is build automation evolved. Gradle can automate the building, testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or indeed anything else.

Gradle combines the power and flexibility of Ant with the dependency management and conventions of Maven into a more effective way to build. Powered by a Groovy DSL and packed with innovation, Gradle provides a declLearn more about what makes Gradle a compelling choice for build automation or get started with Gradle right now.arative way to describe all kinds of builds through sensible defaults. Gradle is quickly becoming the build system of choice for many open source projects, leading edge enterprises and legacy automation challenges.

Praquet: Takes Hadoop Makes Columnar

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:32:51 +0530

Praquet

Parquet is a columnar storage format for Hadoop.

Parquet was created to make the advantages of compressed, efficient columnar data representation available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem, regardless of the choice of data processing framework, data model, or programming language.

Parquet is built from the ground up with complex nested data structures in mind, and uses the repetition/definition level approach to encoding such data structures, as popularized by Google Dremel. We believe this approach is superior to simple flattening of nested name spaces.

Parquet is built to support very efficient compression and encoding schemes. Parquet allows compression schemes to be specified on a per-column level, and is future-proofed to allow adding more encodings as they are invented and implemented. We separate the concepts of encoding and compression, allowing parquet consumers to implement operators that work directly on encoded data without paying decompression and decoding penalty when possible.

CRIU: Pause and Resume Anything

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:13:25 +0530

CRIU

Welcome to CRIU, a project to implement checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux in userspace.

Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace, or CRIU, is a software tool for Linux operating system. Using this tool, you can freeze a running application (or part of it) and checkpoint it to a hard drive as a collection of files. You can then use the files to restore and run the application from the point it was frozen at. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space.

The project is currently under very active development. CRIU is a sub-project of OpenVZ

Thorax: Another Vertebrate

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:42:34 +0530

Thorax

By Ryan Eastridge and Kevin Decker is another Walmart Labs project that brings together Backbone and Handlebars to provide an “opinionated, battle tested framework for building large scale web applications”.

Thorax has some sugar to help with tasks like data binding and events. Descendants of Thorax.View automatically have their properties mapped to template variables, and binding a model will cause the model’s attributes to be bound. Models and collections can also trigger view events, and events are inheritable.

Collections can also be rendered using the collection keyword in the template, and the views will stay current as models in the collection change.

It seems like Thorax fits in with my particular way of working with Backbone, and it looks like it might cut down a lot of the boilerplate I find myself writing so I’m going to give it a go.

Forget-Table: Table with Memory Loss

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:19:15 +0530

Forget-Table

Forget-Table is a database for storing non-stationary categorical distributions that forget old observations responsibly. It has been designed to store millions of distributions and can be written to at a high volume.

“Forgetting” from a distribution is done by simulating a Poisson process with a user-specified rate. This results in equalizing all bins in a distribution such that, if no new observations are added in, the distribution will approach uniform.

Ribbon: Tying Up Processes Together

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:09:06 +0530

Ribbon

Ribbon plays an critical role in supporting inter-process communication in the cloud. The library includes the Netflix’ client side load balancers and clients for middle tier services.

Ribbon provides the following features:

Multiple and pluggable load balancing rules
Integration with service discovery
Built-in failure resiliency
Cloud enabled
Clients integrated with load balancers
Archaius configuration driven client factory

There are three sub projects:

ribbon-core: includes load balancer and client interface definitions, common load balancer implementations, integration of client with load balancers and client factory.
ribbon-eureka: includes load balancer implementations based on Eureka client, which is the library for service registration and discovery.
ribbon-httpclient: includes the JSR-311 based implementation of REST client integrated with load balancers.

Aegir: Manage Drupal Networks

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:47:57 +0530

Aegir

The Aegir hosting system allows developers and site administrators to automate many of the common tasks associated with deploying and managing large websites. Aegir makes it easy to install, upgrade, deploy, and backup an entire network of Drupal sites.

Recent support for multi-server site deployment and management allows for migrating sites between servers, including large sites spread across multiple web servers.

Aegir is under active development. You can check out the latest code from Drupal.org’s provision and hostmaster projects.

Galera: Solving Cluster Headache

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:52:50 +0530

Galera

MySQL/Galera is synchronous multi-master cluster for MySQL/InnoDB database, having features like:

Synchronous replication
Active-active multi-master topology
Read and write to any cluster node
Automatic membership control, failed nodes drop from the cluster
Automatic node joining
True parallel replication, on row level
Direct client connections, native MySQL look & feel

Janitor Monkey: Part of the Simian Army

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:01:59 +0530

Janitor Monkey

Janitor Monkey is a service which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud looking for unused resources to clean up. The design of Janitor Monkey is flexible enough to allow extending it to work with other cloud providers and cloud resources. The service is configured to run, by default, on non-holiday weekdays at 11 AM. The schedule can be easily re-configured to fit your business’ need.

Janitor Monkey determines whether a resource should be a cleanup candidate by applying a set of rules on it. If any of the rules determines that the resource is a cleanup candidate, Janitor Monkey marks the resource and schedules a time to clean it up. The design of Janitor Monkey also makes it simple to customize the set of rules or to add new ones.

Since there can always be exceptions when you want to keep an unused resource longer, before a resource is deleted by Janitor Monkey, the owner of the resource will receive a notification a configurable number of days ahead of the cleanup time. This is to prevent a resource that is still needed from being deleted by Janitor Monkey. The resource owner can then flag the resources that they want to keep as exceptions and Janitor Monkey will leave them alone

Laravel: PHP Getting Classy

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:15:42 +0530

Laravel

Laravel is a clean and classy framework for PHP web development. Freeing you from spaghetti code, Laravel helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive syntax. Development should be a creative experience that you enjoy, not something that is painful. Enjoy the fresh air.