ANZ Pied Piper

The enablement portion of the program is behind us. Now it's time to have fun! As we saw in previous posts, all program participants acquired various skills through a series of workshops and competed against each other by creating a project of their own involving elements from all workshops. The next step was to have a 24 hour Hackathon. Hackathons are events where participants prototype a concept about a common theme, either working individually or in teams. Between illness and various working and internal training commitments only 9 people could join us but it was fun. The theme we chose for the Hackathon was to improve the app I had developed for the previous year's Presales Conference. The idea of the original app was twofold: to help us navigate the event and choose between as many as 4 parallel tracks to help us obtain better feedback about the different sessions as they happen, as opposed to rely on a survey at the end of the 3 day event. Additionally th...

One of the key mandates of  Cloud Native Apps is to be stateless. This allows them to be ephemeral and to scale out massively. In order to do so they must store their data outside somewhere, but where? The truth is that Cloud Native Apps  love “Object storage”. Object storage is in way similar to File storage, but unlike File it doesn't have a  directory tree. Data is organized in "buckets" which are a single level deep. These "buckets" must have a unique name. "Objects" are files that get stored along with a unique name within the bucket. Apps use this unique identifier retrieve the object. You could say that it is a key-value store where the value portion is a file. Two factors allow object storage to grow orders of magnitude larger than file storage: The simple (almost absence of) data structure Metadata is stored along with the object These mean you don't need to preallocate a table of pointers to files and directories as well t...