This article provides a detailed guide of deploying Zookeeper to AWS using Exhibitor for cluster management. Exhibitor is a great help for managing your cluster but getting things up and running is not well documented. Hopefully this article corrects that deficiency. ...

Cloud Dataflow is Google’s managed service for batch and stream data processing. Dataflow provides a programming model and execution framework that allows you to run the same code in batch or streaming mode, with guarantees on correctness and primitives for correcting timing issues. Why should you care about Dataflow? A few reasons. First, Dataflow is the only stream processing framework that has strong consistency guarantees for time series data. Second, Dataflow integrates well with the Google Cloud Platform and provides seamless methods for reading from and writing to the Datastore, PubSub, BigQuery and Cloud Storage. Third, the Dataflow SDK is open source and has received contributions for interfacing with Hadoop, Firebase, and Salesforce — AWS integration is absolutely possible. Lastly, Dataflow is completely managed, whereas competing offerings such as Spark and Flink typically run on top of a Hadoop installation used for intermediate storage. ...

Follow along with this article as we take a guided tour of containerizing Zookeeper using Docker. This guide will show how to install Zookeeper to the container, how to configure the Zookeeper application, and how to share data volumes between the host and container. ...

Whenever I tell people I’ve been working with Java I get the same reaction: “Yuck! Java? Why Java?” And, admittedly, I had the same reaction — at first. But over time, I’ve come to appreciate Java for its type safety, performance, and rock-solid tooling. I’ve also come to notice that this isn’t the Java I was used to — it’s been steadily improving over the last ten years. ...

Lately I’ve been tasked with developing a Java library for internal use. For testing, its proved useful to package the library for local use. This article describes how to add a Jar file to a local Maven repository for use in your own testing and development. Create your local Maven repository Your local Maven repository lives within the project you are developing for. Creating your local repository is as simple as making a new directory. ...

This is something I often do but rarely remember the steps for. This post is intended to serve as a reminder for me and anyone else having the same question: how to add an upstream remote git repository. Start by forking the repository you are contributing to and cloning that repository to your local file system. In this example, we will use the Elasticsearch repository and assume you have cloned it locally. ...

I’ve recently been working with Java via the Google Cloud Dataflow SDK. One problem I’ve had is working with the BigQuery Java Client. It was never entirely clear how to create a repeated record. This article explains how it works and how you can accomplish the same thing. First, you need to create a new TableRow. For this example, let’s assume we are logging events using a guid and a timestamp. ...

I have been working on a Cloud Dataflow project that parses incoming App Engine logs to generate status statistics such as numer of errors in the last 10 minutes. The incoming data is a JSON representation of a LogEntry object. A LogEntry object is represented in Java as a LogEntry class. The task I found myself in was converting the JSON representation of a LogEntry into the Java object for downstream processing. ...

If you haven’t tried vim-test yet, please do. It provides a consistent interface for running unit tests from within vim for a variety of languages and test runners. It also has support for different methods of dispatching your tests from vim to a terminal to retrieve the results. vim-test works out of the box for a number of languages and is easily extensible to support additional languages. In fact, I recently contributed a Maven test runner for the Java language. If you are developing a Maven project, you can now run your tests from within vim using vim-test. ...

This article provides a startup script for deploying Kafka to a Google Compute Engine instance. This isn’t meant to be a production-ready system — it uses the Zookeeper instance embedded with Kafka and keeps most of the default settings. Instead, treat this as a quick and easy way do Kafka development using a live server. This article uses Compute Engine startup scripts to install and run Kafka on instance startup. Startup scripts allow you to run arbitrary Bash commands whenever an instance is created or restarted. Since this script is run on every restart, we lead with a check that makes sure we have not already ran the startup script and, if we have, we simply exit. ...