Skip to main content

New Year, New Techniques

Been a long time since my last post!  After Christmas, at work we have been reinventing our current eCommerce solution with a whole new fresh approach and designing a whole layer of Micro-services out of Kubernetes and gRPC.  I'm still getting my head around the configuration of Kube and deployment strategy - fortunately I have a fantastic supporting team helping me through that, but I've been jumping right in the deep end of gRPC.

It allows you to specify much like an interface, defining what functions can be called from a package and what properties the request and response consists of, so any language can consume this configuration and call it appropriately.  It also reduces latency by removing the typical handshakes of the HTTP protocol.  But that doesn't mean that you cannot write typical REST endpoints to it.  To the contrary, be sure to take a look at the NPM package gRPC GraphQL Server.  It seems quite new but does a fantastic job.

To compliment all of this, I have also written an AWS class which I will probably share at a later point, but this connects me to 3 separate services:

  • Lambda: to invoke separate global functions
  • Dynamo: for fast NoSQL database transactions and
  • SSM: for temporary service parameter storage

Another fresh move for me this year is that I'm writing far less functions that return a promise in favour of writing async functions.  It is certainly much cleaner, and I feel rather stupid, but I had previously thought that you could only await on an async function, and not on a function that returns a promise.  Has anyone else thought the same?

Hopefully this has given you some ideas. Stay safe!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running NodeJS Serverless Locally

 So it's been a long time, but I thought this was a neat little trick so I thought I'd share it with the world - as little followers as I have.  In my spare time I've been writing up a new hobby project in Serverless , and while I do maintain a staging and production environment in AWS, it means I need to do a deployment every time I want to test all of the API's I've drafted for it. Not wanting to disturb the yaml configuration for running it locally, I've come up with a simple outline of a server which continues to use the same configuration.  Take the express driven server I first define here: And then put a index.js  in your routes folder to contain this code: Voila! This will take the request from your localhost and interpret the path against your serverless.yml and run the configured function.  Hope this helps someone!
Post a Comment
Read more

question2answer Wordpress Integration

 Today I want to journal my implementation of a WordPress site with the package of "question2answer".  It comes as self-promoted as being able to integrate with WordPress "out of the box".  I'm going to vent a small amount of frustration here, because the only integration going on is the simplicity of configuration with using the same database, along with the user authentication of WordPress.  Otherwise they run as two separate sites/themes. This will not do. So let's get to some context.  I have a new hobby project in mind which requires a open source stack-overflow clone.  Enter question2answer .  Now I don't want to come across as completely ungrateful, this package - while old, ticks all the boxes and looks like it was well maintained, but I need every  page to look the same to have a seamless integration.  So, let's go through this step by step. Forum Index Update This step probably  doesn't need to be done, but I just wanted to mak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Auth0 - Removing Social Accounts

Greetings!  Long time it has been.  Today's post comes from a project I was handed to convert the tens of thousands of users through our website that are using social accounts into email/password logins.  It has served us well over the years, but with the on-going scrutiny from the changes at Facebook, and the integration we need to do with our online shop which does not have social authentication - makes sense it is time to remove. But what is the cleanest way? We want to make this as seamless and easy as possible for our customers and with one EDM delivery.  I have come up with the following procedure: The comments should make it fairly self-explanatory.  What you may find interesting is that we are deleting the corresponding user from Wordpress .  This will get re-created after they sign in with the new user ID.  If you are curious on the SQL that can be used to look up and delete the user by the Auth0 user_id, you can use this query: From there you...
Post a Comment
Read more