Offline Events vs Livestreams: What's Good for Your Business?

Follow the Money and You'll Find Your Answer

Offline Events are more than just events. They're microcosms of overlapping economies. For example, take crypto events that serve the purpose of enabling Founders meet Investors.
Here, the cost of hosting the event is subsidized by selling branding space on things as weird as free keychains (with sponsor's logo slapped on as a sticker) and prime sponsorships (that gets you seated next to the chief guest).
Thus, if your business requires rubbing shoulders with millionaires and Tonya Harding-ing your competitors, without a doubt, you need to iron your suits and step into the offline event.
Make sure the spotlight is on. Jokes apart, offline events also bring a lot of jobs to the area of the venue. This is why politicians jostle to host games and multi-national events.

But, What if You're Running a Tight Ship? Or, Want to Get A Better Bang for Your Buck?

This is where Livestreams, Webinars, and Webcasts etc come into the picture.
From gamers livestreaming games on Twitch to free online classes (like MIT's Open CourseWare), these digital platforms are frugal, more targeted, and above all, can be attended from the comfort of your bed.
Enabling people who can't afford airplane tickets to attend and contribute to events literally thousands of miles away is a game-changer.
Livestreams also score over highly-edited product video events because when an Elon Musk's product unveiling goes horribly wrong, it is the digital platform that ensures its available to GIF makers everywhere.

It's a win-win.

Livestreams are also utilized by companies to help developers learn new skills. For example, Google, is conducting one of their quarterly Cloud Onboarding Livestreams next week. Sign up for free, add to your calendar and login on the 26th of November.
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A year back I was helping some Masters students here in Sydney with a side project. I was mentoring them, guiding them to have a real-world project they could include in their resumes. For this project, we started using Google Cloud Platform, why? Because you get $300 free credit for a year :) simple.
There are other Serverless container offerings like AWS Fargate and Azure Containers, still, I don’t think they are as good and as software engineer friendly as Cloud Run.
I wanted to learn how to set up a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Kubernetes cluster, so I teamed up with another Devops Engineer and started to configure a Kubernetes cluster. As the app’s backend API was already containerized and GKE was managed K8s I thought getting a running URL would not take long.
Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byGeshan Manandhar

Monolithic vs Microservice Architecture: All You Need To Know

The problem that enormous scale venture applications a work in progress bring to the table of programming designers was excessively. There was no arrangement at all to this issue that is the reason an alternate building style was required. Henceforth the expression "microservices" appeared after the economical advancement in distributed computing space, it was first utilized by Dr Peter Rogers in a meeting on distributed computing in 2005.
"Microservices" was debuted at an occasion for programming planners in 2011, where the term was utilized to depict a style of design that numerous participants were trying different things with at the time.
The Monolithic engineering is the traditional style that we have been utilizing ordinarily though the Microservices design is utilized distinctly in very enormous scale applications which can't withstand personal time.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byManoj Khanna

Test Your Blockchain On Google Cloud Using Hyperledger Caliper [A How To Guide]

To benchmark your application with CouchDB run:
caliper benchmark run -w ./ -c benchmark/composer/justice/config.yaml -n benchmark/composer/justice/composer.json
To benchmark your application with LevelDB run:
caliper benchmark run -w ./ -c benchmark/composer/justice/config.yaml -n benchmark/composer/justice/composer-level.json
The results of the benchmark will be reported on the terminal.
Do not forget to stop your machines in Google Cloud after finishing the experiments or else 💸.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byRafael Belchior

Decentralized Cloud Storage is changing the face of the internet (2/2)

The decentralized cloud storage space is very new, and there is still a lot of space left for new entrants to provide different platforms for the users. Let’s compare each one of the solutions that we have discussed above.
Filecoin — Built by the same guys who built the IPFS protocol. Filecoin is a solution for individual users to store their data an alternative to DropBox. Filecoin is building on IPFS, which ensures scalability, robustness, and security. With over a $257 million raised in the ICO, Filecoin is still in the development phase. However, it has announced a lot of partnerships with leading organizations like the Ethereum Foundation.
Sia — Sia is more targeted towards the consumer market, providing them with an alternative to other cloud storage providers. It positions itself and compares it to Amazon and Google. I think this could be the best-decentralized cloud storage solution for the public.
Storj — Just like Sia, StorJ is also targeted towards the consumer, but they are more focused on encryption and distribution. With a similar set of features, Storj can be considered as the closest competitor to Sia.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byAdam Boudjemaa

Overcoming Computing Risks and Challenges on Cloud

In 2015, Bain and Company survey stated that only 18 percent of businesses were willing to move their entire workload to cloud, in 2019 however the number has grown to over 83 percent, according to a survey by RightScale.
According to the study by RightScale, “13 percent of enterprises spend more than $12 million a year on public cloud, while 50 percent spend more than $1.2 million annually.Public cloud expenditure is growing 3x faster than private cloud usage ( 24 percent vs. 8 percent)”-the study states.
Although companies can save much more in the long run if they shift their workload to the cloud, the initial investment is a big problem for many small companies.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byPrabalta Rijal

Symfony is without doubts one of the most popular PHP frameworks. It has amazing flexibility and is written in an applaudable modular fashion. Some Symfony components even power other prominent frameworks like Laravel.
Running Symfony is a bit tricky at times, especially the permissions of the cache and logs folder, this blog post demystifies running the Symfony Demo App in a docker container and hosting it serverless on Google Cloud Run.

Prerequisites

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byGeshan Manandhar

Musings On Software Architecture: Monoliths to Microservices

But I believe it is a bad idea to use the microservice architectural style from the start of a new project. I see that a microservices architecture adds a huge complexity overhead on the infrastructure, and the developers need to take a lot of extra steps not directly related to code to do their job, i.e. communication and coordination.
Basically, you need not only a team to build a microservices architecture, but you need a very good team. It is very easy to build a bad microservices architecture, because it involves very high-level tasks which are not intuitive to the average developer or infrastructure manager.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byLeonardo Venturini

IoT Electric Scooter Cloud Data Collection and Visualization with Soracom + Raspberry Pi [Part 2]

We'll send each data packet through Soracom's secure cellular network, so it’ll be incredibly difficult for a malicious hacker to tamper with the electric scooter and access its data. We’ll also be able to easily track the electric scooter’s location, battery, and speed.
Normally, we’d have to create and manage our own database and server solutions to do all this, but luckily, Soracom has their own solution for managing data. We can just use SORACOM Harvest to collect and store data. It’s super easy to set up too.
All the Raspberry Pi has to do is send an API request to the Harvest endpoint which can be accomplished in a couple lines of code. Soracom conveniently has another service on their platform called SORACOM Lagoon that lets us easily visualize our data with charts, maps, and tables.
We don’t even have to write any code! Lagoon can connect to Harvest automatically, so we don’t need to worry about shuffling data between different servers and services.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byAaron Huang

Serverless Can Help You To Focus

Much like high-level programming languages are an abstraction of machine code, Serverless is an abstraction for cloud infrastructure. When programming in a low-level language, we need to understand the memory requirements for our code to run, explicitly allocate and de-allocate it.
Same with traditionally hosted applications, we need to estimate the workload at any given moment in time and provision the infrastructure required to run it. Just like how high-level programming languages abstract away the burden of configuration, enabling us to build applications faster, Serverless enables us to focus on the code that’s relevant to our product without having to worry about babysitting servers.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} bySimona Cotin

Serverless Myths Debunked - Top Things You Thought You Knew

The shift to a cloud-native technology stack, such as the move to serverless applications, actually has the ability to accelerate implementation and improve application security. In order to accomplish this, a clear blueprint is critical in order to fully understand what it is, and what it enables, so that organizations can have confidence that they are using the right tools and processes to avoid risk.
In fact, organizations that have taken this approach when deploying sensitive serverless applications have been able to adopt the right set of security solutions to minimize risk and maximize security, and are finding these applications to be the most secure applications they are operating.

Read full article or {TWEET THIS} byJessica Bruce