A load-balancing strategy is a strategy allowing to spread the load (e.g. HTTP requests) over a fleet of instances providing some functionality. If you’re like me you probably think of a sort of load-balancer (e.g. Nginx, AWS ELB, …) in front of several nodes (e.g. EC2 instances, docker containers, …). This is, indeed, a very […]
Category archives: Computing
Back-pressure in Grpc-akkastream
Grpc-akkastream, the akka-stream implementation built on top of GRPC looks good on the surface but if you look under the hood there is one problem: it doesn’t provide any support for back-pressure. Akka-streams (as any reactive-stream implementation) provides a way for back-pressure and GRPC (at least the Java version) also has an API that support […]
Making sense of SBT
SBT is probably the most popular (as in “most used”) build tool for Scala yet people (including me) experienced a hard time figuring out why it doesn’t perform as they expect. Originally known as the “Simple Build Tool” it has later been renamed to “Scala Build Tool” (maybe to acknowledge the fact that it was […]
Akka stream interface for gRPC
Back from holidays let’s continue with some of my favourite topics: AkkaStreams and gRPC. We’ve already seen how can take advantage of the ScalaPB code generation tool to generate new interfaces (GRPCMonix) on top of the grpc-java implementation or to create new tools to integrate gRPC with other services (GRPCGateway). Similarly to GRPCMonix which provides […]
Understanding Scala Futures and Execution Contexts
Viktor Klang recently published a set of useful tips on Scala Futures. While being widespread and heavily used, people (especially newcomers) are still experiencing problems working with Scala Futures. In my opinion many of the problems come from a misunderstanding or misconception on how Futures work. (e.g. the strict nature of Futures and the way […]
Publishing gRPC services over REST/HTTP with gRPC Gateway
In the previous post we’ve seen how to implement a gRPC service in Scala. While gRPC is a great way to implement remote services, many client/server interactions are still implemented using REST/HTTP nowadays. So the question is: Is it possible to use gRPC to define and implement services and make them available over REST at […]
gRPC in Scala
As many might think, gRPC doesn’t stand for “google Remote Procedure Call” but is a recursive acronym meaning “gRPC Remote Procedure Call”. I don’t know if you buy it but the truth is that is was originally developed by Google and then open-sourced. If you’ve been in the IT for a while RPC doesn’t necessarily […]
Kafka concepts and common patterns
Many people see Kafka as a messaging system but in reality it’s more than that. It’s a distributed streaming platform. While it can be used as a traditional messaging platform it also means that it’s more complex. In this post we’ll introduce the main concepts present in Kafka and see how they can be used […]
Generating protobuf formats with scala.meta macros
Today’s focus is on scalameta. In this introduction post we’re going to see how to create a macro annotation to generate protobuf formats for case classes. The idea is to be able to serialise any case classes to protobuf just by adding a @PBSerializable annotation to the case class declaration. Then behind the scene the […]
PBDirect – Protobuf without the .proto files
Protocol Buffer (aka Protobuf) is an efficient and fast way to serialise data into a binary format. It is much more compact than Java serialisation or any text-based format (Json, XML, CSV, …). Protobuf is schema based – it needs a description (in a .proto file) of the data structures to be serialised/deserialised. On the […]