TWIL: March 6, 2022

I had to skip last week so this is a Last Two Weeks I Learned (LTWIL) and not a This Week I Learned (TWIL). I’m highlighting two interesting podcasts and a few articles on WSO2 API Manager, Azure API Management, Istio Service Mesh, Kubernetes and Security. Enjoy!


Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1781: The History of .NET with Mark Miller
.NET is twenty years old – how has it changed? Carl and Richard talk with Mark Miller about how he moved from Delphi to .NET, and how .NET has continued to be relevant through the years. The conversation also digs into those pivotal moments of .NET and how it shaped the product into the open-source, cross-platform product of today!

The Azure Podcast

Episode 411: Event Driven Architectures on Azure
Cloud Solution Architects Suhas Rao and Graeme Foster have implemented several Event Driven Architectures on Azure. They talk to Cynthia and Sujit about why customers are looking at these application patterns and provide valuable insights into implementing them on Azure.


WSO2 API Manager

Integrating WSO2 API Manager with Istio Service Mesh
WSO2 API Manager is a full lifecycle API Management solution which has an API Gateway and a Microgateway. Istio is a service mesh solution which helps users to deploy and manage a collection of microservices. Service meshes in their native form have an “API Management gap” that requires to be filled. These are related to exposing services to external consumers (advanced security, discovery, governance, etc.), business insights, policy enforcement, and monetization. This explains how WSO2 API Manager plans to integrate with Istio and manage services deployed in Istio as APIs.

WSO2: Working with Databases
WSO2 API Manager is shipped with an H2 database for storing data.

WSO2: API Operator for Kubernetes
As microservices are increasingly being deployed on Kubernetes, the need to expose these microservices as well documented, easy to consume, managed APIs is becoming important to develop great applications. The API operator for Kubernetes makes APIs a first-class citizen in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Similar to deploying microservices, you can now use this operator to deploy APIs for individual microservices or compose several microservices into individual APIs. With this users will be able to expose their microservice as managed API in Kubernetes environment without any additional work.


Azure API Management

Azure API Management: Self-hosted gateway overview
This article explains how the self-hosted gateway feature of Azure API Management enables hybrid and multi-cloud API management, presents its high-level architecture, and highlights its capabilities.

API Management: Guidance for running self-hosted gateway on Kubernetes in production
In order to run the self-hosted gateway in production, there are various aspects to take in to mind. For example, it should be deployed in a highly-available manner, use configuration backups to handle temporary disconnects and many more. This article provides guidance on how to run self-hosted gateway on Kubernetes for production workloads to ensure that it will run smoothly and reliably.

API Management: Provision a self-hosted gateway in Azure API Management
Provisioning a gateway resource in your Azure API Management instance is a prerequisite for deploying a self-hosted gateway. This article walks through the steps to provision a gateway resource in API Management.


Istio Service Mesh

How to Integrate Your Service Registry with Istio?
Fundamentally, microservices are distributed systems, often in large scales, which bring the burden of networking such as service discovery, retry, circuit breaker, as well as the observability such as metrics, logging, and distributed tracing. Istio helps microservices to offloads these common concerns to a dedicated infrastructure layer, so the microservices themselves can shift the burden of microservices to Istio, and focus on their own business logic. Istio depends on Kubernetes for service discovery, which means you need to deploy your microservices in Kubernetes clusters and use Kubernetes service for discovery before you can offload service communication to Istio.

API Management in Service Mesh Using Istio and WSO2 API Manager
WSO2 API Manager is a full lifecycle API Management solution which has an API Gateway and a Microgateway. Istio is a service mesh solution which helps users to deploy and manage a collection of microservices. Service meshes in their native form have an “API Management gap” that requires to be filled. These are related to exposing services to external consumers (advanced security, discovery, governance, etc.), business insights, policy enforcement, and monetization. In this screencast, we will be looking at how to apply API Management in Service Mesh using Istio and WSO2 API Manager.

WSO2 API Manager Integration with Istio service mesh solution
While Istio provides data plane (DP) and control plane (CP) capabilities, WSO2 API Manager provides management plane capabilities to manage microservices. When you need to expose a service to the outside in a managed way, the API developer can use the WSO2 API Publisher Portal to create the API by attaching necessary policies like security.


Kubernetes

Kubernetes Patterns : The Service Discovery Pattern
Kubernetes deploys applications through Pods. Pods can be placed on different hosts (nodes), scaled up by increasing their number, scaled down by killing the excess ones, and moved from one node to another. All those dynamic actions must occur while ensuring that the application remains reachable at all times. To address this critical requirement, we use the Service Discovery pattern.


Security

‘Ice phishing’ on the blockchain
The technologies that connect us are continually advancing, and while this brings tremendous new capabilities to users, it also opens new attack surfaces for adversaries and abusers. Social engineering represents a class of threats that has extended to virtually every technology that enables human connection. Our recent analysis of a phishing attack connected to the blockchain reaffirms the durability of these threats as well as the need for security fundamentals to be built into related future systems and frameworks.

As Tanks Rolled Into Ukraine, So Did Malware. Then Microsoft Entered the War.
Last Wednesday, a few hours before Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine, alarms went off inside Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center, warning of a never-before-seen piece of “wiper” malware that appeared aimed at the country’s government ministries and financial institutions.


Cool Stuff

Learning Pathways
Here you will find a collection of potential learning journeys that you may wish to consider as part of your own professional development.  These pathways are generally aligned to role-based certification and have been designed as a left-to-right journey that starts with the fundamentals; then builds on this foundational knowledge before leading you through role-based training/certification and beyond. Look out for the Learning Companions which provides additional resources for a particular solution (e.g., Synapse Analytics, GitHub and Sentinel) and are attached to the main pathways most closely alignedtothat solution and certification (Data Engineer, DevOps, etc).

If You Have These 6 Traits, People Will See You as a Leader (Regardless of Your Position)
Obviously, the CEO of your company and your boss will be seen as leaders, whether they realize it or not. But you, regardless of your role in the organization, can be seen as a leader as well. And understanding that and acting in that way will be better for your company — and for your own career.


Have a peaceful week.

Photo by Vasilios Muselimis on Unsplash