Month: February 2016

myCoreDump

Introduction

I hope you enjoy this core dump! The thoughts are so interrelated and connected it is difficult to optimize the presentation so you may need to apply your own defragmentation to get it. In addition, the order is not intended to indicate priority, it is all freaking important!

University API (UAPI)

When acquiring or developing an application it must have an API, and preferably a RESTful one. If the function of the application is core to university business then it should be exposed through the UAPI. If it is not a core function of most, if not all, educational institutions, we should expose the API through our API management tools, but it shouldn’t be part of the UAPI.

Personal API (PAPI)

When we build a system that will store personal / individual information we should consider how we might leave the information in the hands or possession of the individual and access it for our use through their personal API. Since no one yet has a personal API, for the time being we must provide that as well. This will require you to stretch your imagination and creativity, but that’s good for you.

Domain-Driven Design

Everyone should read at least the first two chapters of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon! The super short summary – bring domain experts and developers together to create a ubiquitous language that is embedded in the code itself. In addition, define or determine bounded contexts wherein this language is valid. Without this you won’t understand how we’re going to build solutions and you won’t have a clue what is in and what is not in a microservice. Read it!

Microservices

Microservices are an architectural style that will be used at BYU to create larger systems. Systems built using microservices are loosely coupled, I would even go as far as saying they are highly decoupled, they implement a single business capability, they have well defined interfaces, and communicate using only these interfaces. The size of a microservice is governed by the size of the associated bounded context, go and read the DDD book! At BYU an important part of a microservices’ interface is its ability to raise events. Go figure out why.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)

Systems that poll are inefficient! Build systems that raise events so other systems don’t have to waste time and resources. You can keep asking me if you have to do this, but you can be assured that when I change my mind I’ll let you know. If you didn’t find the humor in the last sentence then go read the links again.

Application Acquisition

When we purchase applications we should give preference, strong preference, to those that run in the cloud. In fact, before we choose an application that is not available as a service choose someone in your group you don’t love and care about to come get my approval.

When we build services or applications they will run at Amazon and use the most abstract service offerings that make sense. In other words, we should not instantiate EC2 servers and S3 storage and then build queues, notification services, etc., but instead should use services such as SQS, SNS, Lambda Functions, etc.

DevOps

DevOps is a culture and practice that we hope will result in the rapid development, testing, and deployment of software. We are measuring the number of deployments / week, failures / week, and time to recovery. We are promoting small changes, thorough automated testing, and deployment to production often. Your team (the DDD team) is in charge and responsible for the functionality, performance, and reliability of “your” product. 

If those in the hardware world think you’re off the hook, think again. Software is eating the world, software is eating your world. The days of interacting with network switches, routers, firewalls, etc. are over. Learn to program, learn to configure hardware devices using programs, learn to use DevOps to configure, test, and deploy hardware platforms as rapidly as “other” developers – that’s right, you just became developers!

Where to Compute

In the past we built data centers and populated them with servers, storage systems, and network components. As CPU performance increased computers became more able to run multiple applications, but stability due to unintentional application interaction made this approach intolerable.

We found ourselves with many underutilized servers running single applications to maintain reliability. Along came server virtualization enabling us to instantiate multiple virtual servers on each physical server. Over the past several years the number of physical servers has diminished considerably.

Well, it is time for another paradigm shift. We are now embarking on a journey that will result in our compute and storage being somewhere else. We will take advantage of Amazon to deliver what our applications and services need to run. Acquired applications will also run in the “cloud”. in either case they will not be housed here. Resources used previously to purchase servers and storage, and maintain them will be redirected to this new endeavor.

Networks

Unlike server and storage, I believe we will have a wired and wireless network on campus for the foreseeable future. However, the way we deploy, configure and maintain these networks will change drastically. Remember, software is eating the world and networking is not an exception to the rule. Network components will be physically installed in some generic way and then configured remotely via software.

In a DevOps fashion, when a problem occurs you figure out what went wrong in the configuration script, you repair the script, you test the script, and you redeploy. Remember, we’ll be watching how often you deploy, how many failures occur, and how long it takes to recover.

The days of hugging these devices are over. If you want one to hug, you can have one of the old ones and keep it in your office – disconnected from the network of course.

Domain of Ones Own (DoOO)

As we embark on this new path it is a great time for you to consider contributing to the content of the Internet. Let your light so shine by getting a domain of your own and sharing your goodness and skills with others. get one at domains.byu.edu. Here you can blog your greatest thoughts, post content that you syndicate to Facebook, Twitter or other services. Go learn, learning is fun!

We are offering this service to all students because we believe they should understand more about how the Internet works. We believe they have much to offer the world and they need to know they can share it with little help from service providers. What they build is transportable to other hosting services and is theirs! In the future a DoOO will enable an individual to have a portfolio and expose this and much more through their personal API (PAPI).

Final Thoughts – For Now!

We have a great team! Let’s pursue all of this FUN with the greatest enthusiasm and Heaven will shine down on us. Let us share our best thinking with others: share code on github, answer questions on stackoverflow, blog about your experiences, publish papers, present at conferences, participate on panels. In short, learn, teach one another, and teach the world!

myDoorbell: A Learning Adventure

Introduction

After being a university chief information officer (CIO) for more than a decade, I decided to refresh my technical skills acquired through formal education and practice as an electrical engineer. I learn best by doing, so I picked a project I was interested in pursuing with the end goal being the learning, and not the finished product. I intend to share several posts that I hope illustrate the things learned and hope they are of value to the reader.

My Project

I have interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) movement and wanted to make strides towards making this practical, simple, and secure. I believe connected devices should be simple and consume little power. This likely requires devices that wake periodically, connect to some sort of network, and then go back to a low power state. After some experimentation it was clear, at the time, that WiFi was a real power hog and wasn’t a likely candidate. However, this realization led me to believe that another router, hub, or coordinator device would be necessary. I recall the effort required to convince homeowners to acquire WiFi routers and looked for an approach that would make this palatable.

I decided the answer was to create a product that homeowners would want to purchase because it excited them, and by the way it contained a network router / coordinator. Once acquired on its own merits, the product would facilitate the inexpensive and simple acquisition of other devices that connect to it. Products worth considering would be interesting to households and would connect to household power:

  • Lamps
  • Televisions or other audio / video (AV) equipment
  • Thermostats
  • Doorbells

Lamps seem simple and boring. However, after implementing my first choice, I know I should have chosen a lamp because it would have been boring, simple, and done! I decided embedding anything in televisions or other AV equipment would require skills and resources I didn’t have. Nest took the thermostat direction and while I disagree on the approach of putting so much technology in a tightly coupled system, I didn’t want everyone to judge my work against a commercially available product. I chose to implement a doorbell because they are ubiquitous, simple and meet my requirements:

  • They are in nearly every U.S. household.
  • Power is available where the indoor ringer is found.
  • They do one thing and no one cares if they do anything else.
  • They are in a good physical location for a network router.
  • They are out of the way, aren’t moved, never unplugged, or inadvertently reconfigured.

I chose to create a doorbell that would function as a replacement doorbell, would act as an IoT network router, and connect this network to the Internet by also connecting to an existing WiFi network. A quick trip to Home Depot revealed that an inexpensive doorbell cost about $13. Even with no experience in product development, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to build a doorbell that also acted as an IoT to WiFi gateway for $13. To be compelling enough to get households to acquire my doorbell it would have to be feature rich:

  • This doorbell would play ringtones uploaded by the user to celebrate seasons, holidays, birthdays, etc.
  • Each time someone rings this doorbell the time and date should be logged.
  • The owner can configure the bell to text them when someone rings.
  • The bell should be easily configured not to make noise when babies are sleeping, pets shouldn’t be disturbed, or the owner just doesn’t want to know you’re there.
  • When the bell is rung it should be configurable to access other Web resources such as APIs, webhooks, etc.
  • The system should be controlled and configured using a mobile app.
  • The doorbell must be a simple replacement of the original doorbell ringer.

While these features increase the likelihood of making it compelling enough to overcome the necessary price point, it certainly eliminates any chance of it being simple.

Summary

In this post I declared my intent to refresh my technical skills through the development of an IoT product, an amazing doorbell, myDoorbell. In the next few posts I will describe how a typical doorbell works, illustrate the general system layout for this new doorbell, describe how to create it so it fits into existing doorbell systems, and discuss many details of the techniques and technologies that make this possible. It will be a fun journey with many twists and turns, but that’s how learning happens!

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