Author Archives: greenido

Chrome, JavaScript

Monitor Your Site With Apps Script

Network alertIn this short tutorial we will see how to built an application that can be used as a (simple) Nagios but, without the need to set up a server and maintain a lot of code. It’s not a replacement to a ‘full’ monitoring systems that give you rich set of abilities but more ‘an idea’ to show you the power of Google cloud with Apps script. The main three components of our system will be:

  1. Google Spreadsheet – We will use two sheets. One to allow us to set configuration data like: urls to monitor, email to get notifications etc’. The other will be our ‘log’. We will write to it all the alerts so we could analyze them later.
  2. Google Form – This will be a quick and easy way to acknowledge that we are aware for the situation and we wish to mute the emails.
  3. Apps Script – All the logic for the checks, alerts and everything in between will be done with a short script with one trigger.

For the first two components, we will use a regular google sheet that looks similar to this: Continue reading →

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cloud

How To Set A Server To Server VPN on Google Compute Engine

There are many cases where you wish to migrate data from one location to another. In most cases, you will wish to do it over a secure channel. In this tutorial we will see what are the main steps in order to set a VPN (in this case: StrongSwan) on Google Compute Engine so you will have a server to server VPN solution between your on own server(s) located in the basement and Compute Engine.
In this tutorial we will setup a VPN connection from your own datacenter to Compute Engine. First, let’s look at the big picture. We wish to have one gateway in our datacenter and another on Compute Engine. These gateways, will be responsible to connect and secure our channel so we could transfer our data over it in a secure way.

High Level Network diagram

VPN on GCE network macro view

Main steps

Continue reading →

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Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, mobile, webdev

Chrome And HTML5 Updates

There are some very interesting technologies that are now available in Chrome. In this post I will try to cover some of them.

We know that Google started the Chrome project on the three ideas of speed, simplicity, and security. It’s still focusing on these important aspects while keep moving forward (fast) on implementation of many other HTML5 features. You can find Chrome on mobile, desktop, Chromebook and Chromecast. Let’s see what are the new, improved features we got these days as developers in Chrome platform:

Focus areas Chrome is moving forward

Mobile and Open Web Platform

We’re investing a lot of time to make sure mobile web experiences improve and that they are easier to develop!

  1. Build amazing mobile web apps
  2. WebGL, Web Audio, WebRTC, Web Speech and many more APIs that give you ‘native’ capabilities inside your browser.
  3. Vibration
  4. Device Motion
  5. WebRTC code lab (link) to check the new world of media (video/audio) in Chrome without plugins.

Continue reading →

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Chrome, cloud, webdev

What’s New In Google Developers World

Here are my slides from a talk I gave last week on what’s new and available for you as a developer in Google’s world. This talk gives a high level overview on the main APIs. If you wish to dive deeper on some of them, you will find many links in the slides.

Continue reading →

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cloud

Big Query Basics

Big QueryIn today talk, I’ve covered one of the coolest tools in the “big data” world – Big Query. What is BigQuery? Well, querying massive datasets can be time consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure. BigQuery solves this problem by enabling super-fast, SQL-like queries, using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. If you wish to play with a cool a BQ demo, just click on the picture on the left.

When to use it?

There are few bold use cases in the analytic landscape that Big Query is the right tool for the job:

  • It’s a great option when your MapReduce based analysis (=Hadoop system) can be slow for ad-hoc queries.
  • If you don’t wish to manage large data centers and tuning Hadoop all day long.
  • It seems that analytics tools should be services at 2014, no? Continue reading →
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cloud

Google Cloud Storage Migration, Backup, and Archive

Google cloud storageToday we covered Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Storage is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data objects on Google’s infrastructure. Few important features: Multiple layers of redundancy. All data replicated to multiple data centers. Objects can be terabytes in size, with resumable uploads and downloads, and range read support. If you wish to start with Google cloud storage, a good starting point will be to click on the image to the left. In my session, I’ve covered:

  • Migrating Data to Cloud Storage
  • Object Composition
  • Durable Reduced Availability Storage Continue reading →
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cloud

Memcache Basics On Google App Engine

memcache on GAEThis week is packed with great content on “Google cloud platform”. I will summaries some of the talks we having in our office. The first talk I gave was on leveraging memcache when you developing with Google App Engine. Here is the summary:

What is Memcache?

Memcache is an in-memory key-value pairs data store. You can use the put(key, value) and get(key) in order to save and fetch data from it. key or value can be anything that is serializable. It’s important to remember that with GAE – Memcache is a shared service accessed via App Engine APIs. So it’s not a RAM base caching layer that you might have on a single server but a service that you will make a network call each time you write/read from it. Continue reading →

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cloud, HTML5, JavaScript, mobile, php

Google Cloud Platform Update

Google cloud platform updateYesterday we had a very cool event at Google’s offices. There were many mobile and web developers that came to hear what is new with Google cloud technologies (among other thing). I’ve used this set of slides because I knew they will be useful to many more developers that miss the event. That is the reason, I’ve used ‘a lot’ of words on each slide.

The event was recorded and I will update this post with the video soon. Have a great 2014! Continue reading →

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cloud, JavaScript

Big Query And Google Spreadsheet Integration

big queryThere are many options to extend the powerful spreadsheets that Google offers. One of the cool, new ways to leverage its power is by using a spreadsheet as your ‘front-end’ to a big data processing power (=Big Query). In our world, there is a need to get results as fast as possible and since our data sources grow fast. It’s nice to have a tool that let us ‘see’ (and share) results quickly and easily.

What is BigQuery?

Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets. When we saying massive we are talking here on billions of rows (or more). It is a scalable and easy to use tool that gives developers and businesses an easy way into powerful data analytics on demand.

As for Google Docs and their powerful sharing capabilities – I guess we don’t need to elaborate here. So, let’s see what are the steps that will let us get data from BigQuery into our Google spreadsheet.

Integrate BigQuery To Google Spreadsheet Continue reading →

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Business, life

On Anti-fragility And The Black Swan

Anti-fragility bookSince I’ve read “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility”, I found Talab’s ideas to be very interesting and practical. I appreciate the fact that he is not ‘only’ an academic scholar that is living in his ivory tower but rather an option trader that bring a lot of ‘street wise’ into his arguments. Here are two recent talks that he made that put some more light on these fascinating subjects: the concepts of antifragility and black swan events and their implications. Continue reading →

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