A Node-RED Twitter-follower-flow

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In my last blog post I did an introduction to “how use the starter kit for Node-RED on IBM Cloud” and in that new blog post I want to highlight the Node-RED Twitter-follower-flow I developed as an introduction to different topics I frequently face at hackathons. Here is the link to the “Twitter-follower-flow” GitHub project. Node-RED is very good for prototyping, that is the reason why it is often used in hackathons. If you are new to Node-RED and you start  to develop a Node-RED flow, you normally have following challenges:

  • How to …
    1. … define own REST endpoints to encapsulate an external API?
    2. … automate the authentication to that external API?
    3. … extract data from the external API?
    4. … customize data and CRUD with databases?

The Node-RED flow of that project has the objective to provide an (little advanced) introduction to the first three topics above. The CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) topic is not covered here. Visit that CRUD example for more information.

  • The “Twitter-follower-flow” example …
    • … uses open technologies (Node-RED is a Project of the OpenJS foundation )
    • … creates no additional costs
    • … has following technical level:
      • Beginner to intermediate
      • Needs a basic knowledge of JavaScript and REST
    • … takes 30 – 45 min to setup the example from scratch
      1. Register on IBM Cloud
      2. Create a Node-RED instance on IBM Cloud
      3. Register at Twitter for a developer API Account
      4. Copy the existing Node-RED flow
      5. Configure the flow
      6. Run the flow
The gifs shows a execution of the Twitter-follower-flow:

twitter-follower-flow-execution

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A short introduction of the Node-RED Starter kit on IBM Cloud for Hackathons

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In that blog post I want to highlight the new way of the instantiation of a Node-RED application on  IBM Cloud with the Node-RED Starter kit. From my perspective Node-RED is a very helpful tool at hackathons. (just take a look in my blog post  How to prepare for a Hackathon with IBM Cloud?)

The Node-RED instantiation has changed and with the Node-RED Starter kit we can take the advantage of the capabilities of IBM Cloud to control the build, deployment and execution of the Node-RED application and we setup automatically all  development tools to work effectively in a small development team in our hackathon.

I want to provide a short walkthrough from my perspective and created a 13 min YouTube video in addition to that blog post.

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Write and execute a JUnit test for a Java microservice based on MicroProfile and run both in the OpenLiberty development mode

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That blog post has the focus on: how to develop a JUnit test for the Authors microservice from the Cloud Native Starter example and run both the Authors microservice and the JUnit test on OpenLiberty in the development mode.

That blog post hasn’t the objective to be a blueprint or a ‘how to guide’ for writing JUnit tests,  JUnit test organization, test strategy and so on. The objective is to get technically started along one concrete microservice example from the Cloud Native Starter project.

The Authors microservice has one RESTful api endpoint called getAuthor. The endpoint provides one parameter for the Author name. The endpoint returns Author data in a JSON format.

Keep the end in mind: The gif shows a sample JUnit test execution for the Author microservice using OpenLiberty in the Visual Studio Code editor:

junit-on-openliberty-run-test

Note: As an alternative or in addition, you can also visit the OpenLiberty tutorial “MicroProfile or Jakarta EE application” to start with that topic.

Let’s start with: What do we need and how do we realize the implementation?

We need to ..

    •  invoke the REST endpoint of the Authors microservice with a REST Client.
    •  transform the JSON response of the REST endpoint to an Author data class
    •  handle different values to invoke the REST Endpoint parameter for the Author name to run tests with variations of the Author name.
    • compare the actual response value with an expected value and document the result.

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Run a MicroProfile Microservice on OpenLiberty in a Remote development container in Visual Studio Code

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In this blog post I want to show, how to setup a local remote Java development container for Eclipse MicroProfile with OpenLiberty in Visual Studio Code.

I did that for the Authors microservice from the Cloud Native Starter project with MicroProfile 3.2, OpenJDK Java 11, and the latest OpenLiberty version.

That blog post is structured in:

  • Setup and configuration of Visual Studio Code
  • Run the Authors microservice in the remote development container
  • Debug the Authors microservice in the remote development container

The documentation of remote development with Video Studio Code is here and Java Dev Environments with Containers is a great blog post, which does also cover the remote development with container.

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Automated deployment of a microservice to Kubernetes on IBM Cloud

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In that blog post I want to point out the awesome topic, how to automate the deployment of a Microservice using a delivery pipeline on IBM Cloud.

Maybe you already know Niklas, Harald and I made the great project called Cloud Native Starter. That project includes a Hands-on workshop that is called “Build a Java Microservice and deploy the Microservice to Kubernetes on IBM Cloud”.  In Lab 4 you have to deploy the Authors Microservice to Kubernetes on IBM Cloud. Sometimes we have limited time in workshops. The limited time is the reason why we want to reduce the manual effort for students in a workshop to a minimum, therefor we took the IBM® Cloud Continuous Delivery and I created a repeatable way with minimal human interaction. The delivery pipeline contains sequences of stages which retrieve inputs and run jobs, such as builds, and deployments.

That image shows two stages, one stage is called FETCH and the other DEPLOY_SERVICES. The FETCH stages contains a job called Fetch code and the DELOY_SERVICES has two jobs one for build and one for deployment.

Toolchain-04

With the realization of the automated setup for the creation of the toolchain, you can just press the button Create toolchain in the GitHub project and follow a guided wizard to deploy the Authors Microservice. (Visit the GitHub project Use a IBM Cloud toolchain to deploy a Java Microservices to Kubernetes on IBM Cloud to press the button ;-))

Toolchain-01jpg

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Deploy the Reactive Cloud Native Starter example to IBM Cloud

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The Cloud Native Starter project now contains the new great topic, the development of Reactive Microservices  with Java, quarkus, MicroProfile and Vue.js as front-end. The Reactive example implementation runs on minikube, local OpenShift and on IBM Cloud Kubernetes.

But what does reactive mean? Here is an extract of the definition in  The Reactive Manifesto.

“Systems built as Reactive Systems are more flexible, loosely-coupled and scalable. This makes them easier to develop and amenable to change. They are significantly more tolerant of failure and when failure does occur they meet it with elegance rather than disaster. Reactive Systems are highly responsive, giving users effective interactive feedback.” 

But be aware, our example is not a full Reactive System it shows reactive programming techniques.

Note: To understand the difference between these two topics, that badge on cognitiveclass is useful Reactive Architecture: Introduction to Reactive Systems.

In our reactive programming example, you see directly changes in the database on the Web UI, without refreshing the browser.

reactive-sample

In this blog post I want to share, how you deploy that awesome Reactive example to a free IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster and using the free quota of the IBM Cloud Container Registry. We avoid for the setup that you have to use any paid IBM Cloud services, because you want just to see how the Reactive example works on IBM Cloud.
To create a free Cluster you need a feature code to create a Trial Account or you create a pay as you go account and you only use the free services of IBM Cloud.

That is the major architecture of the Reactive example. Three Java Microservices, one Vue UI application and two infrastructure components running on Kubernetes.

reactive-architecture

But what is reactive programming in more detail? If you want to get more details of the Reactive topic, just visit the blog post Development of Reactive Applications with Quarkus from Niklas Heidloff and if you want to explore the setup for local OpenShift take a look into the blog post Cloud Native Starter on Red Hat OpenShift 4 from Harald Uebele.

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How to develop a customized Dockerfile using minikube

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In this blog post I want to share an awesome and simple practice for beginners: How to develop a customized Dockerfile for a container image running on Kubernetes, using minikube.

Usually, when you use an existing container image to create your own customized configuration, you don’t have deep knowledge how that container image is built, and you have questions like: “What are the folder rights?”, or “What are the installation paths of applications?”, or other information you need to customize the container image to your needs.

You can learn about the existing image, when you visit the GitHub or Dockerhub project of that image (for example: links to GitHub “docker-library / repo-info” and Dockerhub “jenkins repo-info” project of Jenkins). But to ensure that your customization works, you have to run and access the running container in the commandline mode and verify your changes step by step running the image in Kubernetes.

Minikube comes with a container engine you can use. So minikube has all you need to build and run your container image on a local Kubernetes installation.

Here are the steps to customize a Jenkins container image I want to run on minikube, you can try it out:

1. Install minikube

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Deploy WordPress on a free IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster for non-productive usage

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In this blog post I just want to highlight an awesome guideline I noticed on GitHub: How to deploy WordPress to a free IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster for non-productive usage?

Why do I say “non-productive”? Because of the free IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster , which will be deleted after 30 days. Surely you can also deploy WordPress for production usage, when you deploy to a paid cluster. But maybe you got a feature code for free IBM Cloud at a conference or at a hackathon and you want play around with IBM Cloud, that could be one option.

You can find the instructions for the deployment here: Scalable WordPress deployment on Kubernetes Cluster. By the way, the project is under Apache 2.0 license.

wordpress-installation

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Central management of billing and resource usage tracking across multiple accounts in IBM Cloud

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In this blog post I want to shortly highlight the topic central management of billing and resource usage tracking across multiple accounts. I think it is good to know that topic, even if you will currently not use it.

I didn’t use IBM Cloud Enterprise until now, but is great to know that this is possible. This organisational topic is (more or less 😉 ) related to one of my older blog posts  “What are major elements to organize my services, apps and devices in IBM Cloud?”

The announcement was in Juli 2019 :

“Now you can organize multiple IBM Cloud accounts in flexible hierarchical groups.”

For more details please visit that blog post introducing IBM Cloud Enterprises.

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