Things to watch out for GCP SSL with Cloudflare DNS

For our production workload, we deploy the workloads on Kubernetes, in which an ingress resource is created per each deployment. Resources in ingress are GCP Load Balancer and SSL Certificate. As for DNS, we use Cloudflare since it enables CDN without extra configurations on our part. A few months after the deployment went live initially, we were informed that the website couldn’t be accessed. Turns out GCP couldn’t renew the SSL Certificate (error FAILED_NOT_VISIBLE....

December 18, 2023 · 1 min · Karn Wong

Serverless real-time machine learning inference with AWS

For a machine learning project, usually it is divided into two main categories: research and production. For research ML project, the model would be created and used locally on a researcher’s machine. For a production ML project, a deployment would be involved. Usual pattern is to create a service to load a model, accept input, then return a prediction. Production ML is also divided into two main patterns: batch or real-time....

November 28, 2023 · 3 min · Karn Wong

Some problems can be solved with workflows

When we face with engineering problems, it’s too easy to fall into the trap thinking it should be solved with a technical solution. Seasoned engineers think differently, because they realize that most of the time, it’s “people” or “workflow” problems. Let me provide a few examples. Management wants analysts to use Jupyter notebook to reduce time required to create a routine report Background: Most analysts are comfortable using Microsoft Excel to work with data, some can also use SQL, but it’s rare for analysts to be familiar with Python....

November 24, 2023 · 3 min · Karn Wong

Using Apache Iceberg to reduce data lake operations overhead

Every business generates data, some very little, some do generate ginormous amount of data. If you are familiar with the basic web application architecture, there are data, application and web tier. But it doesn’t end there, because the data generated has to be analyzed for reports. A lot of organizations have analysts working on production database directly. This works fine and well, until the data they are working with is very large to the point that a single query can take half a day to process!...

November 15, 2023 · 4 min · Karn Wong

Reduce operational costs with terraform

Background Think of websites you visit each day. Most likely they are hosted on a cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, Azure. The good news is it’s very easy to create a simple deployment with a virtual machine, but for scalable and high-availability workloads, usual recommendations is to use a container-based runtime such as AWS ECS/EKS, GCP Cloud Run/GKE. These services also require more configurations than a simple VM deployment....

November 4, 2023 · 3 min · Karn Wong