It’s not often that we write about Hepta Analytics, the company. And so, for the last blog post of the year, I thought I’d share a little about how we did in our first full calendar year in operation. Here is the biggest news from Hepta in 2019:

Service Business

We managed to retain most of our existing clients from the last year and continue to deliver quality work for them in line with our three-step service offering of IT infrastructure, data analytics and visualization. Quite a number of “Phase II” and “Phase III” proposals were written, signed and/or executed in 2019…

This blog post will walk you through the process of setting up Master to Master database replication between an AWS Relation Database Service (RDS) MySQL server and an Ubuntu host running MySQL via the AWS Database Migration Service.

This blog post will walk you through the process of setting up Master to Master database replication between an AWS Relation Database Service (RDS) MySQL server and an Ubuntu host running MySQL via the AWS Database Migration Service.

The third and final part of this series will share lessons learnt from the migration experience with comparisons from other cloud platforms.

Lesson 1

Automated migration tools work but should not be trusted entirely — especially for legacy applications.

As discussed in Part I, we attempted to use both the application migration tool and database migration tool offered by Azure to migrate IIS applications and Microsoft SQL Server databases respectively. While these tools offered a clean report upon migration, this was not often the case when we checked on the other end.

It is important to use these tools with caution and…

Hepta Analytics recently completed a successful migration project of a Microsoft application stack to Microsoft Azure. By “Microsoft application stack”, I am referring to ASP.NET and Classic ASP applications running on Microsoft IIS which connect to a Microsoft SQL database all on top of a Windows Server operating system. In this three-part series, Benson and I will share our experience of working on this project, detail how we set up a CI/CD pipeline on Azure and discuss challenges faced together with their resolutions.

For context: were operating within strict timelines (less than one calendar month) with the primary goal being…

In my first blog post, I discussed Connecting a Linux Server/VPS to AWS’ Secure Virtual Private Cloud. This post will discuss adding more hosts to the same VPC network to accommodate multiple offices, for example. The new steps are very few but not very well documented online hence the post.

1) Start by creating a new Customer Gateway with dynamic routing in the “Customer Gateway” tab of the VPC Dashboard. Specify the appropriate IP address of the new host.

On the 4th of April 2018, three members from Hepta Analytics formed a team to participate in the 24 hour Facebook/CMU-Africa Cybersecurity hackathon held at the Marriot Hotel in Kigali, Rwanda. 36 hours later, having not slept after hacking away all night, Yvonne, Rahab and I emerged winners of the top prize: An all expense paid trip to attend this year’s Facebook F8 conference in San Jose, California. This is the inside story of how we managed to pull it off.

A few weeks to the event, Yvonne and Rahab approached me with one simple question: Do you want us…

With the many benefits that the cloud offers these days, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to extend your local infrastructure to AWS to take advantage of some of those benefits. These include the Relational Database Service (for easy database management), auto-scaling groups to handle increased capacity dynamically and containerized applications. While there is a lot of vendor-specific documentation on how to do this with hardware equipment (i.e. at router level), there isn’t comprehensive documentation for the client with a single server hosted on a public IP address looking to extend their infrastructure cheaply…until now.

This…