This second post of building Knative application on IBM Cloud series focuses on environment prepration. This series of exercises use IBM Cloud Public as platform.

Let’s first sign up IBM Cloud Public account from https://cloud.ibm.com/registration, we’ll need a valid email address to proceed, input required info and submit the form.

We then should receive an email to confirm registration, check email sent from IBM Cloud and click the action button and we’re good to enjoy IBM Cloud now.

Next step is create a IBM Kubernetes Service cluster. …

This first post of building Knative application on IBM Cloud series mainly focuses on Knative overview.

Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to deploy, manage serverless workloads. Its’ primary goal is to design a portable solution for developers to benefit serverless architecture like event-driven, auto-scaling, pay as you go while avoid vendor lock-in.

Knative builds on top of Kubernetes and Istio. It utilizes Istio for request routing, request split/fractional traffic etc. Below diagram explains Knative different personas:

Knative has two key components: Serving and Eventing.

Serving component is responsible for running application, providing service, request driven computing, auto scale up/scale down(scale…

I would like to talk about some thoughts how team can get tech operational excellence.

Firstly, monitoring is critical for all of applications. Real time monitoring can proactively expose potential issues and alert team for investigation.

• New Relic Synthetics: Recommended. Depending on application nature team can consider either Scripted Browser, Simple Browser, API Test and Ping monitors.
• New Relic Browser: On demand. Consider this when team wants to troubleshoot real customer experience issue or client side performance issue etc.
• New Relic APM: On demand. Consider this when team needs to troubleshoot server side performance issue. …

My tenth anniversary at IBM

我2009年加入IBM，时光冉冉转眼已经10年光景。

回想起来我加入团队的第一个任务是印裔Pushpa姐安排的一个体力活。因为一个应用经常出现db连接数高的问题，DBA帮忙做了一个监控脚本发生高连接时会邮件通知开发团队介入。我不太甘心每天肉眼盯这个report就想着如何给它自动化了，我还真做成了。我花了大概一周的时间做了一个Java utilityz自动读取监控report然后还做了几张漂亮的统计图，老姐自然很是happy，算是开了一个不错的头。期间还出了一个小插曲，刚加入团队第三天忘记拿笔记本回家了（那会好像真心不用天天带回去），心里那叫一个忐忑啊想着万一今天的report出问题没通知团队就麻烦了，大概晚上9点多自己专门打车从家里来公司又check了一遍：）

此后的一两年里自认业务，技术，敏捷等有了长足的进步。做为一个入职的新员工我还领导了大团队的持续集成流程化工作，还有代码静态分析。期间还积极参与社区工作，做了敏捷社区，QSE社区主席等职位致力普及敏捷知识。2012年得益于同事支持和老板肯定升职8。此年带领团队拿到了CDL的质量大奖，个人也拿到了ITA L1认证。

之后有点兴风作浪在团队提议尝试特性团队，结果并不意外不很理想。不过至今我任认为特性团队做法并没有问题，可能更多是团队环境不ready做这件事，大家太习惯待在自己的舒适区而心底排斥尝试新的领域。

到了2013年为我的职业发展考虑（也许是自己在团队嘚瑟瞎折腾特性团队的结果），anyway我被转到了Marketplace项目，自从开始了充实的几年时间，也正是这几年让我见识到了原来CIO之外的团队是如何快速交付的。技术栈从零开始，中国只我一人参与，基本每天晚上加班到11，12点，从测试做起。。。说来都是泪，好在不负所望靠个人努力逐渐赢得了国外同事认可，2014/2015年中国团队陆续建立起来，也有之前的老战友回归加入，很有并肩作战的赶脚。

2016年开始带领团队做微服务转型，同年CIO启动Greenhouse项目，出差到RTP参与MVP开发，第一次很有网友见面的感觉，哈哈。此年升职9，拿到ITA L2认证。更开心的是儿子的出生!

2017年继续推进微服务架构演进，可惜的屡试OTAA不中。很不忍的事发生，武汉兄弟团队被裁撤。期间SaaS Acceleration风生水起，正式立项改名Gaia。

2018年应国外老板要求逐步将重心移至Gaia项目，学习Salesforce技术栈，团队也迅速扩张很多年轻力量加入。

转至2019年首试STSM未果很有挫败感，不过欣慰的是得到了很多老大的支持，15个supporting letter甚至没费太多力气就拿到了。好在review board也比较认可个人工作贡献，只是针对专利和外部影响力方面提出了期望。通过个人冲刺努力拿到了ITA L3认证，在老板大力支持下升职10。升职固然开心，不过因重度参与的项目marketplace和Gaia日子都不太好过，忧心忡忡。期间因为看到了几个系统的重复性提出中台建议，个人非常非常想推进做成这件事因为我认为这对IBM是正确的事。

回顾10年一路走来，如果用几个关键词总计下来：立足战略，持续学习，专注自律，执行力，领导力。

10年走来，感恩那些一路帮助过我的同学们！

下一个10年会怎么样？拭目以待！

IBM-Red Hat: my view

IBM officially announced closing of Red Hat acquisition on 7/9/2019, the largest deal for IBM ever. I personally believe $34 billion deal would definitely go down in tech history ($165 billion deal for AOL-TimerWarner, $67 billion deal for Dell and EMC).

There are lots of articles, blogs on IBM-Red Hat’s acquisition while here I’d like to share some my mostly advocated insights.

1. This acquisition brings IBM and Red Hat complementary competency to each other. If we review IBM deeply after these years transformation the industry expertise is its’ core competency especially for Bank, Assurance, Telecom etc…