Conditional HTTP requests are one of the little-known but widely used features. An intelligent client can determine the status and content of HTTP requests without actually transmitting the body over the wire. With conditional HTTP requests, you can reduce the work done by your server by identifying whether existing data available with the client still valid, hence saving bandwidth.

In conditional HTTP requests, the result of an HTTP request can be changed by comparing the affected resources with the value of a validator.

REST uses HTTP extensively — HTTP verbs in combination with URLs have special implied meanings and status…

If you are building a text-heavy web platform such as a blog or a documentation platform, your users expect a search functionality. One of the simplest and effective way to build search experiences is to leverage the full-text search (FTS) capabilities exposed by your database.

In this blog, we will look at building a search system for a web app that indexes various videos. Each video has a title, description, and associated metadata. We want our system to be searchable over video title and description. We will be using SQLAlchemy as our ORM layer for the underlying PostgreSQL database.

PostgreSQL and FTS

PostgreSQL…

So, if you have been working on web services in this half of the decade, you must have come across the term “load balancing”. So what is load balancing? Let’s find out!

What is load balancing?

Load balancing, as the name suggests, is distributing work to multiple agents. In our case, we distribute incoming HTTP requests from browsers, apps or other servers between a pool of web servers that can serve this request.

How does load balancing work?

Load balancing works primarily in two ways:

1. Client-side
2. Server-side

Client-side load balancing

In client-side load balancing, we expect the client to distribute requests to each of the servers capable of serving the request. We…

This post is about the confusions of a programmer familiar with many other ORMs was asked to use Hibernate for the first time.

Before you ask “I thought you are a backend developer in working primarily on Java, how come you did not use Hibernate?” Yes, I am a Java developer. I write Java code for a living daily and no, I don’t use Hibernate often. I create REST APIs as the part of my daily job, but I don’t use Spring or Hibernate often. My Company uses JDBi extensively so I never had the chance to fully learn how…

Healthchecks are essential to signal whether a service is up and running normally. In a microservices-based architecture, health checks are used to discover healthy service instances. It is vital to have an accurate health check indicator for the reliability of our applications.

A client-library, load-balancer, or service discovery co-ordinator (such as consul) takes care of periodically checking each instance’s health. When connecting to the service, the library or load-balancer checks the instances’ status and binds only to healthy service instances. A monitoring service may also rely on the health indicator to fire-off alerts.

How to design meaningful application health checks

Your application health check should be a…

You may come across a Makefile today or you may be writing one yourself. The Makefile will have some targets such as build, test, and install. When invoked, these tasks run a bunch of commands. Sadly, such Makefiles are no better than a task runner. Makefiles are much, much more capable.

The problem with average Makefiles

With fast disks and CPUs, we do not have a strong need to prevent duplicate work anymore. A webpack build takes seconds, so small that you will be mostly okay with it running over and over.

But what if your tasks are not trivial enough?

You may have seen…

README is important — no matter if your software is open-source or purely internal. It will form the first impression of your code. The main goals of your README should be to convey the necessary information about what your code does and instructions for other developers to set up and contribute changes as soon as possible.

Here is a checklist for the perfect README.

Title

Your repository needs a name. People will refer your project by that name. Good projects have memorable names. Even better when they connect to the primary functionality of the project. …

First things first… What’s Envoy?

Envoy is a high-performance L4 and L7 proxy with wire-level support for multiple protocols such as HTTP, GRPC, MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc. It possesses advanced load balancing features including automatic retries, circuit breaking, rate limiting, all with the goodness of providing APIs for dynamically managing all its configuration.

At Gojek, we use Envoy at multiple places — as a fronting proxy to micro-services, as an ingress point to client-facing APIs, etc. …