Nick Fisher's tech blog

Recent Posts

How to Configure Rest Assured to Record the Latency of Every Request In a Custom Way

Sample code associated with this post can be found on Github.

Rest Assured is a library that makes it easy to write api based automated tests in java. Recently I needed to find a way to record the latency of each request as well as some metadata about it [request path, method, things of that nature]. I found a nice way to do this with rest assured filters, and I’m going to share that with you in this article.

The Hystrix Parameters You Actually Need to Tune in Spring Boot

There is some [hacky] code for this post on Github.

The number of hystrix configuration options, as of this writing, is about 34. In reality, you don’t need to worry about most of them, as the defaults are perfectly reasonable. This article discusses those parameters that, in my experience, you typically need to pay attention to and tune, and I have provided some examples using spring boot’s support for hystrix via the javanica library.

How to Expose Meaningful Prometheus Metrics In a Spring Boot 2.x Application

The source code for this post can be found on Github.

Prometheus is a metrics aggregator with its own presumed format. The basic idea is to have the application gather a set of custom metrics, then periodically collect (or “scrape”) the metrics and send them off to a prometheus server. This server will store the data in its database, and you can thus view the evolution of your application’s metrics over time.

How To Create a Kubernetes Cluster on Digital Ocean using Terraform

The source code for this post can be found on Github.

Kubernetes has democratized the cloud more than any piece of software before or since. What used to be proprietary APIs by AWS, Azure, or GCP for things like auto scaling groups, load balancers, or virtual machines is now abstracted away behind never ending yaml configuration. Combine this wonderful abstraction with the pricing model of Digital Ocean and you’ve got all the makings of a developer party.

How to Create a Digital Ocean Droplet using Terraform

The source code for this post can be found on Github.

Terraform lets you define your infrastructure, e.g. a virtual machine, in code. Used properly, this saves you a lot of time, makes infra easier to manage, and will generally limit your ability to do something dumb, like delete or modify something your infrastructure is dependent on.

The Difference Between a Reactive Non-Blocking Model and Classic Asynchronous Code

Reactive Programming is a very different way of thinking about doing work in a microservices environment. Anyone who has worked with a GUI, dating back to even to windows forms, is familiar with the event based model, but what does that mean when there is unpredictable latency involved? How does handing off to a thread to make a remote call differ from this new “reactive web”?

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