Dan Erez Innovation Blog

After we already got used to thinking in Micro Services, and learned that an API Gateway is needed, it’s time to adapt it to the AI ​​era. So get the…
AI Gateway!
Yes, yes, it’s a real concept and even needed in my opinion. Just as a normal API Gateway stands in fromt of services, performs Routing of requests, Caching, Authentication and many other operations, so the AI ​​Gateway can perform similar operations in the AI ​​world:

– Routing a request to the most suitable model
– Quota checking of users and approval/rejection of a request
– blacking out fields and information that external models should not see (or direct to a model that runs locally in the case of classified information)
– Caching management of answers

And quite a few other actions according to your own imagination (and need).
Agile companies like Kong have already released such a product, and of course there are also open source products – for example MLFLow.
I wonder what the next step in this evolution is?

In my next DevOps conference (in Berlin) I will talk about Backstage. This is a framework developed by Spotify and can be used to build Developer Portals. In such a Portal, you can see the catalog of services and APIs that are available for developers, start new services based on Templates, and basically do everything you want with the help of one of a few hundred plug-ins that are available for Backstage – or you can create your own plugin that will make your coffee. Who needs it? especially medium to big sized organizations that begin to feel the mess, the need for standardization, knowledge gaps, etc. If there’ll be interest, I will also write about how to build a plugin for Backstage soon…

https://backstage.io

What’s new? As part of my AI research, which also includes the development of an AI-based software developer (but that’s for another post), I came across an interesting project by Microsoft – sketch2code. As the name suggests – a schematic drawing of a screen should be turned into the same screen in HTML automatically! This can be a great base for a demo, or even the skeleton of an app. Does anyone know another AI that turns HTML into React?…

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-lab-sketch2code

Hi, everyone! Not long ago I came across a cool library called archunit ( https://www.archunit.org/ ) This library allows you to write tests about.. the architecture. Yes, yes, it is possible to check not only business logic, but also structural logic, for example: from which layer is it allowed to call repositories? What is a correct name for the service? Which packages are allowed to be used and which are not?

By using these tests correctly and intelligently, it is possible to direct the developers to a more correct architectural solution, and save both problems and too much variation between the systems in the company. Cool.

https://www.archunit.org/

When talking about AI, everyone thinks about images and text, it’s time to talk about… sounds

A Microsoft project called (not originally) Vall-E-X will allow you to synthesize the voices of anyone you want – do you want Biden to scold your children? No problem. Or Billie Eilish to read you a story? done. The business potential is great, but so is the potential of fake news…

The project has not been officially released yet, but it has a page here: https://lnkd.in/daeGXCmd

There is already a project that implements it, of course in open source:

https://lnkd.in/dcHVa5T3

So who would you like to read this post to you?…

Most of the software organizations today use git to manage their code. Over the years, many commands were added and things got complicated (rebase, merge or reset?), so most developers have no idea how git works, and they only use a small portion of git’s capabilities (and in many cases also incorrectly…).

!No more

Meta (Facebook) has a tradition of releasing great tools and libraries (e.g. react) and they recently released an excellent code management tool, which I think could replace git in a few years: Sapling – https://sapling-scm.com. Literally it mrans a ‘seedling’, and practically it is a brilliant and simple tool. It is still under development, but it is open source so you can contribute and help determine its direction. So goodbye git – and thanks for all the years

The costs of cloud computing are quite a headache, and I have already heard of companies whose majority of revenue went to payments to the cloud providers. Not that they don’t deserve payment for their services, but we usually spend much more than we need (as we do in real life..). Cost management is the subject for an entire lecture (which I have already given here: https://devopscon.io), so I will just mention here an open source project that tries to approach this issue – Open Cost. The project allow you to monitor costs and allocate resources according to the load and other settings. The infrastructure it monitors and manages is currently only Kubernetes based, but since most workloads in the cloud today are designed to run on Kubernetes, this approach makes sense. They did a good job – installation is easy and it integrates well with Kubernetes and promotheus. You can take a look here: https://www.opencost.io/. Is this the future and will it be the future standard? only time will tell.

Any good product, software or other, starts with good planning. Recently we have been running beautiful diagrams that attract the eye. They are not dry like diagrams in visio or lucid, but combine beautiful graphics with photos, text, etc. and all in a presentation that is simply.. beautiful! This is an improvement even in the eyes of an engineer like me. The tool is called Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com) and has a full open source version or a version (Excalidraw+) for a nominal fee of $6-7 per month per user with sharing options and a few more goodies.

https://excalidraw.com/

Welcome to my web site! My name is Dan Erez and I’m a software innovator. I work as a software architect and always learning about new technologies, tools, frameworks, techniques, etc.

I also speak at conferences and write articles, and more – I’ll share all of that stuff here, so you can enjoy and learn. I’d love to hear from you too, whether it’s a hi, a feedback, a question or am invitation to do something cool togther. So stay tuned 🙂