VU Alumni Spotlight - Open Key to Every Career (slides)

 As previously mentioned, I was invited to speak today as part of the VU alumni spotlight series. 

I spent the time sharing how being open can mean everything to your career. It's something that has been core to my journey throughout my working life and striving to help others only lifts your own path.

It's amazing to see how many people just need to slightly adjust their way of doing things to become that catalyst in another person's journey through life.

If you were unable to join, or just didn't have the time, no worries, I've posted the slides from the session online below.

Business optimisation architecture - Common architectural elements

Part 2 - Common architecture elements

In our previous article from this series we introduced a use case around business optimisation for retail stores.

The process was laid out how we've approached the use case and how portfolio solutions are the base for researching a generic architecture. 

The only thing left to cover was the order in which you'll be led through the details.

This article starts the real journey at the very top, with a generic architecture from which we'll discuss the common architectural elements one by one.

Business optimisation architecture - An introduction

Part 1 - An introduction

The last few years we have been digging deeply into the world of architectures with a focus on presenting access to ways of mapping successful implementations for specific use cases.

It's an interesting challenge in that we have the mission of creating of architectural content based on common customer adoption patterns. 

That's very different from most of the traditional marketing activities usually associated with generating content for the sole purpose of positioning products for solutions. When you're basing the content on actual execution in solution delivery, you're cutting out the chuff. 

What's that mean?

It means that it's going to provide you with a way to implement a solution using open source technologies by focusing on the integrations, structures and interactions that actually have been proven to work. What's not included are any vendor promises that you'll find in normal marketing content. Those promised that when it gets down to implementation crunch time, might not fully deliver on their promises.

Enter the term Portfolio Architecture. 

Let's look at these architectures, how they're created and what value they provide for your solution designs.

VU Alumni Spotlight - Open Key to Every Career

I've been invited to come back and give a talk at my university as part of their alumni spotlight series. 

The funny thing is, this event has been in the planning since pre-pandemic days last year and was initially to be onsite and in person for everyone. 

A year later and it's a different world where we still need to do these things virtually and online. 

Next Thursday, 25 Feb 2021 from 16:00 - 17:00 I'll be sharing some motivational insights from my personal career journey since leaving the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. 

It's a talk that centers how being open can mean everything to your career. If you are interested, reach out and I'll share the online connection information for this session and we'll be talking about more of the following.

RefCard - Getting started with OpenShift published

Earlier this month a writing project I was working on, a getting started with OpenShift reference card, went live online at DZone. 

The project was to put together a getting started guide that walks a developer through getting OpenShift, installing it on a local machine, and a quick start to using one of the provided operators. 

Basically, providing the first steps any developer would need to get started experiencing cloud-native application development. Even better, it's using CodeReady Containers to allow any developer to follow along with this refcard and experience OpenShift on their own local developer machine.

Everything shown in this refcard is freely available for download and the process followed has been put into a project that anyone can use. The entire document is eight pages and includes code examples to help you on your journey to exploring and using cloud-native development on a Kubernetes based platform.

4 Easy Steps for Migrating Projects to OpenShift Container Platform

This article is a walk through how to take an existing project, in this case I'm using a business automation project, and migrating from running locally on an application server to deploying in a container on OpenShift.

The idea is to share four easy steps taking you on a journey from local to cloud native container based application deployments. The base project was an old demo project I had running on JBoss BPM Suite a few years back, polished up and now running on Red Hat Process Automation Manager using Red Hat Enterprise Application Server (EAP).

The project will be outlined, followed by installing it locally on your developer machine. After that, you'll need to install the OpenShift Container Platform and I'll show you how using CodeReady Containers. This puts a container platform running on your developer machine, at which point it's a matter of installing the provided business automation operator and pushing the existing project without any changes into the container. You can observe it deploying right on your OpenShift web console or explore the details with the command line client.

Ready to get started?

How to setup the OpenShift Container Platform 4.6 on your local machine

Are you looking to develop a few projects on your local machine and push them on to a real OpenShift Container Platform without having to worry about cloud hosting of your container platform?

Would you like to do that on one of the newer versions of OpenShift Container Platform such as version 4.6?

Look no further as CodeReady Containers puts it all at your fingertips. Experience the joys of cloud native development and automated rolling deployments. 

The idea was to make this as streamlined of an experience as possible by using the same CodeReady Containers Easy Install project. Let's take a look at what this looks like.

CodeReady Containers - Installing business automation operator (Part 4)

As a consistent user and developer on the OpenShift platform over the years, I've tried helping users by sharing my application development content as we've journeyed from  cartridges all the way to container base development.

With container based development we've also transitioned from using templates to define how to deploy our tooling and applications, to operators. There are many examples of how to work with the templated versions of our applications around decision management and process automation found on Red Hat Demo Central and JBoss Demo Central.

Over the releases of OpenShift 4.x we've seen that operators have become the preferred method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes-native, thus OpenShift, application. With this in mind it felt like time to explore and update existing demos and example projects to employ the provided operators for installation and runtime.

In this series of articles I'll be providing a walk through what it is to use the latest tooling provided by the business automation operator on the OpenShift Container Platform. We'll install the operator by hand, start instances of the decision management and process automation tooling using the OpenShift console, explore command line automation of installing, starting, and configuring the same tooling from the command line, and share a fully automated process automation tooling installation with pre-installed example project.

In the previous article we've installed the business automation operator in the OpenShift web console, installed the provided decision management  and process automation tooling. In our final article of this series, let's install the business automation operator and its provided developer tooling using the command line.