(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
November 28, 2022
As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use. Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network. When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network. This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel.
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June 30, 2022
In the last year, I moved more and more data and services to hardware that I can directly control. A direct consequence of this is that I started to run more hardware at my house. This change has been very positive, but it is suboptimal when not at home. All services I run are secure and could be shared directly on the web, but I prefer a more cautious approach. For this reason, I decided to create a VPN.
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March 21, 2022
One of the first issues that I had to solve when I started to use gRPC was how to inject a DB connection pool to the function handling the request. The DB connection injection is needed because creating a new SQL connection every time there is a new gRPC request (and tearing it down at the end) is a massive waste of resources. Also, this approach could limit the scalability of the API since the database probably has a limited number of connections it will accept.
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July 28, 2021
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on managing CORS headers with Negroni. Lately, I’ve created a new API server that needed to be accessible from the browser, but this time I used a different technology, more precisely gRPC-Gateway. Few months after I wrote that blog post, I stopped writing new REST services by hand. I did not rewrite all the services that used the old paradigm just because they needed a fix or a new feature, but for all new services, I moved to gRPC with gRPC-Gateway.
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March 1, 2020
Google Cloud provides the capability of terminating a VPN connection with a VPN Gateway. The problem is that the VPN Gateway - at the moment - is relatively limited in capabilities. One of the missing capabilities I would have liked to see implemented is the NAT capability. VPNs can be used to connect the machines of two different parties. Although this is usually not the best architectural pattern, since a connection on the public internet encrypted at the Transport Layer is often a better option, it’s relatively common in more legacy environments.
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March 21, 2019
After the article on the reasons to use vanity URLs in Go and the one about how to implement a lightweight vanity URLs provider, I’d like to share with you how you can leverage AWS Lambda to implement a vanity URLs provider. The first thing we will need is to import the github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go package. This package will provide us with the needed functions to easily integrate our Go code with AWS Lambda.
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January 18, 2019
Golang forces its users to use the repository URL of the dependency in the import statement. For instance, if we want to import the “test” package that is hosted at github.com/fale/test, we will need to use github.com/fale/test. On the one hand, this is very nice since it allows anyone reading the code to immediately understand where the code is hosted and therefore find it very quickly. Also, this URL-based import path guarantees that no two different packages can have the same import path, preventing this kind of confusion for both programmers and the compiler itself.
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December 3, 2018
Today the IT world is very focused on high performance, high throughput interfaces. In this situation, it is common to find REST and gRPC API, given their performances compared to the other solutions. Sometimes, though, we still encounter old API written with older techniques or new API that for some reasons have been developed with outdated technologies. One of those cases that I’ve encountered a few times over the last few months is SOAP.
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November 18, 2018
There are some pieces that you need to put in every microservice you write. Those are for instance logging, error handling, authentication. Over the last year, I found myself writing over and over CORS headers. This requirement brought me to think that I should have used a Negroni middleware since we are already using Negroni for other middlewares. I started looking online for an already written one, and I found a bunch, but I was not happy with what I found, so I decided to write my own.
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September 23, 2018
Golang uses URLs for the dependencies packages resolution. To unbundle the code repository hosting the package and the import path, Golang supports the idea of Vanity Import Paths. The way this has been implemented is that, as long as the import path points to a page where Go can find the real package URL, it will follow through. So, we will need to create a web server that can serve pages in a way that the Go toolchains can understand.
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