Revolgy Blog

7 min read · 01/14/2021

Advanced API Routing in EKS with Traefik, AWS LoadBalancer Controller and External-DNS

Have you been thinking about how to distribute incoming HTTP(S) (and TCP) requests in EKS? This problem might sound complicated at first, since in most cases you need to combine multiple applications to make it work. But it’s not as hard as it looks at first glance! I will show you a solution that is really versatile and gives you the option of using advanced routing rules — such as query parameter-based routing, or matching a HTTP header with a regular expression.

5 min read · 01/04/2021

Teambuilding online: 5 practical tips from our experience

2020 was a year of massive changes in the way HR departments work. Our company had the ambition to switch to “remote-first” modus operandi way before the pandemic. We like to work with a wide range of interesting people from different corners of the World. We don't want to limit our operations to Czechia only. The current situation only accelerated our plans. It was exciting on one hand but a great challenge on the other. Especially in the field of “human relations.”

5 min read · 12/09/2020

re:Invent 2020: What does the CEO of AWS have to say about Microsoft?

A year ago I was sitting on an airplane from Prague to Las Vegas. I wasn't looking for Elvis impersonator to officiate my marriage neither was I planning to spend time in the casino. I was heading to re:Invent - an annual AWS conference. This year, like all of us, I'm stuck at home. Fortunately I could get a bit of Vegas in my living room / home office (and in my heart) with the online edition of re:Invent. It started with Andy Jassy’s (the CEO of AWS) keynote.

2 min read · 11/13/2020

Revolgy is the AWS Consulting partner of the year

Revolgy team received a top award - Amazon Web Services Consulting Partner of the Year in the CEE region.

2 min read · 10/12/2020

G Suite is changing to Google Workspace

Google announced a complete rebranding of its communication and collaboration tools. With the change of the name, design and massive improvements to the user experience of their flagship product G Suite, they also introduced a brand new pricing policy.

4 min read · 10/09/2020

So long G Suite. Welcome, Google Workspace

Everything you need to get anything done, now in one place

1 min read · 09/14/2020

G Suite visitors sharing

Google has made online collaboration with non-Google accounts way easier by enabling them to view, comment on, or edit content in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Sites. You can now say goodbye to converting email attachments from one software extension to another.

2 min read · 08/04/2020

G Suite Essentials customers can use AppSheet at no charge

Google lately announced a new version of G Suite - G Suite Essentials. This solution originally includes Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet. Now, Google adds one new feature - AppSheet - Google Cloud’s no-code app-development solution.

5 min read · 08/04/2020

New updates to G Suite for more secure remote work

G Suite is now more secure against phishing, brute-force attacks and gives more control to admins and meeting hosts over who can join the meeting and in what way. This blogpost explains it all.

4 min read · 07/22/2020

G Suite got major redesign

By intelligently bringing together core tools like video, chat, email, files, and tasks, G Suite makes it way easier to keep the communication between your team consistent, stay on top of things, and just be in the flow.

11 min read · 07/21/2020

Google Cloud for fintech

Yes, it can! And it’s easier than you think. It’s time to bust the myths.

3 min read · 07/09/2020

Welcome to the world Google Currents

What is the real purpose of Google Currents? And why does Google still try to come up with new social networks?

7 min read · 06/24/2020

Why (and how) we still work remotely after COVID-19

The recent global pandemic forced most of us to do almost everything online due to health concerns. For us at Revolgy, moving our company operations fully online was an obvious decision, as remote work is an integral part of the cloud ecosystem. Before the COVID hit we just wanted to give it a try for a couple of weeks to prove that the cobbler's children, in fact, do not go barefoot.

1 min read · 06/18/2020

We joined the portfolio of Sandberg Capital

Sandberg Capital, an investment group with major investments in Central and Eastern Europe, gained 35% equity stake in Revolgy.

4 min read · 06/18/2020

What part of your “startup product” can save you a fortune?

According to Google about 100 million of new startups are established annually. It makes around 270k new startups per day! Just for a comparison - about 360k babies are born each day. I don't know how precise these numbers are, but what I’m sure of is that there is quite a big competition amongst startup companies and only a select few can succeed.

4 min read · 06/16/2020

Welcome Google Chat! 5+1 Tips and Tricks

Classic Hangouts will be turned off later this year and will evolve into 2 products: Google Chat for messaging and Google Meet for video meetings. We tried this new solution for you in Revolgy and we are bringing you the best practices, comparison between Chat and Slack and many tips, tricks and hidden features.

4 min read · 06/05/2020

5 tips on how not to get lost in translation

Nowadays, work-related communication is expected to happen mostly online and in the written form. Thus, we often need to communicate with people who speak a different language, from a divergent culture and different professional backgrounds, using just a few lines of text. How to avoid miscommunication?

3 min read · 04/27/2020

AWS cloud with a partner or directly from the vendor

A comparison of the most common two ways of entering the cloud. The article takes a closer look at getting the cloud "directly" from your chosen vendor (whether it is Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else) and compares it with the second option of “entering” the cloud with the help from a certified partner. Specifically, we will focus on Amazon Cloud (AWS).

3 min read · 04/01/2020

We are here for you

The past few weeks have been really tough for all of us so I’d like to start this message by sending my best wishes to you and your loved ones. Above all else, our thoughts are with those affected by the COVID-19. We wish them a speedy recovery, and we remain inspired by our healthcare workers and others who are caring for people around the world as well as an overwhelming sense of community amongst people of all nations.

5 min read · 03/01/2020

Home office - slacking off or a real productivity booster?

In recent years, work flexibility has become a widely discussed theme. Some of the buzzwords you’re likely to hear include “telecommuting”, “home office”, and “flexible working hours”. The development of cloud technologies has opened new possibilities for defining the ground rules between employers and employees.

7 min read · 02/21/2020

Michal Šimon: I feel that "cloud-native" is just another buzzword.

I first heard about Michal Šimon (Founder and CEO of Codeac.io.) from my friends in Ostrava. Some of them went to elementary school with him. They all admired Michal’s lovely personality and his achievements. It is very impressive that someone from that small industrial city made it into Silicon Valley and founded his own startup. My colleagues and I were excited to get a chance to have him at the Cloud Native Meetup in Prague. where he talked about serverless machine learning at Codeac.io. What Michal thinks about “buzzwords” such as serverless or cloud-native? And how did he get into software engineering? Read along!

3 min read · 02/11/2020

Jennifer Strejevitch: Containers will be mainstream!

I've met with Jennifer Strejevitch at the co-working space HubHub in the centre of Prague. She is one of the very few women who lectured at the Cloud Native Meetup which I help to organise. It isn't easy to find female speakers for this kind of event. Jennifer was recommended to me by another speaker, Katie Gamanji (we will publish an interview with her soon) Both Jennifer and Katie are active members of the Women in DevOps community and they both worked for Condé Nast - a global publisher with magazines such as Vogue, The New Yorker or Wired in their portfolio. I had a chance to talk to them both about how difficult was it to force their way in and thrive in IT, what kind of trends do they predict in this field, and what does “cloud-native” mean to them. Let's have a look at what I learned from Jennifer.

3 min read · 02/04/2020

How to: automated long-term cloud SQL backups step by step guide

A solution for automating Cloud SQL backups through GCP technologies leaning as close to fully managed as possible. There are a few ways to implement this solution. In this step-by-step guide, I will show you how to implement such solutions with good, maintainable practices in mind.

6 min read · 01/14/2020

Productboard: 'Why we decided to migrate to AWS' (webinar recap)

Serverless solutions are a growing trend. More companies are deciding to move their IT from previous solutions (whether an on-premises datacenter or platform-as-a-service type) to the cloud.

3 min read · 12/30/2019

The cloud or on-premises? How Czech companies approach their IT infrastructure

In 2019 we asked our clients and other Czech companies whether and how they use cloud solutions. Do companies still perceive the cloud as a threat, or is cloud security an asset to them? How many companies are still running on bare-metal and how many are already in the cloud? Is the transition difficult? And which provider is the most popular Google, Amazon or Microsoft?

5 min read · 10/31/2019

All you need to know before deploying a managed monitoring solution

We've recently got a chance to try out a SaaS monitoring solution called SignalFx. We really enjoyed working with it and thought it is worth sharing our experience. Let's have a look at what are some of its main benefits and everything else you need to know before you deploy any managed monitoring solution:

2 min read · 10/14/2019

Google container registry lifecycle policy for images retention

Is your Google Container Registry filling up, taking up storage and becoming expensive? How to handle images retention as a service?

4 min read · 10/08/2019

Everything is more important than IT infrastructure. Or is it?

When you start a new business, almost everything seems to be more important than the IT infrastructure that your product will run on. It's the least of the new CEO's concerns. “We will just buy a bunch of servers and our IT guys will take care of everything else”- he thinks. “First I have to take care of my target audience, frontend and UX of the app, graphic design, contact network, marketing, hiring… Oh, and let's not forget about great coffee and a ping-pong table”

8 min read · 08/13/2019

On-demand compute power for rendering video

You know the saying, the shoemaker's children go barefoot? That’s exactly how this post topic came by. I was preparing some graphics visualization for a new webinar and as I was rendering the final product for like 6th time due to a minor change, effectively turning my notebook into a fancy, unusable paperweight for the next thirty minutes. It struck me. Here I am, calling myself a Cloud Architect, using my own hardware to do the heavy work, being blocked away from working on my product.

4 min read · 07/23/2019

Hey, start-ups, the cloud is your future!

We keep hearing that computing is moving to the Cloud. Moreover, the Cloud should supposedly be the first choice of small and medium businesses, including start-ups. Why so? Here are a couple of reasons why start-ups (as well as the majority of other companies) should embrace the so-called cloud-first approach.

3 min read · 07/02/2019

DevOps and SRE's are the new Linux Admins. But What the heck does this mean?

You have probably heard these buzzwords already. With the current boom in cloud computing, the “Linux admins” are going out of fashion and “DevOps Engineers” and “SRE specialists” are popping out all around the globe. But what do these terms, or positions actually incorporate? Should employees with above-mentioned titles work side by side, or should they be afraid of being replaced by one another? Let’s bring some light into this topic.

3 min read · 05/23/2019

All you need to know before you try Kubernetes - Containers Explained

A lot of companies nowadays use Kubernetes for orchestrating their containers. I thought it would be interesting to talk about the benefits of containerisation - ie. before you even think about adding Kubernetes on top of that.

12 min read · 05/17/2019

From being noobs to having no Ops. How to use GCP to deal with backend challenges of a gaming business.

The world of mobile online gaming is a really competitive environment. Being in the gaming business comes with a lot of day to day challenges. Handling large number of requests, terabytes of data and managing the entire cloud infrastructure in a small team consisting of only 4 people.

6 min read · 05/06/2019

Cloud storages II: Block Storage vs. Object Storage. What are the advantages and disadvantages for you?

Cloud providers meet the storage needs of modern application deployments, by providing services that mostly fit into two categories: object storage and block storage. Do you know what is the difference between Block Storage and Object Storage? Which one is best suited for your needs? What types of storages do different Cloud providers offer?

2 min read · 05/03/2019

Debugging kube-dns and using FQDNs

Last week one of our clients started getting a lot of application errors after they migrated their main service to Google Kubernetes Engine. Quickly they found kube-dns is logging a lot of errors and is consuming a suspicious amount of cpu.

3 min read · 04/23/2019

Google Kubernetes Engine — HorizontalPodAutoscaler with external metrics from PubSub

With PubSub Stackdriver metrics adapter running on GKE we can easily autoscale our worker pool for minimum latency and maximum cost-effectivity.

3 min read · 04/11/2019

Štěpán's top picks from Google Cloud NEXT '19

It's been a busy few days here in San Francisco. The Moscone Center is buzzing with people. I am really enjoying meeting other Cloud enthusiasts and exchanging experiences and ideas with them.

7 min read · 04/02/2019

Keep up with the dynamics of the market. Try microservices!

To stay on monolith or to re-write it to microservices? This is the question! The question for more and more companies who rely on apps in their business. What are the business benefits and challenges of each of them?

3 min read · 02/25/2019

Cloud Storages I: Flash drives are dead. Long live the cloud!

Cloud storage is the next step of data storing evolution. External hard drives are on the verge of extinction as a new, much more convenient and much safer data storing creature emerged in the technology food chain.

4 min read · 02/07/2019

GCP Stackdriver Logging export to bucket and extract textPayload from json with Cloud Functions

On GCP you can export your logs to Google Storage Bucket automatically. Every hour there is a json file containing your logs and its metadata. What if you need just the raw logs though?

4 min read · 02/04/2019

5 reasons why working with a Cloud Partner is a good idea

Scaling the SaaS / IaaS business up through the partner network is one of the possible routes you can take. Public Cloud vendors rely on partners to get closer to their customers across the world. What does it mean exactly?

5 min read · 01/28/2019

Who is the real owner of your company's documents?

All data created by users of your G Suite are the exclusive property of your company (see G Suite Terms). The challenge is to make your users keep the data in your G Suite instance and organise it in a way so that the company has full control over it.

4 min read · 01/22/2019

Have you heard of CaaS? It's time to try it out!

This January AWS has significantly lowered the price of Fargate service hoping to make it accessible to more users. The price is dependant on the number of CPU used and RAM and calculated per usage per minute. At the moment it is up to 40% lower than before.

5 min read · 01/04/2019

Kubernetes for business in a nutshell

Kubernetes is supported by a huge community and a great deal of content can be found about it. What I was lacking was a simple, non-technical explanation of how it works and why should my business use it?

5 min read · 12/11/2018

LetsEncrypt Tomcat on Windows

This article describes the creation and setup of a certificate for HTTPS on a Tomcat server running on Windows. Its purpose isn't to present every possible option, but the selected one that gets the job done.

3 min read · 11/21/2018

Is G Suite GDPR compliant?

The question is: Does GDPR require you to have your data stored exclusively on-premises within the EU? To give you the full answer let's start from the basics terminology.

2 min read · 11/12/2018

Autoscale NGINX and PHP-FPM independently on Google Kubernetes Engine

Let’s say I have a stateless php app that needs to run 24/7 and automatically scale up to perform well and scale down to be cost-effective. A perfect use case for Kubernetes, right? (Let’s be honest here now — you would use Kubernetes anyway because all the cool kids do it these days).

5 min read · 11/12/2018

CI/CD pipelines - checklist

Continuous integration (CI) is the process of automatically building and testing your software on a regular basis. How regularly this occurs varies.

2 min read · 11/12/2018

How will Google Maps API updates affect your business?

Google Maps Platform is finally here! We're talking about a revolutionary change in the Google Maps APIs Premium Plan. What are the new exciting features and how will they help your business?

3 min read · 11/01/2018

Scaling in Google Kubernetes Engine

One of the main advantages of hosting application in the cloud is definitely the ability to scale resources in reaction to growing traffic or predictable traffic peaks that can be specific to your business.

6 min read · 09/26/2018

Empower employees and support employee initiative with G Suite

IT is all about people. Often we tend to forget that all the IT tools, applications and programmes are here because of people and for people: clients, shareholders, management and employees (no matter what the exact order is).

4 min read · 09/20/2018

Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers let you run JavaScript in Cloudflare’s 120+ edge locations around the world. Using a Worker, you can modify your site’s HTTP requests and responses, make parallel requests, or generate responses from the edge.

3 min read · 09/13/2018

EKS quickstart

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerised applications using Kubernetes on AWS.

5 min read · 08/23/2018

Istio: Multi-Cluster Federation and Hybrid Cloud

Your business is successful and you need to go global. How do you scale your app across multiple regions? How do you handle deployments to multiple clusters?

4 min read · 08/09/2018

Istio service mesh on Kubernetes

Over the past year, the service mesh has emerged as a critical component of the cloud-native stack. Companies such as Paypal, Ticketmaster and Monzo all function fully on cloud-native solutions and they all also added a service mesh to their production applications.

3 min read · 08/01/2018

Customising virtual machines

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the public cloud such as GCP or AWS is its speed. Instant access to an environment from anywhere in the world, fast setup, prebuilt images or instances and managed services - all these allow the end-user to start using computing, storage and networking resources in minutes.

4 min read · 07/23/2018

Building quality relationships with clients and within the company with G Suite

Building long lasting, close relationship with your clients and quickly reacting to their needs is the key to leading a successful business. It can only be done if the relationships within the company are well taken care of in the first place.

2 min read · 07/23/2018

Google container builder for easy and quick CD pipeline

I love the Google Cloud Platform. I love Google Kubernetes Engine. And I love GitHub as well. But I need a quick CD pipeline for an easy automated app deployment. I have an easy stateless php app running on nginx and php-fpm in Docker containers versioned in git on GitHub.

4 min read · 07/23/2018

Kubernetes in production — Pod Disruption Budget

How to manage disruptions in Kubernetes? Setting a proper RollingUpdate strategy specs solves only one type of disruption.What about other disruptions?

4 min read · 07/23/2018

Is "the cloud" in EU and is it GDPS compliant?

Where exactly does your data go when you send it to the Cloud and are the servers that it is stored in compliant with the European data protection regulations?

3 min read · 07/23/2018

Kubernetes in production - snapshotting cluster state

Are you the lucky one and your Kubernetes workload is 100% stateless? What about the cluster’s state though? What if you accidentally deleted the whole k8s cluster or a namespace?

1 min read · 07/15/2018

Build your own apps with Google App Maker

Thanks to Googles newest release - the App Maker, now you can achieve even more with Cloud Platform.

3 min read · 07/15/2018

Accomplish more with new Gmail

The average employee receives almost 100 emails per day. This is a lot to manage, organise and prioritise. Google just announced the biggest updates to G Suite so far.