Week 25
I had another session in my Engineering Mentorship program where I get to pair with someone who has more experience in an area the mentorship is based on. For me, it is Kubernetes, and the idea is to achieve some specific goals. The mentor for the program will help the mentee to achieve their goals.
I was able to do some practice and some live Kubernetes hands-on. I had some assignments I wanted to catch up from the previous week, so, a part of the time was also used to doing that. I was able to deploy a basic Laravel app to Kubernetes and this app has access to a Docker API. As basic as it seems, I see it as an important step in achieving some of the goals I had highlighted for the program.
A fun part of these pairings was where we get to talk over problems and think about some aspects and why we should encourage/discourage them. It reminded me of those interview periods. The only difference is that there is no Adrenaline involved š. I could also see how I've improved at having such technical conversations - being able to communicate in symbols that we both understand.
I still have about 6 weeks to go in the Mentorship program and I hope to achieve the things I've planned for myself.
Since cloud costs have been a challenge, I've been seeking every means to slow down the rate at which our credit reserve gets burned out even with the increase in PHPSandbox's user base. I've been investigating how we can use AWS S3 (which is cheaper) to offload some notebook content from EBS volumes (more expensive). Even from the pricing, one will get a lesser cost for storing the same size of data inside S3 when compared to EBS volumes. In the context of PHPSandbox, this is complex to implement as we still need to have EBS volumes anyway. This is because we need to mount a filesystem that is not only readable/writable by the container running, but also to some other containers e.g. Composer container that will install packages in a notebook.
Making this work requires us to tar a notebook content, move it to S3 and delete the local copy of the storage on the EBS volume to free up space. However, that is just the easy part, we also need to ensure that whenever the app, tries to access any file in that storage, such file is made available. To achieve this, we will need to download the storage, extract it and then access the requested file/content as normal. Although I'm not entirely sure of how complex this would get, it is guaranteed to reduce the cloud credit burn rate if implemented.
Given so much anxiety and worry about the credit that will soon finish, I probably won't mind coding this out anyway.
I also had a chance to watch the Kenobi series that started some weeks ago. If youāve ever heard me say āHello thereā, itās a line I picked up from Obi-Wan Kenobi while watching most of the Star Wars-based installments where he was featured. After a long break, it's good to see Obi-Wan Kenobi on the screens again. In fact, not only him but his one and only Padawan - Anakin Skywalker, also returned. Seeing Ewan McGregor and Haden Christensen reprise their roles after almost two decades since the last movie. I also had the fun of seeing the Inquisitors aside from seeing them in the Star Wars Rebel animation. I could see they worked so hard to keep them close to the animated series counterparts, especially Fifth Brother.