Author Archives

Louis S. Bermanhttps://louisberman.wordpress.comLouis Berman is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded four different technology firms and was employed as a CTO at GiftCertificates.com and Kideo.com. He presently serves as a Cloud Solutions Architect (CSA) at Microsoft. Mr. Berman developed the very first global-scale CDN deployed on Azure (predating Microsoft’s own offering by some 19 months!), plus three different automated trading platforms, a 3,200-core HPC cluster that delved into crop genomics—the largest RDMA-style cluster ever fielded in Azure up until that point, in late 2016—and countless other projects both on and off the cloud. Mr. Berman currently serves as CSA for the largest Azure customer (both by monthly spend and breadth of usage) in Microsoft Northeast. As a speaker, Mr. Berman has presented on a variety of technical and scientific topics. Recent presentations include “WebJobs (My Next SuperPower!)” for Philly Code Camp, “Batch Processing in Azure” for Microsoft’s TechReady and “ScopeSeeing: A Lifelong Quest to Visit The World’s Greatest Telescopes” for the Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF); the world’s largest astronomy event. An avid astronomer, Mr. Berman led the very first visual observation of Eris—the largest dwarf planet in our solar system—and is the president of the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers.

Let Me Serve[rless] You

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I’m less than pleased with the verbalism “Serverless,” a bit of marketing-sprecht pitch to selling consumption-based functionality to the feckless.  Not that Amazon’s “Lamda” is all that better a mouthful, but whatever the case I’d feel like less of a shill when talking about Microsoft’s lovely tech if it only had a better name.

The rub, of course is that Serverless—itself!—is great; an obvious yet revolutionary idea that is turning programming very much on it’s head.

As it turns out Serverless has been very much in the air, as of late.  Indeed, I’ve lost count of the number of presentations and meetings I’ve had on the subject in the preceding month alone but it must be in the low dozens.

On Friday, December 7th—tomorrow, as of this writing—I’ll be presenting on the subject again; this time to a bunch of data professionals at Philly DataFest.  I’d invite you to attend but the event has been sold out for weeks so you’ll have to wait for the next go-round.

Anyway, if you’d like to see what all the fuss is about, do check out my deck and demo.

Keep coding…

Campity Do Dah

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The leaves have begun to bud, the snow has started to melt, so it can only mean one thing: time for another Code Camp (2018.1).  This time round I have two sessions scheduled:

Go Serverless with Azure Functions, Logic Apps and EventGrid
Azure’s serverless story makes it dead simple to decompose your clunky monolithic apps into performant DevOps-friendly microservices. Join Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect Louis Berman as he shows you how to build and deploy a significant cloud-scale application by live-coding a real-world example of automating employee on-boarding to the Microsoft Graph as a serverless app. As a bonus he’ll also show you how to get a handle on your serverless workloads through DevOps.

Zero to DevOps (with VSTS)
DevOps is the secret sauce behind today’s most successful development teams and companies. Join Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect Louis Berman as he shows you how to speed your race into the cloud; in many cases by as much as 10x within a single year. In this demo-heavy session Mr. Berman will demonstrate how very easy it is for every organization to adopt DevOps, but just as importantly he’ll also focus on the soft-skills needed to “sell” DevOps to your clients and peers. The session will conclude with Mr. Berman’s “Top 10 Tips for DevOps Success!”

If you’d like to get a jump on things (or if you’re reading this after 3/24/2018) you can download my decks:

I also prepared a Functions demo (LsbServerless) which you can download from GitHub.

May the Serverless be with you…

 

Wax On, Wax Off

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WaxOnWaxOffHTTP clients can be infuriating in that they generally work without a hiccup; until they don’t!

I recently wrote a utility to receive and then save streamed Bid/Ask data from OANDA; called OandaSink.  It wasn’t rocket science—some six hundred lines in all—so I turned it on and the program didn’t skip a beat for three solid weeks.  Then, for some unknowable reason,  the server forced a disconnect and all of my lovely retry / reconnect  logic didn’t do what it was supposed to.
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Trope

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In eleven minutes and some odd seconds, I’d be dead. Not even twelve. Eleven! And I couldn’t do anything to change that less than salutary fact. The “timer” was ticking, but contrary to the popular trope, there was no loose red wire to cut and stop it all. No, the bomb wasn’t even a “bomb” bomb but a routine physics experiment gone terribly wrong, and I knew full well that it couldn’t be stopped thanks to the implacability of runaway exponentials and all that.

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I Was (Great American) Eclipsed

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EclipseFor those of you who experienced the Great American Eclipse, enough said.  For those who missed it, let me be the first to commiserate with you; you quite simply have no idea.

I could say something like “The moment was glorific;” a true statement, for sure, although an inadequate testament at best.  Indeed, the worst traffic jam in Wyoming history could do nothing to lessen my appreciation and wonder.  I’d do it again in a heartbeat!

BTW, the traffic jam was truly epic.  In my own case, it took ten miserable hours for my wife and I to crawl back to Denver even though the outward journey only took about three.  And we were the lucky ones; three of the four other couples that accompanied us on this trip took at least 13½ exhausting hours to do the same.

To get a good sense of the how the eclipse went down (at least in Casper, WY), check out KCWY13’s Even Scientist Were Blown Away By Great American Eclipse.  I get a good bit of air-time and I only manage to make one flub; see if you can spot it.  As to my favorite moment, at 1:48 or so my friend friend Gary Trapuzzano and his lovely wife Tracey Berlin kiss on camera after totality, clearly elated if also a bit stunned; pretty much summing up the whole experience for me.  Sheer magic.

Again, the eclipse was transcendent.  Word to the wise, though: 4/8/2024 looks to be even better!

Tickety, Tickety Tick

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TickerTo develop and back-test trading algos its essential to have great gobs of historical data on hand, almost always at the tick level.  More often than not this data comes from your broker—OANDA, Alpari, DukasCopy, and Integral (TrueFX), to name a popular few—whether through commercial platforms like MT4 or proprietary APIs.  Alternately, one can use a generic downloader like Birt’s Tick Data Suite.

Over the years I’ve worked with more than a dozen brokers and other data providers so you think I’d have a handle on this stuff by now, but nothing could be further from the truth.  No, its an ever changing and messy landscape.   Continue reading →

Cancel That

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Cancellation in a multi-threaded Console App can be surprisingly difficult, even though I’ve done it dozens (hundreds?!?) of times before.  As any programmer can tell you, there are the “Things you know” and “Things you merely think you know.”  In programming, fiddly little details count.

I won’t go into the trade-offs between using Tasks or Parallel.For[Each] or TPL DataFlow, but suffice it to say that the later is both the most useful and easiest to get right.  Enjoy…

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow;

namespace CancelDemo
{
   class Program
   {
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         Console.WriteLine("Press any key to cancel...");
         Console.WriteLine();

         var cts = new CancellationTokenSource();

         var client = new HttpClient();

         try
         {
            var fetcher = new ActionBlock<string>(
               async url =>
               {
                  await client.GetAsync(url, cts.Token);

                  Console.WriteLine($"FETCHED {url}");
               },
               new ExecutionDataflowBlockOptions()
               {
                  CancellationToken = cts.Token,
                  MaxDegreeOfParallelism = Environment.ProcessorCount
               });

            urls.ForEach(url => fetcher.Post(url));

            fetcher.Complete();

            var readKey = new TaskFactory(cts.Token).StartNew(() =>
            {
               while (!Console.KeyAvailable)
                  Thread.Sleep(100);

               cts.Cancel();

               Console.ReadKey(true);
            });

            Task.WaitAny(new Task[] { fetcher.Completion, readKey });
         }
         catch (OperationCanceledException)
         {
         }
         catch (Exception error)
         {
            cts.Cancel();

            Console.WriteLine("Error: " + error.Message);
         }

         Console.WriteLine();
         Console.Write("Press any key to terminate...");

         Console.ReadKey(true);
      }

      private static List<string> urls = new List<string>()
      {
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/143270831869696811/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/155585362100632165/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/23010648069511614/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/303711568591359002/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/314900198915723688/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/316166836311260373/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/535576580657166380/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/56154326576327972/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/56154326576368600/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/88523948898601589/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/108438303498183811/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/127156389453876236/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/270708627574674608/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/368380444492800731/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/250653535491278041/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/565483296932119884/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/173177548141309276/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/430867889333901210/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/61361613645883874/",
         "https://www.pinterest.com/pin/16466354858074206/"
      };
   }
}