How the 2008 Bitcoin white paper solved the classic computer science consensus problem — Problem Statement Byzantine Generals Problem (BGP) is named after an allegory where a number of generals need to cooperate and agree on attacking a city together at the same time to win the battle (figure 1-left). If any (n) of the generals retreat at the last moment, the battle is lost (figure…

Many-worlds (multiverse), Retro-causality (time-symmetry) and Consciousness-causes-collapse — This post will touch on three unconventional implications of quantum mechanics for the nature of reality. It will provide high-level description of the quantum experiments and hypothesis that try to fit the bizarre observations at the quantum level. …

Quantum computer is an emerging technology that will have a major impact — Quantum computing and AI can be combined to have an even greater impact. The goal of this blog post is to introduce basic concepts of quantum computers and try to demystify them. Quantum computers use properties of matter observed at the micro (sub-atomic) level to perform computations and solve problems…

The goal of software development (SD) and machine learning (ML) is to deliver features and capabilities to meet requirements and solve problems. But ML differs significantly from traditional software development in terms of the development approach and types of problems it addresses. …

Tutorial on deploying an application on Kubernetes (AWS EKS) — In this tutorial, we will deploy microservices based containerized application (retail app) on AWS’s managed Kubernetes service (EKS) cluster and expose it to the external world using loadbalancers. Container orchestration entails automating the provisioning, networking, deploying, autoscaling, and load-balancing of containerized based applications. Kubernetes is the industry standard platform for…

Launch application with deployment pipeline configured as code — In this tutorial we will be launching WordPress application in AWS cloud using Deployment Pipeline configured as code. Pipeline as code (PaC) is similar to “infrastructure as code (IaC)”, where we launch and configure infrastructure as code. In PaC, we configure build, test and deployment steps in the form of…

Tutorial on managing changes to database as code with Alembic & SQLAlchemy — In this tutorial we will construct a database schema using Alembic tool and apply it to PostgreSQL database in the cloud. Definitions DB Migration: A version controlled (with code) and incremental way of making changes to database schemas. SQLAlchemy: Python based framework that provides an interface to the database. It is…

Tutorial on launching WordPress application with and without Infrastructure as Code — In this tutorial we will provision an EC2 instance in AWS cloud and configure WordPress application manually via command line and then automatically with the help of infrastructure as code (IaC). The goal is to understand the benefits of using IaC to provision and configure applications in the cloud. …

Tutorial on automatically scaling servers based on load in AWS — One of the benefits of cloud is to not have to precisely predict and provision resources ahead of time for workload in production. In an on-premises model, you will need to over-provision the hardware resources by either scaling vertically (increase existing server’s cpu, memory, etc.) or horizontally (add more equivalently…