Google’s educational efforts and the underlying Cast functionality, etcd3 and its switch to using gRPC, and AWS opens up its Mumbai region which makes me go on a slight tangent about the differences between regions.

Google Cast for Education

We’re all aware that Google frequently releases new and interesting things. Some of these projects work out well, while others don’t and get shut down again. So, it’s always worth keeping an eye on what they’re announcing. This week that included a number of new tools for education. Google has for a long time had a strong presence in education, in many ways because for the schools and universities using their products is cheaper and works well.

The most interesting one they’ve announced in my opinion is Cast for Education. This allows you to share the contents of your screen (or, to be more exact, your Google Chrome browser tab) with other students or the teacher. Without the need for additional hardware or doing anything to the network. This is a very nice feature, that I can definitely see some potential for in classrooms where Chromebooks are pretty popular already¹.

From a technical point of view, this sounds a lot like a Chromecast, but without the need for the actual device. While I wasn’t aware of it, the base functionality² for this is currently being tested in the Chrome betas. That sounds like a really nice feature, and I’m looking forward to seeing it released.

Of course, because that is still in beta, so is the educational version of it so teachers will have to jump through some hoops to get it working, but as summer holidays are about to start in the Western Hemisphere Google has a couple of months to release it for the next school year. At which point this can become a good selling point for schools to get Chromebooks instead of some other type of computer.

etcd3

CoreOS released etcd3³, which brings some good looking improvements to the system. In case you’re not familiar with it, you can probably summarize etcd as a distributed key-value store system. In container (read Docker) clusters you will often need to get access to certain data for your containers. Whether that is configuration files or API keys. etcd and similar tools (most notably Consul and Zookeeper) are good solutions for this. Additionally, etcd is included by default in Kubernetes, one of the best known Docker orchestration tools.

As usual, if you want to know everything that changed you should read the linked post. The change that caught my eye however is the switch away from JSON endpoints in favor of gRPC. It probably helps that there was a good presentation about gRPC at last month’s Go meetup⁴ here in Melbourne so it’s still fresh in my mind. gRPC takes advantage of the capabilities of HTTP/2, by allowing bi-directional connections which means that once a connection is set up transfer can flow in either direction the whole time. It’s also payload agnostic, meaning that you can theoretically use it for most use cases.

In the case of etcd3, it sounds like they’ve internally changed over to a binary format, but by using a gRPC gateway it keeps compatibility with the old way of doing things. Of course, it’s recommended that you switch your applications over to using gRPC⁵ for a speed boost.

Intro to Kubernetes

Speaking of etcd and Kubernetes, a fun short illustrated video guide to Kubernetes “for children” was posted on their blog in early June. If you haven’t seen it, and are curious about what Kubernetes actually is and does spend the 8 minutes to watch it.

AWS Mumbai opened

While it might not be very exciting unless you live in/around India or have a decent number of visitors to your sites/applications from there⁶, AWS opened up their Mumbai region. It seems initially a bit limited to what it supports, but as with other regions that is expected to grow quickly.

Of course, it remains a downside with AWS that regions have different services available to them. Obviously there are technical reasons for it, but it can be annoying when you need to have your service in a local region that doesn’t support the latest and greatest. A good example of that is the frustration of every AWS user in Australia with regards to Lambda which didn’t get released in Sydney until a bit over a week ago.

Then of course there are the times where a headline of an announcement manages to both delight and frustrate. Such as the recent release of the Elastic File System, basically a shared file system that will be great for legacy systems. And it’s available for production now. In three whole regions⁷.