Dendory Capital - Blog

Jenkins is a well known tool used in the DevOps world to automate processes. Typically, it's mostly used to build and deploy software as part of a CI/CD process, including cloning code from git, running a build job, running tests and deploying the resulting artifacts. However, Jenkins pipelines can be used to automate anything at all. Because of its built-in credentials manager, multi-node architecture and multitude of plugins, it can be worth it to centralize a lot of the repeated tasks you may have inside of Jenkins, rather than having scripts resting on a server somewhere. In this post we'll see how to use a Jenkins pipeline to connect to AWS and retrieve a list of S3 buckets available. Storing credentials The first thing you should do is securely store your credentials. One of the oldest security issue that IT people have had to deal with is the management of credentials. If you use a shell script to run your command, then you need credentials to be stored inside the script

  As part of our technology services here at Dendory Capital, we touch a lot of exciting new industries. One of them is Cryptocurrencies. By now most people know about Bitcoin and how it's been going on a massive growth in the past year, but Bitcoin is just one of many different crypto coins. The landscape is much more vast than it used to be when Bitcoin was the only coin in town, and perhaps the most interesting part of crypto isn't so much the price action but instead all of the technologies behind these coins. In this post I will describe some of the basic fundamentals that drive crypto including blockchain networks, smart contracts and gas fees. The basics of blockchain All crypto currencies work on top of something called the blockchain. In simplified terms, a blockchain is a chain of blocks, linked together in a secure manner, and published on a ledger. This is how crypto coins are created, and how transactions are recorded. For example, let's say you have one Bitcoi

Over the last few years, we've deployed a lot of environments into the AWS cloud. Provisioning a brand new IT environment requires a well planned out design, and each design is going to be different based on your business needs. But one aspect that has to always be present, from the original concept all the way to the execution, is security. These days security cannot be an afterthought. There's too much data, money and power riding on our modern IT systems, where getting a virus or having a hacker breach those systems is no longer an incoveniance, it can be a career ending event. This is why we always make sure to follow industry best practices when it comes to security. A lot of people believe security is a digital, black and white concept. Either you're secure or you're not. But in reality, you can never be truly fool proof. Security comes in layers, and the more layers you put in place, the more secure your environment is. In this post, I'll describe some of the

 The Dendory Capital Datalab creates solutions, workflows, tools and pipelines for our clients' Big Data needs. As part of this process, we need to make sure the solutions we provide our clients work properly. Today, we're going to go over a simple use case of analyzing a dataset to gain useful insights about a particular problem. We're going to load a CSV file containing data from the NASA Near Earth Objects project, and try to find out whether or not any large object is going to come close to the planet in the next week. Singing up for Databricks Databricks is the commercial version of Apache Spark, and provides a handy web-based interface to create and manage clusters, start a notebook, and use Python code without any administration overhead. Better yet, they have a community edition we're going to be able to use for free. So the first thing to do is go to databricks.com and signing up for a community account. Once you confirm your email address, you can log into

Taking notes is something that anyone who works with intellectual matters has to do. You typically start in high school, when the things you learn are no longer trivial and can no longer be retained by heart just by hearing them, and it goes on throughout a lifetime for many of us. A lot of what makes a good engineer or scientist isn't what they can remember, but how good they are at finding the answer, whether that's by referring to your notes from previous problems you've solved, searching for the answer through experiments, or just Googling for it. If you want to retain that knowledge and not waste time when you need to do something that's close enough to something you've touched in the past, having a well organizing notes taking system is crucial. Over the years I've used a lot of tools myself, and I will review what I consider 3 of the best and most popular options here. Apple Notes If you use an iPhone, like many of us do, the default notes app that comes

This year I've helped a lot of clients with their big data projects, and it's likely that anyone that works in DevOps or even as a regular IT person will have to deal with big data in the coming years. Businesses rely more and more on data analytics to make decisions that wouldn't have been possible before. Whether it's an insurance company adjusting rates based on real time car data streaming in, a security company alerting their agents automatically when something suspicious is detected on one of their many surveillance systems, or even a small business trying to gain more insights from web traffic, big data is everywhere. But before you can deal with big data, you need to know some of the common terms being used, what they refer to, and how they typically apply within the enterprise. This will allow you to successfully engage with the different stakeholders and make sure everyone is on the same page, so projects don't over-promise and under-deliver. Types of data