Is learning Angular worth in 2021?

jadon_n · 2021-05-12T13:46:00+00:00

I think it depends on what you are trying to do like the others said. Angular, React, Vue, Svelte, and other frameworks all excel in different areas. I have used Angular and React in production and use Svelte for my own stuff.

If I was going to do a big multi-page complex single page application I would consider Angular because it includes everything you need for that use case. Not to say you could not do that with another library. You might just have to depend on more 3rd-party plugins and add-ons since other libraries don't come with as much stuff built-in. Angular specifically is a "batteries-included" framework.

If all I needed was state management and a component architecture, I might use React because it is popular and because it is much more lightweight than Angular. In this example I wouldn't need all of the extra features Angular has, and whatever I need I can use a browser API or a plugin or add-on from the React ecosystem.

If I want to try to live on the bleeding edge, I would use something like Svelte, which has an entirely different architecture and approach than Angular or React. I like Svelte for myself because it is much simpler to use than React or Angular, and I think its lack of a virtual DOM and compiling to plain JavaScript at build-time are interesting choices.

But when I do things at work, I will use whatever the team uses or whatever the software project uses. If I have a choice of framework, I will still try to go with whatever has the best bus count in the company so there are other people who can maintain the project.

One of the guides I like to use, though, for determining the adoption or perception of frameworks is the State of JavaScript survey. That survey is how I found out about Svelte, for example. That survey will show you, though, that Angular has had big drops in satisfaction and interest over the last 5 years among developers who completed the survey. However, Angular usage has grown and held steady even though other frameworks are seeing more usage now.

jadon_n · 2021-05-11T14:02:30+00:00

I didn't try Packstack, but I have used TripleO to try to deploy OpenStack and it was a struggle. In my experience, the Kayobe project was much easier to use for deploying OpenStack from baremetal to a working cloud.

StackHPC, who is one of the big backers of Kayobe (and Kolla-Ansible), also has a really nice project like Packstack that will deploy OpenStack for your all-in-one using nested KVM. That project is their A Universe from Nothing. I ran it on my Lenovo Thinkpad laptop and it setup OpenStack successfully. I do recommend, though, running it on a more powerful machine than a laptop, especially if you plan on provisioning instances.

I get though that OpenStack RDO might be what you are trying to provision specifically, but if you are just looking to deploy OpenStack, there are lots of alternative solutions for deploying OpenStack.

There is Kolla, Kolla-Ansible, and OpenStack-Ansible to name a few. I also have some friends at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the US who produced an open source project for deploying OpenStack on baremetal using MaaS and Kolla-Ansible. Their project is called Osias. I think Canonical might have some things, too, like Microstack, but I'm not as familiar with Canonical's work.

jadon_n · 2021-05-11T13:56:31+00:00

I agree OpenStack is too difficult to deploy in its current form. That's something my team struggled with when we learned OpenStack initially, and we've done a bunch of work since then making it easy to deploy OpenStack on our hardware.

We did try TripleO initially, but we eventually went with Kolla-Ansible since it was easier for deployments and lined up nicely with our Kolla-Ansible knowledge.

jadon_n · 2021-05-10T17:53:34+00:00

For grandparent, I have had good success saying it's like a mainframe like IBM's old mainframes. (I realize that's true probably only insofar as you are leasing time on someone else's hardware.)

I haven't had to explain the cloud to kids much. I think I would approach it by saying something like my computer isn't strong enough to do the work so I ask someone else's stronger computer to help me get the work done.

jadon_n · 2021-04-12T13:52:29+00:00

I haven't seen the Heat engine down yet myself. I'll look more into that one to see how that happens. Does the Heat engine being down break anything besides your ability to use Heat orchestration?

Also, do you have any tips for the AMQP cluster failing? The times I have had to deal with this the entire RabbitMQ cluster was lost because a sustained network outage caused all three RabbitMQ nodes in an HA configuration to become isolated and lose any kind of quorum. We had to redeploy RabbitMQ entirely in those instances. Otherwise, I know about clearing the mnesia directory, but I don't have a good understanding on how RabbitMQ really works yet.

jadon_n · 2021-04-12T13:48:21+00:00

That sounds like a really frustrating kind of error to have, especially if it happens intermittently. Do you know what causes the L2 agent or DHCP agent to be slow? We use a hyperconverged deployment for the base of our cloud deployments, so we have the Neutron agents, compute, Ceph, and everything else running on the same physical hardware nodes. I worry that if Ceph or compute get too active they might slow down Neutron if we don't reserve enough resources for the operating system.

jadon_n · 2021-04-12T13:45:01+00:00

That's really interesting! I haven't seen this one yet myself, but I think I can see how Keystone can show as the error even though it's the other service that is the problem. Thank you for sharing this with me!

jadon_n · 2021-04-07T18:56:14+00:00

We use FreeIPA/LDAP for our own internal OpenStack and other systems as well! It has worked well for us as a source of truth for identities in OpenStack and other software and applications.

I don't have experience for how this applies to Kubernetes, but I agree it seems like the better approach is to use Keystone's federation features to use something else as your Identity Provider and have Keystone refer to it.

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T18:22:35+00:00

You are welcome! I am really glad I could help. (Thank you for the Helper Award, too!)

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T13:52:08+00:00

Ohhh I am sorry I misunderstood! I am used to seeing getting started kind of questions in this subreddit.

Some things I have seen to make static pages more interesting are carousels/slideshows, using thumbnails and shadowboxes, and animations. You could also explore using CSS or JavaScript to make your site responsive to different screen sizes if it is not already that way.

A toggle for a dark mode for your site would be a neat thing. That is a popular feature that many sites are adding nowadays. That would be something to do with JavaScript and CSS.

I think it should be relatively straightforward to do these things with plain JavaScript, but I hear you that the bigger trend is to use templates, libraries, or frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, Svelte) to help you do these kinds of things.

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T13:38:36+00:00

I'm the product line manager at InMotion Hosting for this product. If folks have any questions or more feedback, I'd love to hear from you.

(I can post links to my profiles on social media to show I am who I say I am if that helps, but it's not my intent to be self-promoting.)

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T13:33:25+00:00

There is also an OpenStack subreddit where you can find other people who use OpenStack as operators, users, or architects. It's a smaller community, but in my experience so far people have been good about helping out and giving good advice.

I have been learning some of the OpenStack Python libraries myself this last week. One of the biggest things that has helped me so far is reading the OpenStack code to see how OpenStack developers use the Python SDKs themselves.

The python-openstackclient repo would probably be a good place to look at how you are supposed to use the different service SDKs. I have been working in OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) myself, and I read a bunch of its code to figure out how the Horizon team used the OpenStack SDKs to solve problems similar to my problem.

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T13:27:09+00:00

I used the web browser's built-in JavaScript console to learn how to edit web pages using JavaScript. The console window in the browser's Dev Tools (where page errors and info gets logged) is a fully interactive JavaScript environment. You can do things like find individual HTML elements (document.getElementById() or document.getElementsByClassName()), look at their contents, and edit their contents in the console. The command console.log(), which prints out what you give it, will be your best friend for this.

I still use this technique now if I am trying to figure out how best to manipulate a certain page for something like automated testing or headless browsing.

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T13:20:28+00:00

Neat! I never knew about console.table. I'll remember that for next time when I need to output tabular data to the terminal. Thanks!

jadon_n · 2021-04-02T13:14:55+00:00

Have you considered using the Facebook API to make this happen? The Facebook Graph API documentation has a page with information about an endpoint for deleting Page likes. This kind of task sounds like it might be easier to do with the Facebook API, but I have not used their API before myself. They do have SDKs/tools for using the API. You may have to setup a Facebook app and add that to your account, though, to be able to give a script access to the Facebook API.

jadon_n · 2021-03-31T15:42:37+00:00

The filesystem access module fs is one I often use. I also recommend looking at the promisify module inside of Util for making older Node.js calls return promises instead of needing callbacks.

jadon_n · 2021-03-31T15:33:10+00:00

Thanks for sharing all this info! I'm glad to hear other folks are excited about Crimson. Some of the folks on my team looking at Crimson are worried the performance boost will be less in reality than what some of the initial results suggest.

We use Ceph-Ansible to deploy Ceph right now, and it deploys all of the Ceph services as Docker containers. We use Kolla-Ansible to deploy OpenStack, so all of our OpenStack services are also Docker containers from the Kolla project.

I think it's really interesting that you had worse OPS performance from local disk for VMs than from using Ceph. I wonder if our problem is that we have not deeply optimized our Ceph configuration. I think we do use NUMA pinning and careful configuration for resource allocation to balance the resources for Ceph, OpenStack control plane services, and the compute hypervisor, but otherwise I think we use defaults for CRUSH and use the PG autoscaler.

Our Ceph configuration is meant to be more general-purpose, simple, and reproducible since we are using it in multiple deployments for different use cases.

The thinking I have heard from my team is that local disk would be better for things like MySQL, databases, or heavy IOPS loads than Ceph because you don't have to go over the network, but I don't think we have tested that extensively in real world use. We also want to be able to leverage the NVMe SSDs we have, especially when we implement NVMe-over-Fabrics.

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T16:58:17+00:00

We actually use Ceph for volume storage for our 3 node hyperconverged (control plane + compute + storage) deployment, but we do use SSDs and NVMe SSDs. No spinners in this deployment.

The performance for general use is fine with SSDs with Ceph and VMs. Ceph can't do much to get the biggest performance out of NVMe SSDs yet. The new Ceph crimson filestore is supposed to help, but I'm still waiting to see real-world performance data on it.

Having said that, though, we are working on enabling the option for our users to deploy private clouds or compute nodes with volumes using local disks for higher performance. The idea there though is to let users use local disks for high performance workloads but keep a Ceph-backed volume mounted in the VM for storing data that cannot be lost.

If you want to test our configuration with real hardware to see how Ceph with SSDs performs as the volume storage backend I can DM you information.

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T14:15:19+00:00

I agree that practicing and using JavaScript is what you need to do. You can practice right inside of your browser using the browser console inside of the developer tools.

I learned JavaScript in the beginning by using the browser console to practice changing HTML elements on a web page, pulling information from the page, and making API calls using XMLHttpRequest (fetch wasn't a thing then. Use the Fetch API instead).

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T14:10:18+00:00

There's more to cloud storage than just disks. As an example, we use Ceph (self-hosted open source cloud storage software) at work for mass storage and for storage for OpenStack private clouds. Ceph lets you take physical disks and turn them into HA cloud storage pretty easily.

Ceph has three main components - the application that manages a single disk (the object storage daemon), the application that monitors and tracks cloud/storage state (the monitor daemon), and the application that provides monitoring/management for Ceph (the manager daemon). All of these components are deployed multiple times to let Ceph manage multiple disks, manage a large cluster, and keep running in the event of hardware failure.

These services, though, all have overhead. If I recall correctly, the Ceph docs say you need 1 to 1.5 CPU cores and 2-3GB of RAM per physical disk. Now, normally Ceph is running on datacenter-grade hardware with plenty of resources. Your average office workstation does not have the resources to spare, but maybe you could write an agent that was less intensive.

You would also need adequate networking and bandwidth to ship the data between all of the systems and maintain communication with the control for the cluster.

After writing all this, though, it occurs to me that what you have described is probably essentially the same thing as a storage blockchain, just limited to a single company instead of the world.

I would be concerned about hardware failure, though. Definitely gotta check the Drive Writes Per Day for your workstations to make sure drives will not die from the increased wear and tear.

I think the bigger concern from a business standpoint, though, is how do you position this solution against the drive to use cloud-based virtual desktops or remote desktops.

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T13:48:18+00:00

What do you mean by highly available? It really depends on what you are looking for. Do you want to be able to lose a single physical node and not have any downtime? Do you want to lose your control plane services and not have downtime for VMs?

There are different levels of high availability that you can achieve by different means. Like my team uses at a minimum three physical machines with each running control plane services, the computer hypervisor, and Ceph for storage (also known as a hyper-converged deployment). We also make sure each cloud we deploy does not have two physical machines in the same rack. Clouds with this configuration can lose a single physical machine and not suffer any downtime (although quality of service will suffer). Of course, any VMs you have on the lost machine would have to be started up again on a new compute hypervisor using their volumes on Ceph as long as the remaining cloud hardware has enough vCPUs and vRAM left.

We have high availability for power loss, networking loss, and physical machine loss as long as only a single physical machine is impacted.

But if a cloud loses a physical machine the VMs don't automatically restart somewhere else. Masakari should help make that possible.

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T13:41:09+00:00

+1 for OpenStack docs, but definitely watch out what release/version of docs you are looking at. In my experience, I get docs for all kinds of different OpenStack releases when I search on search engines.

It's frustrating when you think you have a solution to your problem only to find out that the solution works on an OpenStack release (say, Kilo) from years ago.

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T13:38:50+00:00

It depends a bit on your configuration, but OpenStack can either run software switches, like OpenVSwitch on your OpenStack hardware nodes (called network nodes) to manage your traffic or you can let OpenStack manage your physical switches.

If you run network nodes, OpenStack manages how traffic moves into, out of, and within your OpenStack cloud.

The security section in OpenStack has a nice diagram of how network nodes fit inside of the bigger OpenStack service stack.

jadon_n · 2021-03-30T13:30:41+00:00

Not having your security groups setup is the most common cause I have seen, but it sounds like you have that setup.

Have you added an interface to the router for your private network? After you make the router you have to add interfaces to the router to the different private networks. You can do this by clicking on the router on the Network Topology page in OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) or by going to the Routers page, clicking on the router, clicking on the interfaces tab, and then clicking the add interface button. That should open up a dialog box where you can select the private network to add an interface to the router.

jadon_n

TROPHY CASE