Archive for April, 2024

Using IBM Event Automation with Azure Event Hubs

Friday, April 26th, 2024

IBM Event Automation helps companies to accelerate their event-driven projects wherever businesses are on their journey. It provides multiple components (Event Streams, Event Endpoint Management, and Event Processing) which together lay the foundation of an event-driven architecture that can unlock the value of the streams of events that businesses have.

A key goal of Event Automation is to be composable. The three components can be used together, or they can each be used to extend and enhance an existing event-driven deployment.

Today, I demonstrated some of the Event Automation components working with Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka. As Event Hubs provides a Kafka interface to Azure’s data streaming service, it obviously can be used with Event Automation. But it can be helpful to inspire people by showing it for real, so even demos of obvious things can be valuable.

For example, Event Endpoint Management can enhance the value of topics in Event Hubs by offering management and governance, and by enabling governed reuse of those topics. Event Processing makes it easy to get insights from the events on Event Hubs topics, by providing an intuitive low-code authoring canvas to process them.

If I was going to be running this for a while and wanted to optimise for my applications in Azure, I would likely have set this up like this, with the Event Gateways deployed close to the Azure Kafka endpoints.

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Hoops (a Machine Learning for Kids worksheet)

Sunday, April 21st, 2024

Machine Learning for Kids is intended to be an open creative sandbox to let students invent their own AI-powered projects. But in order to enable that, I create more prescriptive project worksheets to inspire and show what is possible.

I’ve just written another worksheet based around regression models – a model type that I added support for in February.

This project is based on shooting basketballs.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to migrate to a new cluster

Thursday, April 18th, 2024

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters.

For this sixth post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to migrate your Kafka cluster to a new region.

I’ve broken this down into multiple stages. For each stage, I’ll explain the intent and share a demo script I’ve created to let you try this for yourself.

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Shoot the bug (a Machine Learning for Kids worksheet)

Wednesday, April 17th, 2024

Students are free to devise their own projects in Machine Learning for Kids, but I also write project worksheets to help inspire students and teachers.

This evening, I’ve written a new worksheet based around regression models. (I wrote about adding support for regression models to the site a couple months ago).

The premise for this project is sort of Space Invaders. Except with only a single Space Invader. And it’s a cute little bug.

The aim of the game is to shoot at the bug.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to restore from a backup cluster

Friday, April 12th, 2024

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters.

For this fifth post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to maintain a backup of your Kafka events, and to be able to restore from that backup.

This is more complex than the previous posts as there are multiple stages involved. For each stage, I’ll explain the intent and share the demo script I’ve created to let you try this for yourself.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to create a failover cluster

Monday, April 8th, 2024

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters.

For this fourth post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to create an active/passive topology with a backup cluster ready to failover to.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to share topics across multiple regions

Friday, April 5th, 2024

This is the third in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters, but sometimes I feel like this can be forgotten if we only talk about it in the context of disaster recovery.

In these posts, I want to inspire you to think about other ways you could use Mirror Maker 2. The best way to learn about what is possible is to play with it for yourself, so with these posts I’ll include a script to create a demonstration of the scenario.

For this third post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to create logical topics shared across multiple regions.

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How ML for Kids handles numbers models now

Thursday, April 4th, 2024

I’m on vacation for the Easter holidays this week. Apparently I don’t know how vacations work, so I’ve spent a lot of the last six days working on a major rewrite of a big chunk of Machine Learning for Kids. In this post, I want to describe what I’ve been doing and why.

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