September 2016 Summaries

Effective monitoring of services is crucial for maintaining high availability. AWS Cloudwatch, in conjunction with its Simple Notification Service (SNS), can create alarms and send notifications to the right people. However, sending these notifications to a chat app like Slack is more effective than email or SMS alone. Slack provides several benefits over traditional notification methods, including visibility of team members available to respond, mobile accessibility, easy control of notifications, and a convenient timeline for root cause analysis. To create a Slack alarm channel, follow these steps: 1) Create a Slack channel for alarms; 2) Add Slack email integration to get an email alias for the channel; 3) Create an SNS topic for your alarms; 4) Create a subscription to the SNS topic that sends email to the email alias from step 2; and 5) Set notifications for alarms to go to the appropriate SNS topic.

Bandwidth transitioned from using Java Server Faces (JSF) for their UI front end to ReactJs due to the increasing number of front-end developers on their team. The migration process was challenging, but they managed it by breaking down the application into logical pieces and using a reverse proxy from Apache. They also set up a Node.js server to serve the new ReactJS UI, utilizing libraries like Babel, Webpack, Xo, Ava, and WebdriverIO for efficiency. The switch improved testing practices and made state management easier compared to JSF. Overall, developers enjoyed the transition to ReactJS/Redux as it allowed them to focus on their respective strengths in either Java or front-end development.