Issue #32
Read about infrastructure topics and news every week
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Things They Didn’t Teach You About Software Engineering
Vadim has a nice list of practical things happening in the real world of software engineering: you rarely write something from scratch, domain knowledge is more important than your coding skills, writing documentation is not emphasized hard enough, you work with uncertainty most of the time, and more.
https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/things-they-didnt-teach-you/
Haiku Is An Open-Source Operating System for Those Who Miss NeXTStep
https://www.zdnet.com/article/haiku-is-an-open-source-operating-system-for-those-who-miss-nextstep/
Letting Governance Teams Govern
Teri Radichel discusses the idea that organizations moving to the cloud can actually have more control over security compared to an on-premises environment. The author argues that if security is architected and implemented correctly, the cloud offers the opportunity for IT, security, and software development to converge, allowing businesses to re-think and re-architect more security into their systems and processes. The article also mentions that most cloud environments need improved governance in order to prevent the riskiest actions and most egregious mistakes with cloud organizational policies. The author provides some code to demonstrate the concepts discussed and plans to expand on the topic in future posts.
https://medium.com/cloud-security/letting-governance-teams-govern-49d9854d7ebb
Rackspace Says Hackers Accessed Customer Data During Ransomware Attack
Rackspace continues to trickle the truth out; it's now admitting that attackers accessed customer data during their ransomware attack. Their Exchange service what hit by this hack and they are now discontinuing the service. Things for Rackspace are not going very well at all.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/06/rackspace-ransomware-data-exchange/
AWS Security Heads Offer Top Cybersecurity Predictions For 2023
Cybersecurity predictions for 2023 from leaders at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The predictions include an increase in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to defend against cyber threats, the continued growth of ransomware attacks, and the need for better visibility and control over cloud infrastructure. They also predict that the boundary between IT and security will continue to blur, and that there will be a greater focus on protecting data across its entire lifecycle.
https://venturebeat.com/security/aws-security-heads-offer-top-cybersecurity-predictions-for-2023/
AWS Account Root User
A tip: root user doesn't have API credentials assigned.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_root-user.html
A Small Mistake Does Not A Complex Systems Failure Make
This a great article that delves into the subject of complex systems failure, specifically examining how small errors can have a significant impact and the inadequacy of assigning blame for major failures.
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/01/15/a-small-mistake-does-not-a-complex-systems-failure-make/
Build AWS Lambda Container Image with AWS CDK
A well-written and concise article that focuses on the topic of failure in complex systems, specifically highlighting the effects of small errors and the inefficiency of placing blame for large failures on them.
https://www.ranthebuilder.cloud/post/build-aws-lambda-container-image-with-aws-cdk
Fairness In Multi-tenant Systems
This article from AWS discusses fairness in multi-tenant systems, which are systems that are shared by multiple users or tenants. The article focuses on the concept of rate limiting, which is a technique used to control the rate of incoming requests to a system in order to prevent overloading and abuse. The article explores how rate limiting has evolved over time, and how AWS has implemented fairness in its rate-limiting mechanisms to ensure that all tenants are treated fairly and that the system remains performant. The article also offers best practices for building fair multi-tenant systems.
https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/fairness-in-multi-tenant-systems/
The Many Ways To Acces ECS
How to configure and manage access to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) clusters and tasks using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). It covers the basics of IAM policies and roles, and how to use them to control access to ECS resources. It also provides examples of how to set up access for different types of users and use cases, such as granting access to a specific task or cluster, and how troubleshooting access issues.
https://blog.symops.com/2023/01/18/ecs-access/
New Bold Move Linux Malware Used To Backdoor Fortinet devices
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-boldmove-linux-malware-used-to-backdoor-fortinet-devices/
Creating an AWS Governance Account
Another interesting article from security expert Teri Radichel.
https://medium.com/cloud-security/creating-an-aws-governance-account-b190996b8d97
Monads According to a Robot
It seems that chat GPT does a poor job at describing monads, I am not surprised!
https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2023/1/2/monads-according-to-a-robot
Writing Haskell with Chat GPT
It does a decent job at writing basic Haskell. I think chat GPT can be used for simple tasks to generate code that can be adapted and improved.
https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2023/1/16/writing-haskell-with-chat-gpt
Threat Actors Turn to Sliver as Open Source Alternative to Popular C2 Frameworks
https://thehackernews.com/2023/01/threat-actors-turn-to-sliver-as-open.html
Introducing maximum concurrency of AWS Lambda functions when using Amazon SQS as an event source
AWS Lambda now allows setting a limit on the number of concurrent functions that can be invoked by SQS as an event source. This article explains how to set this limit and provides information on how Lambda scales using this pattern, the problems it can solve, and a demonstration of the feature.
Azure Functions 2022 recap and 2023 sneak peek
The Azure Functions team has released a recap of the updates and improvements made to Azure Functions in 2022, as well as a preview of what to expect in 2023. These include new features such as support for .NET 6 and Azure Stack, improvements to the Azure Functions runtime, and better integration with other Azure services.
Transfer data from AWS to GCP using Storage Transfer Service
The Storage Transfer Service is a Google Cloud tool that facilitates the transfer of data from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by automating data movement. It supports several types of data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, and Amazon EBS snapshots, and allows scheduling transfers, setting up data encryption, and monitoring transfer status. It provides a simple and efficient way to move large amounts of data from AWS to GCP.
Decoupling Microservices with AWS EventBridge Pipes
How to use AWS EventBridge to decouple microservices in a serverless architecture. EventBridge allows services to communicate by sending and receiving events, instead of making direct HTTP calls. The article provides an example of how EventBridge can be used to create "pipes" between services, which can help to make microservices more loosely coupled, and reduce dependencies between services. This method can improve the overall scalability, security, and maintainability of the system.
https://cbannes.medium.com/decoupling-microservices-with-aws-eventbridge-pipes-3cef3a1dfce7
Build a serverless streaming pipeline with Amazon MSK Serverless, Amazon MSK Connect, and MongoDB Atlas
The pipeline ingests streaming data from a Kafka topic, processes it using AWS Lambda, and stores it in MongoDB Atlas. By using serverless technologies, the pipeline can scale automatically and only pay for the resources used. The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up and configure the pipeline and also highlights the benefits of using this architecture such as cost-efficiency, scalability, and ease of use.
Generate diagrams programmatically
How to use D2, a Go-based tool that enables creating diagrams in a declarative manner. It guides the reader on how to use D2 in Go code to generate a diagram of a database schema directly from a provided SQL schema.
https://terrastruct.com/blog/post/generate-diagrams-programmatically/
The exasperated engineers guide to IPs in Golang
https://djosephsen.github.io//posts/ipnet/
prest
Serve Postgres data with this REST solution.
https://github.com/prest/prest
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