Issue 105 — March 1, 2017
Welcome

An incredibly busy week in the world of Web operations and security. You know it's a bad week when an SHA-1 collision isn't the biggest or even second biggest story, spots taken by a major leak/vulnerability in Cloudflare, and a major AWS outage, both linked below.
The initial vulnerability report by Google’s Tavis Ormandy on what became the ‘Cloudbleed’ issue. Cloudflare created a detailed incident report when the news was released, followed by an analysis of the overall impact of the vulnerability, both of which are well worth reading.
Project Zero
Things began with S3 in the US-East-1 region going down, but this quickly cascaded into numerous failures or slowdowns across the Web and within AWS.
The Register
As always, interpret benchmarks carefully, but it’s interesting to see how Linode’s new $5 plan stacks up against the competition here.
Josh Sherman
A short explainer on anycast and how it improves performance and reliability.
Incapsula   sponsored 
A significant event given the key role that SHA1 plays in the systems that make up our stacks.
Google
S3 was down for hours but it didn’t impact Sentry much. Why? They’d built a simple S3 proxy cache.
Sentry Blog
Hashicorp’s Terraform lets you define infrastructure across nearly all cloud providers in a simple markup format.
Elastic Byte Blog
When your domain registrar won’t return your calls, it may be time for plan B - move from one TLD to another.
GoCD
Using a topic-based message queue to communicate between processes is very common but there are other approaches to keep our minds open to.
Bob Reselman
Transport Layer Security should provide confidentiality, integrity and authenticity — but Jaap-Henk argues that it’s becoming apparent that it fails to provide the latter: authenticity.
Jaap-Henk Hoepman
GitHub introduces SAML single sign-on, automated provisioning, 24/5 support, and guaranteed uptime on its new business plan.
GitHub
Jobs
Want to work on a high-traffic, popular web app? Come and talk to us about Ruby, SmartOS, MySQL, Kafka or burritos.
FreeAgent
Wimdu are looking for an Engineer with 3+ years experience to help define a solid strategy for ensuring future growth of our platform.
Wimdu
In brief
Can deliver up to 3.3M IOPS and 16GB/sec sequential disk throughput.
Amazon
Mozilla Hacks
The market-wide drop in virtual server pricing continues.
Vultr
Kamaljit Bath
eWeek
Monitoring is highly important in running apps at scale. Apply best practices from this book to avoid pitfalls.
VividCortex   sponsored 
Gareth Dwyer
Tom Wilkie
Cloudcast
Why you might benefit from letting this popular paradigm rest in peace.
Michael S.​ Mikowski
Shlomi Ben Haim
See how Rollbar pairs perfectly with New Relic to give you greater coverage and insights into your application errors. Get x-ray vision into broken code. Learn more.
Rollbar   sponsored 
github.​com
Thomas Hollstegge
Could be handy if working close to the metal.
Milian Wolff