--- title: "A look back at the last year in Web operations" publication: "StatusCode Weekly" issue: 197 published_at: "2019-01-02" canonical_url: "https://weekly.statuscode.com/issues/197" --- The latest Web operations, HTTP, and Web performance news #197 — January 2, 2019 [Read on the Web](https://webopsweekly.com/issues/197) Web Operations Weekly Welcome to 2019! This week we're reflecting on **what happened in the web operations world in 2018**, as well as the top stories and tools _you_, our fantastic readers 🤗, clicked on the most. Thanks for supporting us in 2018 and we look forward to keeping you up to date into 2019! _— Peter Cooper, editor_ 🗞 Web operations developments in 2018 - The first big story of 2018 was about [the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities](https://thenewstack.io/need-know-meltdown-spectre-cpu-flaws/) whose repercussions continue to be felt. - Someone managed to exploit ACME and [get SSL certificates issued for domains they didn't own.](https://labs.detectify.com/2018/01/12/how-i-exploited-acme-tls-sni-01-issuing-lets-encrypt-ssl-certs-for-any-domain-using-shared-hosting/) - AWS started the year by opening [its 50th availability zone](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-third-aws-availability-zone-in-london/) (in London) and adding [native Go support](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-go-support-for-aws-lambda/) to AWS Lambda. - Red Hat [acquired CoreOS](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-coreos-expanding-its-kubernetes-and-containers-leadership), extending its moves into the Kubernetes world. [IBM then bought Red Hat](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/28/ibm_redhat_acquisition/) itself later in the year. - Jerry Hargrove explained a lot of AWS services [in neat illustrations.](https://www.awsgeek.com/) [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/85215a0e.png)](https://www.gremlin.com/community/tutorials/chaos-engineering-the-history-principles-and-practice/?utm_medium=cpm&utm_source=WebOpsWeekly&utm_content=20190102&utm_campaign=2019_Cooperpress) [Chaos Engineering: the History, Principles, and Practice](https://www.gremlin.com/community/tutorials/chaos-engineering-the-history-principles-and-practice/?utm_medium=cpm&utm_source=WebOpsWeekly&utm_content=20190102&utm_campaign=2019_Cooperpress) — What is Chaos Engineering? This post provides a comprehensive overview into the origins of this discipline, its various manifestations, and recommendations for implementing Chaos Engineering in your own systems. Gremlin sponsor - The servers behind Fortnite [went down](https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-service-outage-at-3-4m-ccu) under the load of the rapidly growing game. - NGINX added support [for HTTP2 Server Push](https://ops.tips/blog/nginx-http2-server-push/) and [gRPC](https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-1-13-10-grpc/). - Chrome began to mark all non-HTTPS sites [as 'not secure'](https://security.googleblog.com/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here-to-stay.html) in a push to make HTTPS even more common. - memcached was used in [a variety of 'amplification' DDoS attacks.](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/in-the-wild-ddoses-use-new-way-to-achieve-unthinkable-sizes/) - Let's Encrypt, the popular free security certificate issuing service, launched [ACME v2 and wildcard certificate support](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-and-wildcard-certificate-support-is-live/55579). - Cloudflare and APNIC launched the [1.1.1.1 DNS service](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/). Cloudflare also launched its [Workers](https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-workers/) 'JavaScript at the edge' service. - Traffic to Amazon's Route 53 DNS service got [rerouted by a BGP hijack](https://doublepulsar.com/hijack-of-amazons-internet-domain-service-used-to-reroute-web-traffic-for-two-hours-unnoticed-3a6f0dda6a6f) in April. Cloudflare then [explained what BGP leaks are](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bgp-leaks-and-crypto-currencies/). - Amazon's [Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-now-generally-available/) (EKS) went live. Azure's equivalent [went GA shortly thereafter.](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-kubernetes-service-aks-ga-new-regions-new-features-new-productivity/) Oh, and then [VMware's](https://cloud.vmware.com/community/2018/06/26/introducing-vmware-kubernetes-engine-vke/). - Microsoft [acquired GitHub](https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/) and [dropped a data center in to the sea.](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813) - In the world of serverless, Google's [Cloud Functions went live](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/bringing-the-best-of-serverless-to-you.html), as did AWS's [Aurora Serverless MySQL.](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aurora-serverless-ga/) AWS's DynamoDB followed suit [with on-demand pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-dynamodb-on-demand-no-capacity-planning-and-pay-per-request-pricing/) later in the year. - Azure [went down for a bit](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/microsoft-azure-suffers-outage-after-cooling-issue/) due to a cooling issue. - MongoDB's [new license](https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server) caused a bit of discussion. - Kubernetes [continued to eat the world.](https://medium.com/@pingles/convergence-to-kubernetes-137ffa7ea2bc) Please note, this list is just a selection and isn't _exhaustive_.. you've got [our issue archive](https://webopsweekly.com/issues) for that :-) 💻 Jobs [DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)](https://x-team.com/remote-devops-engineer-jobs/?utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=email-ad&utm_campaign=webops) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands. X-Team [Find A Job Through Vettery](https://www.vettery.com/tech?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=cooper-webopsweekly&utm_term=tech&utm_content=grouped&utm_campaign=ad-77581) — Vettery matches top tech talent with growing companies. Create your profile to get started. Vettery 📘 Top Tutorials of 2018 [12 Best Practices for User Account, Auth and Password Management](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/01/12-best-practices-for-user-account.html) — A post laying out best practices to ensure you have a safe, scalable, usable account authentication system. Ian Maddox (Google) [A Modern (Re)Introduction to DNS](https://powerdns.org/hello-dns/) — An attempt to provide a concise, modern, ‘correct introduction’ to DNS and related concepts. Pretty technical, but all worth knowing. _“The goal is to be a mini “TCP/IP Illustrated” of DNS.”_ Bert Hubert [📈 Data-Driven Guide to Engineering Leadership](https://www.gitprime.com/resources-data-driven-engineering-metrics/?utm_source=webopswk&utm_medium=email-nl&utm_campaign=webopswk%28q1%29) — Get actionable insights from 7 million commits and 85,000+ engineers, to increase your software teams velocity. _[Free Guide]_ GitPrime sponsor [Best Practices for Staging Environments](https://increment.com/development/center-stage-best-practices-for-staging-environments/) — When you’ve got a new feature to push out, it’s tempting, but risky, to go straight to production. A ‘production lite’ staging environment can help you indulge yourself without affecting end users. Alice Goldfuss [Behold HTTP/3, Formerly Known as 'HTTP-over-QUIC'](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/11/11/http-3/) — HTTP/3 is the (still) forthcoming new HTTP version that uses QUIC (a multiplexed stream transport over UDP originally designed by Google). [More story here.](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/the-next-version-of-http-wont-be-using-tcp/) Daniel Stenberg 💬 Top Ops Stories of 2018 [E-Commerce at Scale: Inside Shopify's Tech Stack](https://shopifyengineering.myshopify.com/blogs/engineering/e-commerce-at-scale-inside-shopifys-tech-stack) — Shopify provides ecommerce services for over 600K sites - here’s how they keep their system running at over 80K requests per second while running on Ruby on Rails, a system not usually known for its speed, and MySQL. Shopify Engineering [Moving Fast and Securing Things at Slack](https://slack.engineering/moving-fast-and-securing-things-540e6c5ae58a) — Ease of deployment and security often have an inverse relationship but it pays to get both right. Slack does this by following a Security Development Lifecycle and has built some tools and processes to manage it smoothly. Max Feldman [How Netflix Does Failovers in 7 Minutes Flat](https://opensource.com/article/18/4/how-netflix-does-failovers-7-minutes-flat) — Netflix decreased the time it takes to respond to an outage from 45 minutes to seven with no additional cost. Amjith Ramanujam [Building a Central Logging Service In-House](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/building-central-logging-service/) — A look at how a team built their own in-house central logging service to record all key events logged during user sessions, enabling them to track both errors and useful business metrics. Akhil Labudubariki 🔧 Top Tools of 2018 [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/e_sharpen:60/e3cvfufrhacpb9jchlut.jpg)](https://goaccess.io/) [GoAccess: A Visual, Real-Time Web Log Analyzer](https://goaccess.io/) — An open source log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in the terminal or through the browser. Supports logs from Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, etc. Gerardo O. [GitHub Actions: Workflow Automation on GitHub](https://github.com/features/actions) — _Still_ in beta, as of 2019, _Actions_ takes GitHub into new, ops-style territory by providing definable, automated workflows for deploying and releasing software. It’s billed as _“the biggest shift we’ve had in the history of GitHub”._ GitHub [Shop Like a Developer – Discover and Experiment with Hot New Cloud Services 🔥](https://www.manifold.co/?utm_campaign=FrontEndFocus&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=sponsorship&utm_content=Jan2) Manifold sponsor [Google Releases reCAPTCHA V3: The New Way to Stop Bots](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/10/introducing-recaptcha-v3-new-way-to.html) — Instead of just showing a CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA v3 gives incoming visitors a risk score and lets you take custom actions based on that score. Google [Minimal Ubuntu: A Tiny Ubuntu Distribution for Containers](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/09/minimal-ubuntu-released) — _“The 29MB Docker image for Minimal Ubuntu 18.04 LTS serves as a highly efficient container starting point, and allows developers to deploy multicloud containerized applications faster.”_ Canonical [A Collection of Unix Sysadmin Test Questions and Answers](https://github.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills) — Want to test your Unix sysadmin skills for an interview or just for fun? This collection of questions and answers should keep you entertained. Trimstray [Play with Kubernetes: Learn Kubernetes in the Browser](https://blog.docker.com/2018/05/introducing-play-kubernetes/) — The [Play with Kubernetes Classroom](https://training.play-with-kubernetes.com/) is an online, hands-on Kubernetes learning environment that lets you follow a tutorial without installing anything locally. Mano Marks (Docker) Curated by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/) [Change your email address](https://webopsweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) or[Stop getting this newsletter](https://webopsweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*) © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom