#230 — August 21, 2019

Read on the Web

StatusCode
Covering the week's news in software development, infrastructure, ops, platforms, and performance — Formerly Web Operations Weekly and currently in transition.

Editorial credit: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com

How AWS Powered Amazon's Prime Day 2019 — Amazon drove a ‘record breaking’ amount of traffic and sales on this year’s Prime Day, all powered by AWS services like CloudFront, DynamoDB (which peaked at serving 45.4 million requests per second), and Aurora.

Jeff Barr

Microsoft Introduces Beta of Its Chrome-Based Edge Browser — Available for Windows and macOS, the beta release of Edge is the third and final preview release of Microsoft’s new Chromium-based browser, although Microsoft is declaring it ‘ready for everyday use’ with this release. It also includes the ‘Internet Explorer mode’ for back compatibility with IE 11.

Joe Belfiore (Microsoft)

How to Develop a Successful DevOps Testing Strategy — Everything you need to know about building a DevOps strategy starts here. Get expert tips and tools that will streamline and automate your entire software delivery lifecycle.

Zephyr sponsor

Cloudflare Plans to Go Public, Here's Its S-1 — When a company wishes to offer its shares for public sale in the US, it has to file a document with the authorities to disclose info about their business, how it’s performing, etc. Here’s Cloudflare’s.

SEC

IETF Publishes JMAP Spec, An Attempt to Modernize Email — We’ve briefly mentioned this before, but the specifications for the ‘JMAP’ email protocol have now been reviewed and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It remains to be seen if providers other than Fastmail and Topicbox adopt it, however.

Fastmail

Highlights from Git 2.23: Alternatives for git checkout — Yes, there’s a new version of git. The biggest tweak comes via two new commands, git switch and git restore which aim to break down the git checkout experience into something more controllable.

The GitHub Blog

Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

WebOps developers are in demand on Vettery — Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

💬 Stories and Opinions

The Architecture of a Static, Wiki-Like Site from 1996 — I saw this on Hacker News and thought it was interesting, particularly through the lens of the renaissance of static site generation. It involves forms, email, and turning emails into site edits.

Colin Wright

How 21st Century Datacenter Locations Can Be Driven by 19th Century Politics

George Moore

The (Not So) Hidden Cost of Sharing Code Between iOS And Android — Dropbox used to share C++ code between their iOS and Android apps but the overhead of doing so turned out to be more costly than just writing two versions..

Eyal Guthmann (Dropbox)

📕 20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams — Actionable insights to help you debug your development process with data. Get your copy.

GitPrime sponsor

Why Software Architects Must Be Involved in the Earliest Systems Engineering Activities

Sarah Sheard

What I've Learnt in a Year of Working Remotely — Working remotely as a software developer is increasingly common, and despite the obvious advantages, there are a lot of complicated tradeoffs too.

Mike Davidson

Behind The Scenes of Pinterest’s Next-Gen Content Moderation Platform, Pinqueue3.0

James Man (Pinterest Engineering)

📖 Tutorials and Knowledge

Some Distributed Systems Vocabulary — Brief, high level explanations of CAP, ACID, Harvest and Yield, BASE, CALM, consistency levels, and more. All things worth knowing (or knowing how to look up!)

Will Larson

How to Start Your Own ISP — A practical guide to starting your own (wireless) Internet Service Provider.

Graham Castleton

Do You Need Go or Kubernetes Training?

Ardan Labs sponsor

Using Callback URLs for Approval Emails with AWS Step Functions — A clever use for a Step Functions state machine – sending out an email and then awaiting for a user to click an approve/reject link within the mail.

Ben Kehoe

Bringing Serverless to a Page Near You with Hugo and Kubernetes — Discover how to migrate a Hugo-powered static site over to OpenFaaS complete with custom domains, TLS, and CI/CD.

OpenFaaS

You Can Now Trigger Kernel Panics on Your EC2 Instances — Initially it sounds like one of those “but why?” features but it’s basically to help you diagnose problems with unresponsive instances.

Sébastien Stormacq

🛠 Code and Tools

Ruby on Rails 6.0 Released — The latest big release of the popular rapid webapp development framework for Ruby is out.

Official Rails Blog

MongoDB 4.2 Released — The popular document-oriented database takes a step forward with support for distributed ACID transactions, on-demand materialized views, and retryable reads and writes (for handling transient cluster failures). Client-side field-level encryption is also in beta.

Eliot Horowitz (MongoDB)

Going 'Serverless' on Google Cloud Platform — A roundup of what GCP offers when it comes to no-ops services from the Firebase backend to Cloud Functions, App Engine, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine.

Tyler Treat

A New Way to Run .NET 'Apps' Directly From a GitHub Gist — A look at an interesting open source project that now brings an embeddable JavaScript-inspired scripting language, #Script, to .NET Core and .NET apps.

Scott Hanselman