#304 — February 17, 2021

Web Version

StatusCode Weekly
What's happening in software development, ops, platforms and tools.

How Let's Encrypt is Preparing to Issue 200 Million Certificates in 24 Hours — Let’s Encrypt usually issues two million certificates per day, so why do they want to scale up to 100x that? Worst case scenarios. What if they need to suddenly reissue every certificate they manage?

Josh Aas (Let's Encrypt)

Go 1.16 Released — A significant release for the popular systems language. The release notes cover the details but you can expect faster and more efficient builds, the use of Go modules by default, macOS Arm64 support, and native file embedding support in executables.

Matt Pearring and Dmitri Shuralyov

Remote Instructor-Led Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, & Python Training — We offer live-streaming remote training sessions for individual engineers and companies that want to augment their knowledge in Go, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Python. We’ve trained over 10,000 engineers via our carefully crafted classes.

Ardan Labs sponsor

▶  A Deep Dive Into AWS Lambda Security and Function Isolation — A look at what happens behind the scenes at AWS to ensure that serverless functions are secure and that all of the millions of functions they run aren’t tripping over each other.

Marc Brooker

Dapr 1.0: A Portable, Event-Driven, Runtime for Distributed Apps — Dapr, an open source project out of Microsoft, provides best practices and building blocks for microservices and is language-agnostic. v1.0 has just dropped. It also provides bindings for common infrastructure items, such as pub/sub messaging. There’s more detail in the original announcement blog post from 2019.

Microsoft

Quick Bits

📘 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

My Philosophy on Alerting — ...“based my observations while I was a Site Reliability Engineer at Google.” There’s a lot to enjoy here if you’re in the position of auditing or writing alerting rules on your own systems.

Rob Ewaschuk

The Top 15 AWS Architecture Blog Posts of 2020 — This is a good retrospective to some useful blog posts if you’re working with AWS.

Jane Scolieri and Ellen Crowley

▶  Java's Quirks and Wrong (?) Defaults with Brian Goetz — An interesting chat with one of the leading figures in the Java world about what Java got ‘wrong’ but why it still works well that way.

nipafx

4 Steps for Kafka Rebalance - Notes From the Field — Our insights from the journey of creating the desired balance of partitions between Brokers, while reducing the data movement and overhead in the cluster.

Wix Engineering sponsor

A Compiled List of Kubernetes Failure Stories — The rationale for this? Learning experiences for people dealing with Kubernetes ops on a daily basis.

Henning Jacobs et al.

How to Generate Thumbnails using AWS Lambda from Videos Uploaded to S3 — A perfect pairing of serverless and Node.js. This thorough walkthrough covers using Node to tie together processing new videos uploaded to an S3 bucket, running FFmpeg to generate thumbnails, and then upload those back to S3.

norrapscm

Alex Ellis' Experiences Publishing 'Serverless For Everyone Else' — After four years of building the OpenFaaS project, Alex Ellis sat and wrote a book about it all called Serverless for Everyone Else. While the book is worth checking out, this post is more an interesting look at what publishing your own book is like and, notably, “in 14 days, I’ve received more money than OpenFaaS corporate users have paid into the project over 4 years.”

Alex Ellis

How To Set Up Continuous Archiving and Perform Point-In-Time-Recovery with Postgres 12 on Ubuntu 20.04 — Another straightforward ‘what it says in the title’ tutorial published by DigitalOcean.

Nathan McCulloch

The Types of Errors That Every Streaming Organization Can Encounter

Bitmovin Inc. sponsor

Running Nomad (the Workload Orchestrator) on a Home Server — If you want to figure out why you might use Nomad instead of Kubernetes, this is one way to go about it.

Karan Sharma

Understanding SQL JOIN — A mental model to understand SQL’s JOIN.

Edward Loveall

How We Use Kubernetes At Asana

Tony Liang (Asana)

🛠 Code and Tools

Typesense: An Open Source, Typo-Tolerant Search Engine — Pitched as an open source alternative to systems like Algolia, Typesense’s primary focus is speed and developer convenience for adding things like instant search or autosuggest to your sites. GitHub repo. BTW, Meilisearch is another great option in this space.

Typesense Inc.

Endgame: An AWS Pentesting Tool from Salesforce — A tool to demonstrate how simple human errors in excessive permissions (such a granting s3:* access instead of s3:GetObject) can be abused and it supports more resource types than even AWS’s own IAM Access Analyzer. This is interesting as Salesforce is a huge AWS user (via Heroku).

Salesforce

Adminer: A Database Manager in a Single PHP File — A mature project that’s an alternative to phpMyAdmin for managing Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, and other databases via a Web interface. The main selling point is it’s distributed as a single PHP file. v4.8.0 just dropped. GitHub repo.

Jakub Vrána

Online GIF Tools: A Variety of Browser-Based GIF Editing Tools — Covers things like rotation, flipping, cropping, adding borders, etc. EZGif Optimizer is another online tool I often find useful for tweaking animated GIFs in particular.

Browserling

💻 Jobs

Find Your Next Job Through Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Hired