#281 — August 26, 2020

Web Version

StatusCode Weekly
Covering what's new in software development, ops, platforms, tech, and tooling.

An Illustrated Guide to How NAT Traversal Works — Just how can peer-to-peer connections be established between two machines in spite of all the obstacles in the way? This is a thorough look at a complex problem and solution.

David Anderson

AWS Previews AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) — A new tool that lets you directly manage AWS services from Kubernetes. It’s a developer preview only for now and only a handful of services are supported (which doesn’t include IAM).

Pipes, Hausenblas, and Taber

Remote Instructor-Led Go, Docker, Kubernetes, & Python Training — We offer live-streaming remote training sessions for individual engineers and companies that want to augment their knowledge in Go, Docker, Kubernetes, and Python. We’ve trained over 5,000 engineers via our carefully crafted classes.

Ardan Labs sponsor

Ask HN: How to Do Cross Platform GUI? — There are so many options for creating cross-platform apps nowadays and almost as many opinions on how to do so, so it’s interesting to see a forum like Hacker News take the topic on including the expected debate over Electron.

Hacker News

Scaling Docker to Serve Millions More Developers: Network EgressLast week we mentioned that Docker would be introducing a container image retention policy – now it’s introducing rate limits for container image pulls on free accounts (up to 200 pulls per 6 hours). If you’re a heavy Docker user, you may want to check into this.

Jean-Laurent de Morlhon

Azure Cosmos DB Serverless Now in Preview — Azure Cosmos DB Serverless is now available in preview on the Core (SQL) API, with support for the APIs for MongoDB, Gremlin (graph), Table, and Cassandra coming soon. ‘Serverless’ in this case refers to the consumption-based model adopted, as opposed to having to provision ‘request units per second’ as on standard Cosmos DB.

Micorsoft Azure

⚡️ Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

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Vettery

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📕 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

'Lightweight' Serverless on DigitalOcean with Terraform and faasd — Roll your own serverless system. Of course, you could use any VPS, but in this case a DigitalOcean droplet is used with Terraform, a TLS certificate installed, and then you can start deploying code on faasd.

Alex Ellis

Writing an SSDP Directory in Elixir — SSDP is the Simple Service Discovery Protocol. This article shows off some of what makes Elixir good at building basic services (this one over UDP). Beware, however, as the site autoplays MIDI music (you can pause this at the bottom)!

Quinn Wilton

Sending SPF- and DMARC-Passing Mail As Any Gmail or G Suite Customer — Until seven hours after this post was published, it was possible to subvert Gmail and G Suite’s DMARC/SPF policy to relay and grant authenticity to fraudulent messages. Here’s how the issue worked.

Allison Husain

SaaS CTO Security Checklist — Use this basic security checklist to harden the security of your company, infrastructure, applications and more.

Sqreen sponsor

How to Contact Google SRE: Dropping a Shell in Cloud SQL — The write-up of a now fixed vulnerability in Google Cloud SQL which let researchers gain shell access.. provoking a rapid response from a Google engineer in turn.

Offensi

Reverse Engineering GTA V's Stunt Jump System — Not useful but if you’ve ever played GTA V, you’ll find it interesting at least. Scripting for GTA V sounds like fun.

Anthony Som

The Power of Serverless: Taking Visual Regression Tests From 20 Minutes to 10 Seconds — Visual regression tests are awesome, but unfortunately, they can take a considerable amount of time to run. Until now.

Fernando Devegili

RIP.com: Here's What Happens to Your Domains When You Die — Or, more accurately, the curious tale of domain investors (and others) who died but without the ability for their estates to benefit from said domains.

Tina Eaton

🛠 Code and Tools

Pelias: A Modular, Stand-Alone Coarse Geocoder — Given an address or place name this will come up with geographic coordinates, and vice versa. It’s very coarse, but it may be acceptable for your use case. Demo here.

Pelias

HyScale: An Application Centric Abstraction Framework over Kubernetes — Aims to make Kubernetes simpler. Takes a declarative definition of your service config and generates Dockerfile, image and Kubernetes manifests and deploys to a K8s cluster for you.

HyScale

AWS Lambda Now Supports Kafka (MSK) as an Event Source — Well, AWS’s managed Kafka anyway (i.e. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka or MSK). This opens up another option for building serverless apps on top of streaming data.

Amazon Web Services

DNJS: A JavaScript Subset for Configuration Languages — You might think that JSON can already work as a configuration language but this goes a step further by allowing various other JavaScript features in order to be more dynamic. CUE and Dhall are other compelling options in this space.

Oliver Russell

Will It CORS? — A handy online tool/wizard for establishing how your (potential) use case will (or won’t!) operate alongside CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

HTTP Toolkit

A Big List of HTTP Static Server One-Liners — Want to spin up a quick HTTP server locally? There’s a lot of ways to do it and this list is updated on occasion.

William Bowers

Macros and Utilities to Write 'Shell Script-Like Tasks' with Rust

Tao Gup, et al.

Nali: An Offline Tool for Querying IP Geographic Information

zu1k

MyPaas: Run Your Own PaaS using Docker and Traefik

Almar Klein

🕰 ICYMI (Some older stuff that's worth checking out...)