#206 — March 6, 2019

Read on the Web

Web Operations Weekly

We Analyzed 13 Billion Log Entries, Here's What We Learned — Kinsta is a premium WordPress host. They analyzed 13 billion log entries and share some results here. Desktop and mobile users are almost equal in number, Chrome leads the desktop browser race, Safari on mobile, and.. well, a lot more.

Brian Jackson (Kinsta)

How Is Software Developed at Amazon?“Scaling is by mitosis. Teams split apart into smaller teams that completely own a service. EC2 started as one two pizza team.”

High Scalability

Ten Steps for Securing Your Web Applications“Security is hard.” This post helps you handle both intended and unintended functionality. Make it a checklist for your apps.

Joe Kunter (Heroku)

Introducing Gremlin Free — Like a hosted Chaos Monkey as-a-Service, Gremlin Free helps you identify system weaknesses before they become outages. You can use Gremlin Free to randomly shut down servers and simulate CPU spikes on your way to building more reliable software.

Gremlin sponsor

The Challenging Migration from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine — The simplicity of Heroku made it easy for this team to get a prototype into production but as things took off, they wanted to adopt a Kubernetes-based approach. Here’s their story.

Adrien Joly (Algolia)

Linux 5.0: A Major Milestone with Minor Improvements — Linus Torvalds is frank about what this release really means: "‘5.0’ doesn’t mean anything more than that the 4.x numbers started getting big enough that I ran out of fingers and toes."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (ZDNet)

💻 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

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in dev roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📖 Stories

Rewriting an API Gateway Service from Clojure to Go — Moving to Go gave AppsFlyer a statically typed language, improved performance, and a more stable solution.

AppsFlyer

Deconstructing Shopify's Monolith — Shopify has one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in existence and its system was, for years, a huge monolith. This post looks at the limits they ran into and why and how they migrated to a microservices-based approach.

Kirsten Westeinde (Shopify)

Stopping Drupal’s SA-CORE-2019-003 Vulnerability — Drupal, the PHP-based CMS, discovered a severe vulnerability and released a patch. This post shows how Cloudflare analyzed that patch and created rules in their WAF to protect users automatically. Clever.

Richard Sommerville (Cloudflare)

How Cloudflare Built 'Firewall Rules' — A new feature that lets users construct expressions that perform complex matching against HTTP requests to choose how that traffic is handled.

David Kitchen (Cloudflare)

Go Down The Rabbit Hole — The tale of debugging a proxy that worked perfectly over the public internet, but failed inside an Amazon VPC.

Tim Baker (Deliveroo)

A Programming Language that Helped Shape the Digital New York Times — Intriguingly, the New York Times had its own non-public, internal programming language that powered its Web site for almost 20 years.

Brian Hamman

"So Lyft is paying $8M/mo to AWS.." — An interesting Twitter thread about how while giving AWS a lot of money feels unwise at scale, building a datacenter can be a worse proposition.

Hemant Mohapatra on Twitter

Is A Shared Database for Microservices an Anti-Pattern?

Roman Krivtsov

📘 Tutorials

Cache-Control for Civilians — An accessible look at what HTTP's Cache-Control header can do when it comes to controlling how your assets are cached.

Harry Roberts

Building Serverless Apps with Components from the AWS Serverless Application Repository — The AWS Serverless Application Repository contains open-source, serverless components that are searchable and deployable with customizable parameters and predefined licensing.

Aleksandar Simovic

Use The Lead Time Metric to Improve Your CI/CD Process — GoCD’s latest CD metrics blog will guide you on how to identify bottlenecks and improve your CI/CD process.

GoCD sponsor

How Rootless Buildah Works: Building Containers in Unprivileged Environments — Buildah is a tool and library for building Open Container Initiative (OCI) container images.

Daniel J Walsh (Red Hat)

5 Ways to Deploy to AWS Lambda Using Command-Line Tools — Brief summaries of systems you can use to make your lambda deployments more structured, including Stackery, AWS SAM, and the Serverless Framework.

Ran Ribenzaft

🛠 Code & Tools

ValuStor: A memcached Alternative Built on ScyllaScylla itself is a highly scalable, distributed low-latency database (based on Apache Cassandra’s design) and ValuStor is an open source memcached alternative built on top of it and brings several interesting features to the party.

Peter Corless

Automated Visual Testing for Web Apps. Start for Free

Percy sponsor

OperatorHub.io: A Registry for Kubernetes Operators

The Operator Framework

tor_ssh.sh: A Quick Way to Enable SSH Access via Tor

Nick Busey

CDS: An 'Enterprise-Grade' Continuous Delivery Service — Build workflows (via a Web-based UI or CLI), run them, analyze logs, and more.

OVH

Kosko: Write Kubernetes Manifests in JavaScript

Tommy Chen

📣 Some vendor-y news items

Microsoft Opens First Datacenters in Africa with General Availability of Azure — New cloud regions in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Tom Keane (Microsoft)

DigitalOcean Marketplace: A Platform for Preconfigured 1-Click Apps and Tools
The DigitalOcean Blog