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Semi regular newsletter featuring interesting links and articles
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Random Interesting Things
A semi regular newsletter by R.I.Pienaar
Welcome to the next issue of my newsletter, expect when-its-good-and-ready frequency issues full of interesting things I come across online.

Bumper issue again as I've been a bit slack in sending the news letter!
- [ Security ] -
There's a gigantic hole in sudo, get with the patching, the list of affected distros include more or less everything you might care for.

Fairly old news now since I've been lazy and did not send a news letter last week but there was also a huge ransomware worm going around.  It's mostly fizzled out now but it's very significant because this is a thing thanks to NSA hoarded malware that was leaked and used. It also knocked out huge parts of the UK National Healthcare System and could have had dire ramifications.

There's a huge writeup about Stackoverflow's move to HTTPS.  This is an amazing read and gives really in depth insight into what it takes to run a big site, enabling HTTPS is a very complex task and this would form a great roadmap and resource to planning such a move.

The UK gov has gone on record to state unequivocally that websites should not disable password pasting. It seems unbelievable that this is even a thing but so many websites disable password managers and now at least there's some official like resource to give to these.

- [ DevOps ] -
Most of us have fiendishly complex SSH setups now, jump boxes, proxies, pac files, proxies to jump boxes and worse.  There's an amazing tool called advanced-ssh-config that gives you a way to do some very complex setups in a template/dsl style setup it can even output graphs.  Worth a look for sure.

Envoy proxy is quite a hot topic at the moment, Christian Posta is working on a great series covering various patterns of use in a microservices world.

Enough with the Microservices goes into depth about some of the pitfalls of microservices.  I wish I could get this into some peoples minds, alas, buzzword bingo architecture is a thing.

I previously mentioned The Hitchhikers Guide to AWS ECS and Docker, there is now a video serious to accompany it

Istio is a new Service Mesh type thing that helps you build and run services.  It uses Envoy and a number of other things to deliver Traffic Management, Observability, Policy Enforcement and Identity and Security.  It runs on Kubernetes. Worth a look.

Ksonnet is a configuration tool for Kubernetes, looks pretty interesting too.

If you have the misfortune of having to run Zookeeper you might be interested in zetcd - a Zookeeper protocol layer ontop of etcd.  You might be swapping one evil for another, but worth considering.

Cloudflare introduced a pretty interesting intelligent router ontop of their network called Argo, looks like a pretty good capability to have.

Not sure I am on board with all this but The Startup CTO's Guide to Ops is a really good pragmatic look at how to do things without going crazy on the AWS bills.  We need more of this.

IronFunctions is a Open Source serverless platform from iron.io. It's written in Go, runs everywhere and supports any language.  Even is Lambda compatible.

Kubernetes is becoming a bit of a beast, Kubernetes By Example is amazing.  It gives you example commands and outputs of common tasks and this seems like a really good idea to get a birds eye view as well as a reference resource.

- [ Development ] -
Documentation is a very important topic especially for those of us who work on Open Source projects and it's something that people really under appreciate the effort it takes to make.  There's a great doc that can help you level up your efforts titled What nobody tells you about documentation.

d3.js is the amazing graphing library everyone uses.  A great intro titled Hitchhikers Guide to d3.js will get you going with it.  It's a huge framework now made up of many parts and this takes a pretty good walk through its complexities.

- [ /dev/random ] -
A bit tongue in cheek but stack overflow is helping up to 80 people a hour quit VIM.

Very interesting story about resiliency, supply chain management and disaster management as it relates to the Waffle House chain of restaurants and FEMA.  Must read.

Gitorials is an interesting concept allowing you to learn by exploring a growing project over time.

A look back at building a 10Base5 Thick Ethernet.  I remember this, I do not miss them, kudos to this guy for building one today.
Copyright © 2017 R.I. Pienaar, All rights reserved.


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