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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.

First edition of the New Year, off to a pretty good start with lots of DevOps goodness.
- [ DevOps ] -
I've been using Linux since before kernel version 1 and still I am useless at octal file permissions. There's a pretty neat site for the octally challenged like me called permissions-calculator.org

I've been using surge.sh to publish the Choria site and really love it, it's extremely easy and completely CLI centred well worth considering for your static hosting needs. It does get pricey when you want to start adding things like SSL though.  So a solid alternative is to use S3, for a low traffic site it should be cheap and they give you SSL hosting and Certs for free.  There's a great guide about static hosting on S3 that deals with everything you might want to know.

Provisioning just the right amount of resources is quite difficult on Clouds, I've certainly often found myself wondering why an apparently well specced node is just not doing the job. It's probably down to miss conceptions about how virtualization works, transparency and so forth.  An old post titled Under-Provisioning: the curse of the cloud still seems relevant today.

MongoDB seems to be in the news for all the wrong reasons all the time.  This week news of a huge hijacking that's on going ransoming peoples data (warning: annoying popups).  Hopefully we all have our Databases firewalled but mistakes happen, I've certainly been bitten several times by Dockers ridiculous firewall integration and inadvertently opened something up to the world.  We need better tools to do integration tests of our firewalls.

This is not new, I am sure I've just forgotten about it.  Snapcraft.io is a project to do cross distribution software packaging.  It features some interesting isolation and sandboxing and white list based inter process communications. Quite interesting but this space is getting spoiled by variety of choice now.

Uber released their highly distributed messaging server called Cherami.  I am pretty keen on NATS these days, Cherami is different in that it comes from their use of Celery but they wanted something not in Python or memory backed.  So it's aimed at job style messages, distributed, configurable between CP and AP consistency and more.  Quite interesting and of course written in Go. The introduction blog post is worth a read.

This is pretty amazing, Google released something called Grumpy which is a Python compiler written in Go.  It compiles Python code down to Go where they run in the Go runtime, it's pretty amazing and worth keeping an eye on.

Incident response is something you only really learn the hard way. Worse processes and documentation that works for you tend to go through many very painful iterations. In recent years many people have written amazing public post mortems, we have techniques like blameless post mortems and more literature about this topic specifically exist.  Pagerduty have Open Sourced their Incident Response Documentation, it's an amazing resource and from what I can tell quite unique.  Serious kudos to them.

Live streaming has very interesting scalability concerns very different from what we might see in web infra.  There's a great post about FIFAs live streaming architecture thats fascinating reading. The comments are worth reading (what!?).

- [ /dev/random ] -
Shady wifi providers at hotels and conference venues is not new. Those who actively work to DOS access points not run by them deserve a special place in hell.  The FCC is starting to take a grim view on this and fined one lot $718 000.
Copyright © 2017 R.I. Pienaar, All rights reserved.


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