I recently had the opportunity to speak to DEF CON 864 about the multiple layers of security automation within Gitlab, the open source tools that drive them and how the findings are managed and resolved.
Email might be one of the most often overlooked pieces of any web application. Usually the biggest discussion around it in a project begins and ends with “and we’ll send them an email when this happens…”.
A little thought and some minor adjustments can help us avoid some problems that will grow as your project does. Let’s talk about email as a microservice.
Containers are not a new thing, but implementing them was always a little more complicated than it needed to be. Docker made great leaps in simplification of containers and set the world on fire from there. Let’s look at why.
Bosun is a monitoring and alerting system developed by the good folks at Stack Exchange, then open sourced for the rest of us. It’s written in Go, meaning its monitoring agents can run anywhere that Go can drop a binary… which is just about everywhere. So what exactly does it do and how does it compare to the likes of New Relic, CloudWatch, Nagios, Splunk Cloud, Server Density, and other monitoring tools?
PostgreSQL has a great feature called Foreign Data Wrappers (FDW) that allows it to connect directly to outside systems. Although the setup can be a little complicated, once it’s available you can run queries with joins or subqueries against them, insert data, create views, etc. Heroku has dramatically simplified the process of using FDW with PostgreSQL and Redis thanks to Data Links. Let’s try it out.
As development teams push farther toward continuous delivery, deploying updates to an application without disruption to users is constantly becoming a more sought-after practice. Amazon’s EC2 Container Service helps to make that easier than ever with tight Elastic Load Balancer integration.
Backing up your data is one of the most critical activities for your application. Heroku PGBackups makes the entire experience pretty simple but comes with a lot of flexibility too, with a number of options for smooth restoration.
Building an application with a microservice architecture is an excellent long-term decision if you can afford the increase in upfront time investment to do it properly. Heroku provides a platform that most developers know for simple deployment, but it also dramatically simplifies microservices architecture.
At work earlier today I ran across an issue where one of our application queues got backed up and it got me to thinking about how queues are organized in general. The TLDR answer: use urgency and intensity.
SSH::Batch is a simple command line tool, written in Perl, that allows you to run shell commands over SSH across multiple servers. These days it seems most people turn to Puppet / Chef / Ansible for that type of thing, but sometimes your needs aren't that complicated. For that, SSH::Batch fills the gap nicely and it's really simple to get started.
Lightning talk introduce pair programming based on information gleaned from RailsConf 2014. Bulk of the credit for this presentation goes to Chuck Lauer Vose of New Relic and Joe Moore of Pivotal Labs.
In a recent post I provided my initial impressions of Docker, which were glowing to put it mildly. After spending more time working with it, I've found that it does still have some additional drawbacks in certain situations just about every situation covered thanks to Vagrant.
Have you ever been working on a website and needed direct access to the database, but couldn't get access without using something like phpMyAdmin? SSH tunneling can solve this common problem and a whole lot more.
In the age of Twitter and Web 2.0, we've started to see a lot of websites drop the standard www from their domain names. This could simply be a product of people following trends or just trying to be a little different, but the real question is "What are the drawbacks?"