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How to build an organizational culture that is 'cybersecurity ready'

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Tags cio management infosec teams frameworks

Cyber threats are some of the biggest challenges organizations face, but cybersecurity failure is still seen as a critical short-term risk.. By Artem Nikulchenko. By Candid Wüest, Nisha Almoula, Roman Hagen @weforum.org.

Cyber risk is one of the main challenges that organizations face today. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022 highlights how cyber threats have intensified through digital transformation and growing digital dependency.

The article then walks you through:

  • 80% of firms have suffered a cybersecurity breach
  • Boards should prioritize cyber risks in planning
  • Strategic involvement is vital to secure assets and services
  • Cross-functional coordination can strengthen response capabilities
  • Collaboration is key to being ‘cybersecurity ready'

Most executives and board members are aware of key global cyber threats and recognize cybersecurity risk as an enterprise-wide risk, but not everyone understands the impact of these cyber risks and their economic drivers.

Cybersecurity must be a core strategic priority, and ownership and accountability for cybersecurity risk management activities must be adopted both within and outside the CISO organization. Nice one!

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Steps to emulate k8s Pod Network

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Tags cloud cio kubernetes containers devops gcp

Networking is the spine of Kubernetes, but it can be challenging to understand exactly how it is expected to work. There are 4 distinct networking problems to address. By Harinderjit Singh.

There are multiple ways to achieve the requirements laid by Kubernetes for pod networking. We can mainly differentiate between them on the basis of whether the pod network address space is part of the node pool’s subnet or the Pod network address space is separate and is not part of the node pool’s subnet. We will try to emulate the latter.

The article then explains:

  • Pod network
  • Test Configuration
  • Emulation of pod network
  • Testing the connectivity

Linux namespaces (particularly network namespaces) make it easy to implement these requirements. A network namespace is assigned to a pod as soon as it is scheduled and it is done by Kubelet. That means one network namespace for each pod. Good read!

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Hidden gems of Google BigQuery

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Tags golang app-development database miscellaneous gcp

BigQuery is amazing. It is one of my favorite tools within Google Cloud. Luckily, it looks like Google feels the same and, to the joy of BigQuery fans, keeps adding new features there. By Artem Nikulchenko.

Let’s say you push some data into BigQuery, and then another system wants to run a scheduled job to process the newly arrived data. For example, a system can try to pull data from BigQuery to another storage, or this system needs to run hourly reports based on the data, etc. In each of those cases, you would prefer to avoid processing the same records multiple times . As a result, you need a way to know which records are already processed and which were added after the processing took place.

No matter how long I have been working with BigQuery, there is always something new I discover once in a while. Today author wants to share with you the following four things:

  • AUTO column
  • Multi-statement transactions
  • Clustering
  • Indexes

As you may guess from the name, it is designed for point lookups, but not over any field. Currently, indexes can be used to easily find unique data elements that are buried in unstructured text or semi-structured JSON data. Indexes are only used when the SEARCH query is executed. Good read!

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Shaving 40% off Google's B-Tree implementation with Go Generics

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Tags golang app-development performance programming

There are many reasons to be excited about generics in Go. In this article, I’m going to show how, using Go generics, ScyllaDB achieved a 40% performance gain in an already well-optimized package, the Google B-Tree implementation. By Michal Matcczuk.

The work covered in this article was part of ScyllaDB’s long-standing partnership with the Computer Science Department at the University of Warsaw. We’ve worked on a number of projects together: integrating Parquet, an async userspace filesystem, a Kafka client for Seastar, a system for linear algebra in ScyllaDB and a design for a new Rust driver.

The article then describes and explains well:

  • Making faster B-Trees with Generics
  • The additional allocation
  • Why is it faster?

By shifting from an implementation using interfaces to one using generics, we were able to significantly improve performance, minimize garbage collection time, and minimize CPU and other resource utilization, such as heap size. Particularly with heap size, we were able to reduce HeapObjects by 99.53%. You will find all the code and performance testing described in the article as well. Very interesting!

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Building open source search app with Appwrite and Meilisearch

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Tags search app-development cloud open-source

Imagine you are building an inventory or an ecommerce website or a social media of your own, what are the two major things you will have to deal with? A. Database B. Search engine. By Haimantika Mitra.

This article deals with building a simple app where we search for movies, to achieve this we use:

  • Meilisearch- for building the search and
  • Appwrite - for the backend to store data and run functions to automate the search
  • Prerequisites
  • Creating an Appwrite function
  • Configuring the Appwrite function
  • Building the search app
  • Fetching data from Appwrite to MeiliSearch

Appwrite is a self-hosted backend-as-a-service platform that provides developers with all the core APIs required to build any application. Appwrite provides you with a set of APIs, tools, and a management console UI to help you build your apps a lot faster and in a much more secure way. Meilisearch is a powerful, fast, open-source, easy to use and deploy search engine. Both searching and indexing are highly customizable. Features such as typo-tolerance, filters, and synonyms are provided out-of-the-box. Good read!

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How to be an architect?

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Tags management teams career miscellaneous cio agile

But it is somewhat agreed understanding that Architects in a technical team are very senior people who should know everything. This is not a complete truth and nor a lie. What architects are supposed to do (I believe) still varies from organisation to organisation. By Husyn for AWS Community Builders.

The core skill for this role I believe is critical thinking and decision making. For any problem statement different roles in software engineering domain will have different solutions based on their perspectives. An Architect is the one which should understand all such perspectives and take decision based on first principles.

The article walks you over:

  • Types and kinds of architects
  • First principles & decision making
  • Soft skills
  • Business vs tech
  • Biases & preferences
  • Writing
  • Defining & naming
  • Architects to follow
  • Cloud architect

… and more. Any “good” cloud architect can’t be good in one area and be ignorant in other. They have to be a full package for the organisation. In terms of real-life example, AWS architects have a proper T shaped skillset. Yes there are specialised SAs, but even they understand basics of other domain. Interesting!

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Micro-frontend with React and Next.js

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Tags frontend react app-development web-development nodejs

Working on a large-scale project and managing its codebase can be a big challenge for teams. Though micro-frontends have been in the picture for a while now, they are getting increasingly popular because of their unique features and usability. By Harsh Pate.

Micro-frontends are particularly helpful because multiple teams can work on individual modules of the same project without worrying about other modules. With micro-frontends, it doesn’t matter how many modules will be added to a current system.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of what a micro-frontend is and how to implement it using Next.js. We’ll also discuss the advantages of using micro-frontends in your applications.

  • Introduction to micro-frontends
  • Implementing a micro-frontend with Next.js
    • Prerequisites
    • Setting up the micro-frontends
    • Execution and results
  • Advantages of micro-frontends
    • Deployment and security
    • Scalability
    • Faster development
    • Easy testing

So how small is a micro-frontend? This is still unanswered. The bottom line is that you should split your project up so that the user experience won’t be disturbed. This process may be painful because it’ll likely include multiple whiteboard revisions. Godo read!

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This is how we scale: Using a centralized logging solution

Categories

Tags devops aws app-development software-architecture serverless monitoring

Our current centralized logging solution is Logz.io: Cloud Observability for Engineers and most of our application logs are sent there from the k8s cluster. In addition, we use the logging system’s alert mechanism to trigger and send alerts to various sources, including email, Slack channels, etc. By Uriah Ahrak.

When we have several dozens of Lambda functions, we need to solve the problem in a generic way to reduce the amount of work and migration required by the developers who work with FaaS technology on a daily basis.

The article has these main parts:

  • Possible solutions
  • How do we plug in the currently deployed Lambda functions?
  • Deployment of logs consumer
  • Deployment of logs extension
  • Logging code-based Lambdas
  • Logging via CloudWatch log streams

For the final solution, we chose to have a segregation between our code and the logging system specifics. We initiated a Kinesis Stream, which is a generic process that anyone with AWS SDK and appropriate AuthZ can access and send logs in a specific format. If you have Lambda functions/applications that don’t support Lambda extensions, and you don’t want to change the code of the application in order to send logs towards the Kinesis Stream, you can use the CloudWatch Logger Lambda, which is listening to CloudWatch logs streams and pushing these logs automatically to the Kinesis Stream. Good read!

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Reduce energy security risk and improve resilience with Microsoft Defender for IoT

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Tags devops app-development infosec azure

In this blog, author wants to underscore the urgency around cybersecurity, how it’s evolving, and how companies can use technology to manage risk. By Darryl Willis.

A Microsoft sponsored Poneman Insitute study shows that 68 percent of senior management believe that IT and operational technology (OT) are critical to supporting strategic goals.¹ Business leaders realize that connecting everything from vehicles to power plants can offer unprecedented gains in scale and efficiency. However, digital transformation can be a balancing act of risk and reward. These expanding digital platforms can become targets for increasingly sophisticated attacks—with potentially disastrous impacts. Imagine what could happen if a cybercriminal gains access to an oil field or power grid?

The blog post also covers:

  • Getting fearless with cybersecurity
  • Fortune 500 American utility secures OT network
  • Leading global oilfield services firm protects critical processes

Microsoft Defender for IoT is now a critical component of the company’s security architecture. The solution brings operations and IT teams closer together and protects the interests of the organization and key stakeholders. Good read!

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Peeling back the layers and understanding automation mesh

Categories

Tags devops app-development web-development ansible event-driven

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 features an awesome new way to scale out your automation workloads: automation mesh. In this blog post, I want to focus on the technical implementation of automation mesh, what network ports it is using and how you can secure it. By Sean Cavanaugh.

We separated the control plane (which includes the webUI and API) from the execution plane (where an Ansible Playbook is executed) in Ansible Automation Platform 2. This allows you to choose where jobs run across execution nodes, so you can deliver and run automation closer to the devices that need it.

The article further discusses:

  • How do I protect my automation mesh network?
  • Using a Certificate Authority
  • Network security considerations

The Ansible Automation Platform installer takes care of configuring all your automation infrastructure firewall ports. This means the firewall policies and rules on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 or 9 are automatically configured when you deploy automation mesh. Whether you are beginning your automation journey or are a seasoned veteran, there are a variety of resources to enhance your automation knowledge with links in the article. Good read!

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