News

Kubernetes Operators—When, how and the gotchas to keep in mind

Netflix Play API: Building an Evolutionary Architecture

At QCon SF, Suudhan Rangarajan presented ‘Netflix Play API: Why We Built an Evolutionary Architecture’. Key takeaways from the talk included: services that have a single identity/responsibility are easier to maintain and upgrade; engineers should spend time identifying core decisions that need to be made when building a service, and determine whether these are ‘Type 1’ or ‘Type 2’ decisions which require thorough deliberation or rapid experimentation, respectively; and designing an ‘evolutionary architecture’, using tools like fitness functions, provides many benefits. Rangarajan, senior software engineer at Netflix, began the presentation by talking about two key business milestones within Netflix in 2016 that also had a large engineering impact.

Fitness function-driven development

Test-driven development, or TDD, involves writing tests first then developing the minimal code needed to pass the tests. TDD is an established practice for feature development that can improve code quality and test coverage. What about other, non-functional requirements such as scalability, reliability, observability, and other architectural “-ilities”?

Open for event based tracing?

In OpenTracing the fundamental concept for representing distributed traces is the (time) span: something that starts and then finishes, can be annotated with key-value pairs and can be “causally” related. This representation gained popularity with Google’s Dapper paper and triggered open-source tracing implementations like Zipkin and Jaeger and eventually the OpenTracing specification, but according to the academic literature it is not the only one. In spite its popularity, the span based trace representation has some shortcomings that limit its applicability.

CVE-2018-18264 Privilege escalation through Kubernetes dashboard

A recently disclosed vulnerability in Kubernetes dashboard (CVE-2018-18264) exposes secrets to unauthenticated users. In this blog post we’ll explore some key takeaways regarding monitoring privilege escalation on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes dashboard is a web based user interface that allows users to manage applications and resources within the cluster.

New AWS services launch with HIPAA, PCI, ISO, and SOC

NLP with a fashion twist: Zalando’s natural language processing framework

The Race to Develop the World’s Best Quantum Tech

A few days beforeChristmas, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill into law that devotesmore than US $1.2billion to a national effortdedicated toquantum information science over the next 10 years. The National Quantum Initiative Act represents a bipartisan U.S. government push to keep up withChina and other countries in developing technologies such asquantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum communication—all of which have some potential to upset the balance of economic and military powerin the world. Quantum computing has drawnspecial attention for its potential to someday crack the modern computer algorithms that protect government and corporate secrets.

The Guardian’s Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS

Running Kubernetes in the Federal Government

Tackling security compliance is a long and challenging process for agencies, systems integrators, and vendors trying to launch new information systems in the federal government. Each new information system must go through the Risk Management Framework (RMF) created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in order to obtain authority to operate (ATO). This process is often long and tedious and can last for over a year.