DevOps / SRE — Top Links Last Week

Week 10 Issue #17

Hackers Break into Security Cameras, Exposing Tesla, Jails, Hospitals

A group of hackers say they breached a massive trove of security-camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada Inc. Hackers gained access to live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons and schools. Some of the cameras, including in hospitals, use facial-recognition technology to identify and categorize people captured on the footage. Companies whose footage was exposed include carmaker Tesla Inc. and software provider Cloudflare Inc. A hacker collective says the breach was intended to show the pervasiveness of video surveillance and the ease with which systems can be broken into .

Application Security for builders and creators

Alice and Bob work for an exciting data analytics startup that is disrupting the healthcare tech space. They are well known in the security industry for building apps that are secure by design. The vaccine passport app is going to have a go micro-services backend, a React front-end Single Page App (SPA) This will be followed by a native mobile app for Android and iOS built using React Native framework. A good knowledge about the application helps build a relationship with not just the dev team but also with the security testing tools (including the vendor)

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How secure is Docker?

Docker is an OS virtualization software platform that is used to create, deploy and run applications in a Docker container. It is very lightweight when compared to a virtual machine and it allows us to wrap up our application in a container along with all the required libraries and other dependencies and deploy it, so it reduces dependency-related conflicts. Docker is a well-known representative of container-based approaches and the scope of this article is limited to security threats in docker containers. In this article, let’s talk about docker security and its vulnerabilities .

Programatically retrying failed jobs in Horizon

Laravel Horizon is a fantastic tool, which I use in all my projects for my queues. There are 2 separate places for failed jobs: in database failed_jobs_table and and in Redis. When something goes wrong, we need to retry them one-by-one. I love to create an artisan command for this task: command RetryFailedFailedJobsViaHorizon. Added “job-name” argument to run only specific jobs; 2) Added ‘date’ to run failed jobs on specific date .

How do you eat an elephant? Google SREs talk digital transformation

A Practical Guide to Moving to Cloud is available as a free download from Google Cloud. Google SREs share key tenets that underpin the change philosophy you need to instill in your own organization. Building a psychologically safe culture in which you can grow together. Building guardrails into your cloud platform that support transformation, at pace, without negatively impacting others. Be bold; build a new way of operating your business products with a customer-centric perspective. Use your new culture to refine how decisions are made, and provide meaningful autonomy across the organization .

Multicloud deployments surge as Microsoft Azure duels with AWS

Multicloud deployments surge as Microsoft Azure duels with AWS. Microsoft Azure continues to close the adoption gap with Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud also has significant workloads and is a key provider. Cloud spending will grow 39% with companies struggling to maintain budgets, Flexera projects that cloud spending is growing 39%. The report highlights a bevy of moving parts with cloud deployments as well as multi-year trends surrounding containers, security, and optimization. The top four public cloud services used by enterprises include: Data warehouse, DBaaS (relational) Container-as-a-service)

Semaphore – Modern UI for Ansible

Ansible Semaphore is beautiful web interface for running Ansible playbooks. You do not need to change your playbooks to start using it. It is written in Pure Go so you can cross-compile it for many platforms. The separation of task into build and deployment allows you to safely update your production environment. You will be able to choose the database that suits you. You don't have to maintain another database. We use Docker for integration testing. For each release, an Docker image is automatically created on Docker Hub .

Kubernetes vs Docker — What You Should Know as a Machine Learning Engineer

Stephen Oni explains how to use Kubernetes vs Docker to build ML models in TensorFlow. We will use a simple ML model, which we will use to solidify the concept to be introduced. The model is a AND logic gate model, and since the main focus of the article is not on how to train it, this part will be less explained. The project-based method will make it possible for you to just port the ideas and code shown into your machine learning project .

Rust vs. Go: Why They’re Better Together

Rust vs. Go: Why They’re Better Together: Why they supplement and support each other. Go and Rust are modern software languages born out of a need to provide a safe and scalable solution to the problems impacting software development. Both languages were designed over 30 years ago and took similar approaches to a language for today’s development needs. Both Rust and Go are focused on producing efficient code. They also provide easy access to the multiple processors of machines, making them ideal languages for today for development. Go is the product and strategy lead for the Go Programming Language at Google .

Backblaze is now a Terraform provider

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is now a provider in the Terraform registry. Developers can “provision” or set up the infrastructure they need using that code rather than setting it up manually in the UI or command line interface. Terraform takes a DevOps-first approach, incorporating best practices in their platform so that you can focus on other needs. For DevOps outfits that need to manage a diverse toolset, Terraform’s automation enables speed and efficiency, reducing operating cost over time .

4 Best Practice Steps for Kubernetes Policy Enforcement

As organizations’ adoption of Kubernetes matures, there is an increasing need for control. Managing cluster configurations becomes unwieldy fast as multiple workloads are inconsistently or manually deployed and modified. Without guardrails, there are likely to be discrepancies in configurations across containers and clusters which can be challenging to identify, correct and keep consistent. Policy enforcement provides a consistent set of standards so that engineering teams avoid creating security vulnerabilities, overconsuming compute resources or introducing noisy workloads .

5 Steps to Successful DevOps Culture

5 Steps to Successful DevOps Culture: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" Marc Hornbeek: Culture challenges are the No. 1 obstacle that many organizations need to overcome to succeed with DevOps. Transforming organizational culture for success with success requires a strategy, goals and sustained commitment, he says. For example, the typical strategic core values could be responsiveness to customer needs, speed of innovation, technology leadership and software products and services resiliency, for example. The scope and complexity of DevOps requires team members to share knowledge and cross-train .

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | J Paul Reed, Sr Applied Resilience Engineer at Netflix

Break Things on Purpose podcast is a podcast for all-things Chaos Engineering. In this episode, we speak with J Paul Reed, Sr Applied Resilience Engineer at Netflix. Reed explains what a Senior Applied Resillience Engineer does, how his role has impacted reliability at Netflix, and shifting from Newtonian to Quantum thinking. Get started with Gremlin's Chaos Engineering tools to safely, securely, and simply inject failure into your systems to find weaknesses before they cause customer-facing issues. Check out our latest episode below .