Day: July 14, 2022

In the early days of the internet, security was little but an afterthought. Then as hackers started to exploit businesses' lax security postures, things gradually started to change. At first, nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation started pushing web users to embrace HTTPS Everywhere. In response, certification authorities began offering free SSL certificate variations to any site admin that wanted one. As a result, at least 79.6% of all active websites now use SSL.

That was only the beginning. In the ensuing years, developers and web application administrators gradually started to harden their apps against all manner of attacks. They rolled out more complex password requirements. They started to add two-factor authentication as a default measure. They even started putting public-facing services behind high-performance web application firewalls.

Setting up your own servers requires a lot of up-front investment and ongoing maintenance. That’s why most technology companies today use an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider for their compute needs. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure take care of infrastructure tasks like provisioning new machines and keeping them up to date for you, and their services free up your team to focus on building valuable new functionality for your application.

This post is the fourth in a series about what developers need to keep in mind when sorting out security and compliance for their application. Cloud-based companies frequently need to prove that their software is set up with security best practices in mind. Compliance standards and certifications are an effective way to communicate a company’s security posture and build trust with customers.

When I speak at conferences, I often fall back to the fact that, just a couple of decades ago, we’d observe production by kicking the server. This is obviously no longer practical. We can’t see our production. It’s an amorphous cloud that we can’t touch or feel. A power that we read about but don’t fully grasp.

In this case, we have physical evidence that the cloud is there.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working on some AWS CDK-based code and I was trying to figure out how to configure auto-scaling for the provisioned concurrency configuration of an AWS Lambda function. We wanted to run some performance tests on our service and were wondering how scaling provisioned concurrency would impact our overall latency. We tried with the default configuration but also wanted to experiment with a bit more aggressive scaling policy so we had to provide our own metric configuration. 

In this article, I will explain what provisioned concurrency is and how to set up an auto-scaling configuration for it using AWS CDK. We’ll be looking at using predefined metric configurations, but also how to do it with a custom metric.

Clones. Send in the clones. That’s what we do when we replicate databases. At least to some extent. In this article, you’ll learn how to perform the most basic form of replication with MariaDB.

You can adapt the instructions in this article to use virtual machines or bare metal, but Docker is probably one of the easiest ways to try out MariaDB replication without having to install a full operating system before getting to the meat of the matter. So, the only requirement here is to have Docker installed and running on your system (check with docker --version in a terminal).

The projects that a QA Engineers participate can range from small maintenance projects, emergency fixes( spanning 1-2 days or less), mid-range projects(spanning weeks or months) to full-scale large projects( can last up to a year or more). While each of these projects may differ in terms of testing efforts and resources, they all adhere to common test process.

Let’s divide this test management process into 3 categories:

GoDaddy has extended API capabilities for its expired domains auction platform. This will give greater access to all domain investors to bid on auctions.

Until now, access to the Aftermarket API, specifically its Auctions endpoints, had been limited to select investors. The company has previously said that it needed to make back end changes before more users could be accommodated. Now that access has been opened, anyone can acquire closeout domains through the API. 

Creating a Topic in a Kafka cluster is easy and is well documented for kafka-topics.sh or even the official API documentation.

 bin/kafka-topics.sh --help

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate an API that is specifically designed to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) operations on photographs of receipts and extract key business information from them automatically, such as the name and address of the business, the phone number, the receipt total, and much more.   Further down the page, I’ve provided code examples and instructions to help you structure an API call in Java.

There are dozens of costs associated with running a business, and efforts to manage those costs vary in complexity.  While corporate expenditures such as office rent, salaries, and vendor contracts represent cyclical and manageable invoices that internal teams (i.e., accounts payable) can handle directly, employee expenditures in the form of client dinners, taxi rides, and team outings require corporate reimbursement which may only be accomplished with proof of the employee’s transactions.  For the employee, proving such transactions entails presenting a receipt to the business. Along with displaying the all-important total cost of the outing, receipts provide other useful information which the employee’s business can verify, including the name of the venue the employee visited, its website, address, phone number, and a list of the specific purchased goods or services at that location. As simple as the receipt-expensing process may appear, however, it often suffers from a major technological deficiency: most businesses have fully digitized their payroll and expensing procedures, and receipts are still often obtained in hard-copy form. As a result, transitioning a physical receipt into a digital form presents a relevant business technology challenge.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is a connector/ intermediary between two software components. It is a set of definite protocols that makes the interface possible. The interface simply means the nature of requests and responses. How developers would form the request and responses comes under API documentation.

In simpler words, API allows two applications to communicate with each other. We use API when we check the weather on our phones or while sending and receiving messages on apps like Instagram or Facebook, etc.