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Diagrams as Code: The Complete How-to-Use Guide

We're seeing more and more tools that enable you to create software architecture and other Diagrams as Code. The main benefit of using this concept is that majority of the Diagrams as Code tools can be scripted and integrated into a built pipeline for generating automatic documentation. The other benefit responsible for the growing use of Diagrams as code to create software architecture is that it enables the use of text-based tooling, which most software developers already use. Furthermore, text is easily version-controllable and diff’able.

Table of Contents

  • What is Diagram as Code?
  • How to install Diagrams
  • How to use Diagrams
  • Conclusion

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API Security Weekly: Issue 162

This week, we have details of compromised Google Cloud accounts being used to mine cryptocurrency (mainly with weak or no passwords on API connections), there’s an article on how GraphQL can be used as an API gateway (including security controls), a very comprehensive guide to all things relating to API security, and a new API security training course from AppSecEngineer.

Vulnerability: Compromised Google Cloud Accounts Used to Mine Cryptocurrency

The main story this week comes from HackerNews and describes how attackers are able to exploit improperly secured Google Cloud Platform (GCP) tenants. The impact on affected users included compromising their cloud resources, like uploading cryptocurrency mining software, and ransomware and phishing attacks.

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GCP DevOps: Top 7 Implementation Services

As more companies are turning to the Cloud for their application development needs, a new challenge emerged. The physical dedicated servers were proving to be slow, expensive, and required a lot of maintenance to keep up with the growing speed of the market as a whole. The emergence of Agile methodologies was a step in the right direction. However, even these Agile methodologies fell short in keeping up with the increased demand.

This is where DevOps came into the picture to change the culture to a more efficient, reliable, and secure way to develop, manage, and monitor applications. With that said, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a collection of cloud computing services from Google. It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as: 

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Part 2 – How to Hive on GCP using Google DataProc and Cloud Storage

In part 1 of this series, we have seen how to create a Google Dataproc cluster, create external tables in HIVE, point to the data stored on cloud storage, and perform exploratory data analysis in a staging environment. As part of this analysis, we found out that our sample datasets had around:

  • ~ 11% of non-confirming records for Green Taxi Y2019 dataset
  • ~ 33% of non-confirming records for Yellow Taxi Y2019 dataset

Identifying non-confirming records is one of the important steps of exploratory data analysis as they can lead to wrong or faulty interpretation of results. So, as part of the next step, we will create a new environment i.e. new external tables in HIVE with only valid data required for deep-dive analysis and eliminate the non-confirming records.

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Hands on Presto Tutorial: Presto 103

Introduction

This tutorial is Part III of our getting started with Presto series. As a reminder, PrestoDB is an open source distributed SQL query engine. In tutorial 101, we showed you how to install and configure presto locally, and in tutorial 102, we covered how to run a three-node PrestoDB cluster on a laptop. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to run a PrestoDB cluster in a GCP environment using VM instances and GKE containers.

Environment

This guide was developed on GCP VM instances and GKE containers.

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Google Cloud “GCP” Native NixOS Images Build

I am using NixOs as a Development environment that is running on Google Cloud VM.
NixOs official Web site does not provide an official GCP image. On the NixOs Wiki page, you can find an article how you can build your GCP NixOs Image that didn’t work well in the past but now seems all build image issue was resolved and now works well. NixOS Wiki page article also provides two GCP storage that you can find outdated GCP VM images that seem not actively maintained anymore.

  • nixos-images > gs://nixos-images
  • nixos-cloud-images > gs://nixos-images

In the below "HowTo," we will cover how you can build your images in GCP by using Google Cloud VM and store the images in your Google storage bucket.

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Generate Google Cloud API Credentials [Video]

This blog is a quick walkthrough for downloading GCP API credentials (keys). The credentials are at the core of any cloud computing service. Different public cloud service providers use different types of credentials to connect their services through API. So, without much ado, here are the steps required to generate API keys for GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

If you feel lazy reading this blog, here is a 100 seconds long step-by-step video to generate API keys for GCP.

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Alexa and Kubernetes: Deploying the Alexa Skill on Google Kubernetes Engine (IX)

Now, we have everything prepared and ready to go to a Kubernetes Cluster in a cloud provider. It is a fact that creating a cluster in any cloud provider manually is a difficult task. Moreover, if we want to automate this deployment, we need something that helps us in this tedious task. In this article, we will see how to create a Kubernetes Cluster and all of its required objects, deploying our Alexa Skill with Terraform using Google Kubernetes Engine.

Pre-Requisites

Here, you have the technologies used in this project:

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Cloud Computing: How Does it Benefit Your Business?

The International Data Group study shows that in 2018, 69% of businesses were already cloud-based while 18% were only planning to get on board with digitalization. Hundreds of companies around the globe are talking about the benefits of cloud computing while you are reading this article!

Nearly two decades ago, cloud computing became a breakthrough in delivering computing power to business. Thanks to large-scale data centers connected to high speed, low cost, broadband networks, users can have secure access to more business apps on more devices wherever they are 24/7. It's no wonder that traditional onsite computer facilities are struggling to keep up.

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How to Monitor Active Directory With Google Stackdriver

DirectoryConfirgure Google Stackdriver and Bindplane to monitor your Active Directory

What is Active Directory?

Active Directory stores information about objects handled on a network and makes it easy for admins and other users to access and utilize the data. When using the Active Directory Domain Service (AD DS) on a server, you get a domain controller. A domain controller automatically authenticates and authorizes all of the devices and users on the network, easily assigning and enforcing the security policies. Active Directory also includes the ability to create a schema that allows you to define classes and constraints for objects and attributes that are found in the directory. Another useful tool that can be found in AD is the replication service that distributes the directory data across the network.

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Spring Boot and GCP Cloud Pub/Sub

In this post, we will explore how we can use Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) Pub/Sub service in combination with a Spring Boot application using Spring Integration. We will send a message to a sender application which publishes the message to a Topic where a receiver application receives the messages of a Subscription.

Introduction

GCP Pub/Sub is basically just like any other messaging system. You can send a message to a Topic where it is persisted, then a subscriber consumes the message, and after acknowledgment, the message is removed.