Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

MySQL 8.0 release

MySQL 8.0 has been released and it brings the following new features, enhancements, and more:

  1. SQL Window functions, Common Table Expressions, NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED, Descending Indexes, Grouping, Regular Expressions, Character Sets, Cost Model, and Histograms.
  2. JSON Extended syntax, new functions, improved sorting, and partial updates. With JSON table functions you can use the SQL machinery for JSON data.
  3. GIS Geography support. Spatial Reference Systems (SRS), as well as SRS aware spatial datatypes,  spatial indexes,  and spatial functions.
  4. Reliability DDL statements have become atomic and crash safe, meta-data is stored in a single, transactional data dictionary. Powered by InnoDB! 
  5. Observability Significant enhancements to Performance Schema, Information Schema, Configuration Variables, and Error Logging.
  6. Manageability Remote management, Undo tablespace management, and new instant DDL.
  7. Security OpenSSL improvements, new default authentication, SQL Roles, breaking up the super privilege, password strength, and more.
  8. Performance InnoDB is significantly better at Read/Write workloads, IO bound workloads, and high contention “hot spot” workloads. Added Resource Group feature to give users an option optimize for specific workloads on specific hardware by mapping user threads to CPUs.

Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system

Gergely Orosz, an engineer who worked at Uber on the large scale payments system used by the company, shares some of the distributed architecture concepts he had to learn in the blog post titled “Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system“.

The article is very well written and easy to follow. But it’s also a goldmine of links to other resources on the subject.  Here’s a list links and concepts for a quick research and/or click-through later:

Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates

One of the greatest things about the Amazon AWS services is that they save a tonne of time on the reinventing the wheel.  There are numerous technologies out there and nobody has the time to dive deep, learn, and try all of them.  Amazon AWS often provides ready-made templates and configurations for people who just want to try a technology or a tool, without investing too much time (and money) into figuring out all the options and tweaks.

“Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates” is one example of such predefined and pre-configured setup, for those who want to play around with Blockchain.  Just think of how much time it would have taken somebody who just wants to spin up their own Etherium network with some basic tools and services just to check the technology out.  With the predefined templates you can be up and running in minutes, and, once you are comfortable, you can spend more time rebuilding the whole thing, configuring and tweaking everything.

Useful payloads for security testing of web applications

This article (in Russian) lists a number of useful payloads (and some tools that work with them) for security testing of web applications.  Below is the list of handy GitHub repositories for web server path testing, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and several other common types of vulnerabilities.  These payloads are much richer than basic hand-made tests and can help improve the security of the web application a great deal:

Using CloudFoundation to Build, Manage, and Deploy CloudFormation Templates

J Cole Morrison has this rather lengthy blog post on how to use CloudFoundation to simplify and automate the management of your Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure.  AWS CloudFormation is a great tool, but it gets complex real fast with larger setups, so CloudFoundation comes to the rescue.