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Introducing Moby Project: a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement

Docker Blog is introducing the Moby Project:

The Moby Project is a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement and help the ecosystem take containers mainstream. It provides a library of components, a framework for assembling them into custom container-based systems and a place for all container enthusiasts to experiment and exchange ideas.

This just had to happen, given the nature of the Open Source and the importance of the container technology for the modern infrastructure.

The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – Step by Step (2017)

WPBeginner, a website for beginner guides to WordPress, has published an updated and comprehensive guide to WordPress security – “The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – Step by Step (2017)“. Most of the things are well known to seasoned WordPress users – keep things updated, use strong passwords, remove unnecessary plugins, make sure to pick the right hosting, add security enhancing plugins, etc. But it’s a good place to start for people who are not too technical and those who don’t think about security implications of having a publicly accessible website on a daily basis.

There are plenty of questions, answers, simple explanations, and links to other resources in the article. So even if you are an experienced WordPress user, you might find a useful thing or two in there.

You might also want to checkout my earlier blog posts:

Building the Right Alerting System

Here’s something I wanted to get into for a while now, but haven’t had the time yet – switching the monitoring / alerting system from server-oriented to business-oriented. The gist of the story is:

If it’s not actionable and business critical, then it shouldn’t ring.

The article has some statistics and summaries as well. The reasoning behind the switch is obvious, but it’s good to have it formulated:

After a few months, I can tell reducing our alerting rate should have been a top priority before things got out of hands, for a few reasons.

Constant alerts prevented the team to focus on what was important. Being interrupted even for things that can wait for a few hours lowers our productivity when we work on things that can’t wait.

Being awaken every night, several times a night exhausts a team and make people less productive at day, and more prone to do errors.

Too many off hours interventions cost the company a lot of money that could be invested in hardening the infrastructure or hiring someone else instead.

Using the Strict-Transport-Security header

Julia Evans has an excellent write-up on “Using the Strict-Transport-Security header” – what it is, why you’d want to use it, and what are some of the consequences of using one.

As always with her blog posts, this one is very focused on one particular subject, easy to read, and explains things simply, so that the reader’s technical level is always irrelevant (OK, OK, you do need a basic understanding of how HTTP works, but not more than that).

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell

J Cole Morrison wrote an excellent guide into AWS IAM policies. It’s super useful for anyone who have tried implementing IAM policies and failed (or even barely succeeded).

What is an AWS IAM Policy?

A set of rules that, under the correct conditions, define what actions the policy principal or holder can take to specified AWS resources.

That still sounds a bit stiff. How about:

Who can do what to which resources. When do we care?

There we go. Let’s break down the simple statement even more…

Compared to all the AWS documentation one has to dive through, this one is a giant time saver!