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Container Structure Tests: Unit Tests for Docker Images

Usage of containers in software applications is on the rise, and with their increasing usage in production comes a need for robust testing and validation. Containers provide great testing environments, but actually validating the structure of the containers themselves can be tricky. The Docker toolchain provides us with easy ways to interact with the container images themselves, but no real way of verifying their contents. What if we want to ensure a set of commands runs successfully inside of our container, or check that certain files are in the correct place with the correct contents, before shipping?



The Container Tools team at Google is happy to announce the release of the Container Structure Test framework. This framework provides a convenient and powerful way to verify the contents and structure of your containers. We’ve been using this framework at Google to test all of our team’s released containers for over a year now, and we’re excited to finally share it with the public.



The framework supports four types of tests:

Read more at Google blog

Exploring Node.js with Mark Hinkle, the Executive Director of the Node.js Foundation

Even though JavaScript has been around for more than 20 years, it’s becoming the first class citizen for developing enterprise applications. There is a huge developer community behind this technology.

What makes things even more interesting is that, with Node.js, JavaScript can run on server, so developers can write applications that run end-to-end in JavaScript. Node.js is very well suited for service applications because server applications are increasingly becoming single function event-driven microservices.

That’s not all. “Node.js is the number one workload across a serverless infrastructure out there. It was the first solution that ran on Amazon Lambda, Google functions. It’s the largest workload that runs on an IBM Bluemix,”  said Mark Hinkle

Read more at The New Stack

As Go 2.0 Nears, AWS Launches Developer Preview of Go SDK 2.0

There’s now a developer preview of an updated SDK for the Go programming language available on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

Sometimes called Golang, Go is a Google-backed, open source programming language optimized for large-scale apps, such as performant Web apps that can run at tremendous scale. It’s now at version 1.9 stable, but is being moved to version 2.0, a major upgrade whose release data has not yet been revealed.

To help AWS users prepare for that, the company released AWS SDK for Go 2.0.

Read more at ADT Mag

What is the Future of Wi-Fi?

While speed and stability have improved significantly in Wi-Fi networks over the last decade, there are new innovations that will become available in 2018 and into 2019 that will make Wi-Fi faster and more available than ever before.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, which is a multi-stakeholder industry consortium that is all about promoting Wi-Fi is working on a number of programs to advance Wi-Fi in 2018 and beyond. One of those programs is called Wi-Fi Certified Home Design.

Today, Wi-Fi is an afterthought in the home building process, unlike basic utilities like water and power. The general idea behind the Wi-Fi Certified Home program is to change that paradigm and enable home builder to build Wi-Fi technology directly into a new or rebuilt home.

Read more at Enterprise Networking Planet

Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status

If your Linux systems are running a normal Linux distribution, go update your kernel. They should all have the updates in them already. And then keep updating them over the next few weeks, we are still working out lots of corner case bugs given that the testing involved here is complex given the huge variety of systems and workloads this affects. If your distro does not have kernel updates, then I strongly suggest changing distros right now.

However there are lots of systems out there that are not running “normal” Linux distributions for various reasons (rumor has it that it is way more than the “traditional” corporate distros). They rely on the LTS kernel updates, or the normal stable kernel updates, or they are in-house franken-kernels. For those people here’s the status of what is going on regarding all of this mess in the upstream kernels you can use.

Read more at Linux Kernel Monkey Blog

4 Days Left to Submit Your Proposal for Open Networking Summit NA 2018

Share your expertise and help shape the future of SDN, NFV, orchestration and the automation of cloud, network, & IoT services at Open Networking Summit North America, March 26 -29, 2018 in Los Angeles.

With more than 2000 attendees expected at this year’s event, submit before Sunday, January 14, 2018 at 11:59pm PST to share your ideas and expertise with the open networking community.

View the full list of suggested topics and submit your proposal today.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

Oath’s Top 5 Open Source Goals

As with many other companies, the open source program at Oath started informally with a group of diligent engineers and a few legal people. But the ad hoc group soon realized it needed a more formal program if it was going to be able to scale to address more issues and achieve specific business goals. With a formal program in place, they are poised to achieve its goals.

The top five of Oath’s numerous open source goals, according to Yehuda, are:

  1. Keep aligned with the industry on open source technology standards by avoiding creating unique tech stacks that Oath alone would have to manage at its own expense.

Read more at The Linux Foundation

Spectre and Meltdown Attacks Against Microprocessors

The security of pretty much every computer on the planet has just gotten a lot worse, and the only real solution — which of course is not a solution — is to throw them all away and buy new ones.

On Wednesday, researchers just announced a series of major security vulnerabilities in the microprocessors at the heart of the world’s computers for the past 15-20 years. They’ve been named Spectre and Meltdown, and they have to do with manipulating different ways processors optimize performance by rearranging the order of instructions or performing different instructions in parallel. An attacker who controls one process on a system can use the vulnerabilities to steal secrets elsewhere on the computer. (The research papers are here and here.)

Read more at Schneier on Security

Four Tips for a More Secure Website

Security is a hot topic in web development with great reason. Every few months a major website is cracked and millions of user records are leaked. Many times the cause of a breach is from a simple vulnerability that has been overlooked. Here are a few tips to give you a quick overview of standard techniques for making your websites more secure. Note: I do not guarantee a secure website if you follow these suggestions, there are many facets to security that I don’t even touch in this article. This write-up is for increasing awareness about techniques used to correct some common vulnerabilities that appear in web applications.

1. Parameters are good for your health

According to OWASP, the top vulnerability for web applications is SQL injection. What is SQL injection? It is user provided data embedded into a SQL query without any protection. 

Read more at Dev.to

Prometheus vs. Heapster vs. Kubernetes Metrics APIs

In this blog post, I will try to explain the relation between PrometheusHeapster, as well as the Kubernetes metrics APIs and conclude with the recommended way how to autoscale workloads on Kubernetes.

This post assumes you have a basic understanding of Kubernetes and monitoring.

Heapster

Heapster provides metric collection, basic monitoring capabilities and supports multiple data sinks to write the collected metrics to. The code for each sink resides within the Heapster repository. Heapster also enables the use of the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to autoscale on metrics.

Read more at Frederic Branczyk blog