In the final session in the memory-management track of the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, the exhausted group of
developers looked one more time at the use of huge pages and the associated
problem of memory fragmentation. At its worst, this problem can make huge
pages harder (and more expensive) to allocate. Luis Chamberlain, who ran
the session, felt that people were worried about this problem, but that
there was little data on how severe it truly is.
A longstanding tradition in the memory-management track of the Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit is a session with
maintainer Andrew Morton to discuss the overall state of the community and
the development process. The 2024 gathering upheld that tradition toward
the end of the final day of the event. It seems that Morton and the
assembled developers were all happy with how memory-management work is
going, but there is always room for improvement.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (less), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (apache2, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, libqt5-qtnetworkauth, and openssl-3), and Ubuntu (netatalk and python-cryptography).
A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code flashsale150 to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.
We’re counting down to AWS re:Inforce, our annual cloud security event! We are thrilled to invite security enthusiasts and builders to join us in Philadelphia, PA, from June 10–12 for an immersive two-and-a-half-day journey into cloud security learning. This year, we’ve expanded the event by half a day to give you more opportunities to delve into the latest security trends and technologies. At AWS re:Inforce, you’ll have the chance to explore the breadth of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) security landscape, learn how to operationalize security services, and enhance your skills and confidence in cloud security to improve your organization’s security posture. As an attendee, you will have access to over 250 sessions across multiple topic tracks, including data protection; identity and access management; threat detection and incident response; network and infrastructure security; generative AI; governance, risk, and compliance; and application security. Plus, get ready to be inspired by our lineup of customer speakers, who will share their firsthand experiences of innovating securely on AWS.
In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the key sessions that include lecture-style presentations featuring real-world use cases from our customers, as well as the interactive small-group sessions led by AWS experts that guide you through practical problems and solutions.
The threat detection and incident response track is designed to demonstrate how to detect and respond to security risks to help protect workloads at scale. AWS experts and customers will present key topics such as threat detection, vulnerability management, cloud security posture management, threat intelligence, operationalization of AWS security services, container security, effective security investigation, incident response best practices, and strengthening security through the use of generative AI and securing generative AI workloads.
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks
TDR201 | Breakout session | How NatWest uses AWS services to manage vulnerabilities at scale As organizations move to the cloud, rapid change is the new normal. Safeguarding against potential security threats demands continuous monitoring of cloud resources and code that are constantly evolving. In this session, NatWest shares best practices for monitoring their AWS environment for software and configuration vulnerabilities at scale using AWS security services like Amazon Inspector and AWS Security Hub. Learn how security teams can automate the identification and prioritization of critical security insights to manage alert fatigue and swiftly collaborate with application teams for remediation.
TDR301 | Breakout session | Developing an autonomous framework with Security Lake & Torc Robotics Security teams are increasingly seeking autonomy in their security operations. Amazon Security Lake is a powerful solution that allows organizations to centralize their security data across AWS accounts and Regions. In this session, learn how Security Lake simplifies centralizing and operationalizing security data. Then, hear from Torc Robotics, a leading autonomous trucking company, as they share their experience and best practices for using Security Lake to establish an autonomous security framework.
TDR302 | Breakout session | Detecting and responding to threats in generative AI workloads While generative AI is an emerging technology, many of the same services and concepts can be used for threat detection and incident response. In this session, learn how you can build out threat detection and incident response capabilities for a generative AI workload that uses Amazon Bedrock. Find out how to effectively monitor this workload using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub. The session also covers best practices for responding to and remediating security issues that may come up.
TDR303 | Breakout session | Innovations in AWS detection and response services In this session, learn about the latest advancements and recent AWS launches in the field of detection and response. This session focuses on use cases like threat detection, workload protection, automated and continual vulnerability management, centralized monitoring, continuous cloud security posture management, unified security data management, and discovery and protection of workloads and data. Through these use cases, gain a deeper understanding of how you can seamlessly integrate AWS detection and response services to help protect your workloads at scale, enhance your security posture, and streamline security operations across your entire AWS environment.
TDR304 | Breakout session | Explore cloud workload protection with GuardDuty, feat. Booking.com Monitoring your workloads at runtime allows you to detect unexpected activity sooner—before it escalates to broader business-impacting security issues. Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring offers fully managed threat detection that gives you end-to-end visibility across your AWS environment. GuardDuty’s unique detection capabilities are guided by AWS’s visibility into the cloud threat landscape. In this session, learn why AWS built the Runtime Monitoring feature and how it works. Also discover how Booking.com used GuardDuty for runtime protection, supporting their mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
TDR305 | Breakout session | Cyber threat intelligence sharing on AWS Real-time, contextual, and comprehensive visibility into security issues is essential for resilience in any organization. In this session, join the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) as they present their Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing (CTIS) program, built on AWS. With the aim to improve the cyber resilience of the Australian community and help make Australia the most secure place to connect online, the ACSC protects Australia from thousands of threats every day. Learn the technical fundamentals that can help you apply best practices for real-time, bidirectional sharing of threat intelligence across all sectors.
TDR331 | Chalk talk | Unlock OCSF: Turn raw logs into insights with generative AI So, you have security data stored using the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF)—now what? In this chalk talk, learn how to use AWS analytics tools to mine data stored using the OCSF and leverage generative AI to consume insights. Discover how services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Q in QuickSight, and Amazon Bedrock can extract, process, and visualize security insights from OCSF data. Gain practical skills to identify trends, detect anomalies, and transform your OCSF data into actionable security intelligence that can help your organization respond more effectively to cybersecurity threats.
TDR332 | Chalk talk | Anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data within AWS Ransomware events can interrupt operations and cost governments, nonprofits, and businesses billions of dollars. Early detection and automated responses are important mechanisms that can help mitigate your organization’s exposure. In this chalk talk, learn about the anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data within AWS including detection, response, and recovery. Explore the AWS services and features that you can use to protect against ransomware events in your environment, and learn how you can investigate possible ransomware events if they occur.
TDR333 | Chalk talk | Implementing AWS security best practices: Insights and strategies Have you ever wondered if you are using AWS security services such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, AWS WAF, and others to the best of their ability? Do you want to dive deep into common use cases to better operationalize AWS security services through insights developed via thousands of deployments? In this chalk talk, learn tips and tricks from AWS experts who have spent years talking to users and documenting guidance outlining AWS security services best practices.
TDR334 | Chalk talk | Unlock your security superpowers with generative AI Generative AI can accelerate and streamline the process of security analysis and response, enhancing the impact of your security operations team. Its unique ability to combine natural language processing with large existing knowledge bases and agent-based architectures that can interact with your data and systems makes it an ideal tool for augmenting security teams during and after an event. In this chalk talk, explore how generative AI will shape the future of the SOC and lead to new capabilities in incident response and cloud security posture management.
TDR431 | Chalk talk | Harnessing generative AI for investigation and remediation To help businesses move faster and deliver security outcomes, modern security teams need to identify opportunities to automate and simplify their workflows. One way of doing so is through generative AI. Join this chalk talk to learn how to identify use cases where generative AI can help with investigating, prioritizing, and remediating findings from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub. Then find out how you can develop architectures from these use cases, implement them, and evaluate their effectiveness. The talk offers tenets for generative AI and security that can help you safely use generative AI to reduce cognitive load and increase focus on novel, high-value opportunities.
TDR432 | Chalk talk | New tactics and techniques for proactive threat detection This insightful chalk talk is led by the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), the team responsible for swiftly responding to security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Discover the latest trends in threat tactics and techniques observed by the CIRT, along with effective detection and mitigation strategies. Gain valuable insights into emerging threats and learn how to safeguard your organization’s AWS environment against evolving security risks.
TDR433 | Chalk talk | Incident response for multi-account and federated environments In this chalk talk, AWS security experts guide you through the lifecycle of a compromise involving federation and third-party identity providers. Learn how AWS detects unauthorized access and which approaches can help you respond to complex situations involving organizations with multiple accounts. Discover insights into how you can contain and recover from security events and discuss strong IAM policies, appropriately restrictive service control policies, and resource termination for security event containment. Also, learn how to build resiliency in an environment with IAM permission refinement, organizational strategy, detective controls, chain of custody, and IR break-glass models.
TDR227 | Lightning talk | How Razorpay scales threat detection using AWS Discover how Razorpay, a leading payment aggregator solution provider authorized by the Reserve Bank of India, efficiently manages millions of business transactions per minute through automated security operations using AWS security services. Join this lightning talk to explore how Razorpay’s security operations team uses AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Inspector to monitor their critical workloads on AWS. Learn how they orchestrate complex workflows, automating responses to security events, and reduce the time from detection to remediation.
TDR321 | Lightning talk | Scaling incident response with AWS developer tools In incident response, speed matters. Responding to incidents at scale can be challenging as the number of resources in your AWS accounts increases. In this lightning talk, learn how to use SDKs and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to rapidly run commands across your estate so you can quickly retrieve data, identify issues, and resolve security-related problems.
TDR322 | Lightning talk | How Snap Inc. secures its services with Amazon GuardDuty In this lightning talk, discover how Snap Inc. established a secure multi-tenant compute platform on AWS and mitigated security challenges within shared Kubernetes clusters. Snap uses Amazon GuardDuty and the OSS tool Falco for runtime protection across build time, deployment time, and runtime phases. Explore Snap’s techniques for facilitating one-time cluster access through AWS IAM Identity Center. Find out how Snap has implemented isolation strategies between internal tenants using the Pod Security Standards (PSS) and network policies enforced by the Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin.
TDR326 | Lightning talk | Streamlining security auditing with generative AI For identifying and responding to security-related events, collecting and analyzing logs is only the first step. Beyond this initial phase, you need to utilize tools and services to parse through logs, understand baseline behaviors, identify anomalies, and create automated responses based on the type of event. In this lightning talk, learn how to effectively parse security logs, identify anomalies, and receive response runbooks that you can implement within your environment.
Interactive sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)
TDR351 | Builders’ session | Accelerating incident remediation with IR playbooks & Amazon Detective In this builders’ session, learn how to investigate incidents more effectively and discover root cause with Amazon Detective. Amazon Detective provides finding-group summaries by using generative AI to automatically analyze finding groups. Insights in natural language then help you accelerate security investigations. Find out how you can create your own incident response playbooks and test them by handling multi-event security issues.
TDR352 | Builders’ session | How to automate containment and forensics for Amazon EC2 Automated Forensics Orchestrator for Amazon EC2 deploys a mechanism that uses AWS services to orchestrate and automate key digital forensics processes and activities for Amazon EC2 instances in the event of a potential security issue being detected. In this builders’ session, learn how to deploy and scale this self-service AWS solution. Explore the prerequisites, learn how to customize it for your environment, and experience forensic analysis on live artifacts to identify what potential unauthorized users could do in your environment.
TDR353 | Builders’ session | Preventing top misconfigurations associated with security events Have you ever wondered how you can prevent top misconfigurations that could lead to a security event? Join this builders’ session, where the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) reviews some of the most commonly observed misconfigurations that can lead to security events. Then learn how to build mechanisms using AWS Security Hub and other AWS services that can help detect and prevent these issues.
TDR354 | Builders’ session | Insights in your inbox: Build email reporting with AWS Security Hub AWS Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of the security state of your AWS resources by collecting security data from across AWS accounts, AWS Regions, and AWS services. In this builders’ session, learn how to set up a customizable and automated summary email that distills security posture information, insights, and critical findings from Security Hub. Get hands-on with the Security Hub console and discover easy-to-implement code examples that you can use in your own organization to drive security improvements.
TDR355 | Builders’ session | Detecting ransomware and suspicious activity in Amazon RDS In this builders’ session, acquire skills that can help you detect and respond to threats targeting AWS databases. Using services such as AWS Cloud9 and AWS CloudFormation, simulate real-world intrusions on Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora and use Amazon Athena to detect unauthorized activities. The session also covers strategies from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) for rapid incident response and configuring essential security settings to enhance your database defenses. The session provides practical experience in configuring audit logging and enabling termination protection to ensure robust database security measures.
TDR451 | Builders’ session | Create a generative AI runbook to resolve security findings Generative AI has the potential to accelerate and streamline security analysis, response, and recovery, enhancing the effectiveness of human engagement. In this builders’ session, learn how to use Amazon SageMaker notebooks and Amazon Bedrock to quickly resolve security findings in your AWS account. You rely on runbooks for the day-to-day operations, maintenance, and troubleshooting of AWS services. With generative AI, you can gain deeper insights into security findings and take the necessary actions to streamline security analysis and response.
TDR441 | Code talk | How to use generative AI to gain insights in Amazon Security Lake In this code talk, explore how you can use generative AI to gather enhanced security insights within Amazon Security Lake by integrating Amazon SageMaker Studio and Amazon Bedrock. Learn how AI-powered analytics can help rapidly identify and respond to security threats. By using large language models (LLMs) within Amazon Bedrock to process natural language queries and auto-generate SQL queries, you can expedite security investigations, focusing on relevant data sources within Security Lake. The talk includes a threat analysis exercise to demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMs in addressing various security queries. Learn how you can streamline security operations and gain actionable insights to strengthen your security posture and mitigate risks effectively within AWS environments.
TDR442 | Code talk | Security testing, the practical way Join this code talk for a practical demonstration of how to test security capabilities within AWS. The talk can help you evaluate and quantify your detection and response effectiveness against key metrics like mean time to detect and mean time to resolution. Explore testing techniques that use open source tools alongside AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS WAF. Gain insights into testing your security configurations in your environment and uncover best practices tailored to your testing scenarios. This talk equips you with actionable strategies to enhance your security posture and establish robust defense mechanisms within your AWS environment.
TDR443 | Code talk | How to conduct incident response in your Amazon EKS environment Join this code talk to gain insights from both adversaries’ and defenders’ perspectives as AWS experts simulate a live security incident within an application across multiple Amazon EKS clusters, invoking an alert in Amazon GuardDuty. Witness the incident response process as experts demonstrate detection, containment, and recovery procedures in near real time. Through this immersive experience, learn how you can effectively respond to and recover from Amazon EKS–specific incidents, and gain valuable insights into incident handling within cloud environments. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your incident response capabilities and learn how to more effectively safeguard your AWS infrastructure.
TDR444 | Code talk | Identity forensics in the realm of short-term credentials AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is a common way for users to access AWS services and allows you to utilize role chaining for navigating AWS accounts. When investigating security incidents, understanding the history and potential impact is crucial. Examining a single session is often insufficient because the initial abused credential may be different than the one that precipitated the investigation, and other tokens might be generated. Also, a single session investigation may not encompass all permissions that the adversary controls, due to trust relationships between the roles. In this code talk, learn how you can construct identity forensics capabilities using Amazon Detective and create a custom graph database using Amazon Neptune.
TDR371-R | Workshop | Threat detection and response on AWS Join AWS experts for an immersive threat detection and response workshop using Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Detective. This workshop simulates security events for different types of resources and behaviors and illustrates both manual and automated responses with AWS Lambda. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture by operationalizing threat detection and response on AWS.
TDR372-R | Workshop | Container threat detection and response with AWS security services Join AWS experts for an immersive container security workshop using AWS threat detection and response services. This workshop simulates scenarios and security events that may arise while using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. The workshop also demonstrates how to use different AWS security services to detect and respond to potential security threats, as well as suggesting how you can improve your security practices. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture when running workloads on AWS container orchestration services.
TDR373-R | Workshop | Vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector and Jenkins Join AWS experts for an immersive vulnerability management workshop using Amazon Inspector and Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This workshop takes you through approaches to vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector for EC2 instances, container images residing in Amazon ECR and within CI/CD tools, and AWS Lambda functions. Explore the integration of Amazon Inspector with Jenkins, and learn how to operationalize vulnerability management on AWS.
Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to learn more about sessions in other tracks, plus gamified learning, innovation sessions, partner sessions, and labs.
Our comprehensive track content is designed to help arm you with the knowledge and skills needed to securely manage your workloads and applications on AWS. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to stay updated with the latest best practices in threat detection and incident response. Join us in Philadelphia for re:Inforce 2024 by registering today. We can’t wait to welcome you!
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Quantum computers are probably coming, though we don’t know when—and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms. In anticipation of this possibility, cryptographers have been working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has been hosting a competition since 2017, and there already are several proposed standards. Most of these are based on lattice problems.
The mathematics of lattice cryptography revolve around combining sets of vectors—that’s the lattice—in a multi-dimensional space. These lattices are filled with multi-dimensional periodicities. The hard problem that’s used in cryptography is to find the shortest periodicity in a large, random-looking lattice. This can be turned into a public-key cryptosystem in a variety of different ways. Research has been ongoing since 1996, and there has been some really great work since then—including many practical public-key algorithms.
On April 10, Yilei Chen from Tsinghua University in Beijing posted a paper describing a new quantum attack on that shortest-path lattice problem. It’s a very dense mathematical paper—63 pages long—and my guess is that only a few cryptographers are able to understand all of its details. (I was not one of them.) But the conclusion was pretty devastating, breaking essentially all of the lattice-based fully homomorphic encryption schemes and coming significantly closer to attacks against the recently proposed (and NIST-approved) lattice key-exchange and signature schemes.
However, there was a small but critical mistake in the paper, on the bottom of page 37. It was independently discovered by Hongxun Wu from Berkeley and Thomas Vidick from the Weizmann Institute in Israel eight days later. The attack algorithm in its current form doesn’t work.
This was discussed last week at the Cryptographers’ Panel at the RSA Conference. Adi Shamir, the “S” in RSA and a 2002 recipient of ACM’s A.M. Turing award, described the result as psychologically significant because it shows that there is still a lot to be discovered about quantum cryptanalysis of lattice-based algorithms. Craig Gentry—inventor of the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme using lattices—was less impressed, basically saying that a nonworking attack doesn’t change anything.
I tend to agree with Shamir. There have been decades of unsuccessful research into breaking lattice-based systems with classical computers; there has been much less research into quantum cryptanalysis. While Chen’s work doesn’t provide a new security bound, it illustrates that there are significant, unexplored research areas in the construction of efficient quantum attacks on lattice-based cryptosystems. These lattices are periodic structures with some hidden periodicities. Finding a different (one-dimensional) hidden periodicity is exactly what enabled Peter Shor to break the RSA algorithm in polynomial time on a quantum computer. There are certainly more results to be discovered. This is the kind of paper that galvanizes research, and I am excited to see what the next couple of years of research will bring.
To be fair, there are lots of difficulties in making any quantum attack work—even in theory.
Breaking lattice-based cryptography with a quantum computer seems to require orders of magnitude more qubits than breaking RSA, because the key size is much larger and processing it requires more quantum storage. Consequently, testing an algorithm like Chen’s is completely infeasible with current technology. However, the error was mathematical in nature and did not require any experimentation. Chen’s algorithm consisted of nine different steps; the first eight prepared a particular quantum state, and the ninth step was supposed to exploit it. The mistake was in step nine; Chen believed that his wave function was periodic when in fact it was not.
Should NIST be doing anything differently now in its post–quantum cryptography standardization process? The answer is no. They are doing a great job in selecting new algorithms and should not delay anything because of this new research. And users of cryptography should not delay in implementing the new NIST algorithms.
But imagine how different this essay would be were that mistake not yet discovered? If anything, this work emphasizes the need for systems to be crypto-agile: to be able to easily swap algorithms in and out as research continues. And for using hybrid cryptography—multiple algorithms where the security rests on the strongest—where possible, as in TLS.
And—one last point—hooray for peer review. A researcher proposed a new result, and reviewers quickly found a fatal flaw in the work. Efforts to repair the flaw are ongoing. We complain about peer review a lot, but here it worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
On 22 May 2024, we announced that we are intending to list the Foundation’s commercial subsidiary, Raspberry Pi Ltd, on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange. This is called an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
The IPO process is — quite rightly — highly regulated, and information about the company and the potential listing can be found on the Investor Portal on Raspberry Pi Ltd’s website. If that’s what you’re looking for, head there.
In this blog post, I want to explain what an IPO of Raspberry Pi Ltd would mean for the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
A tale of two Raspberry Pis
The Raspberry Pi Foundation was founded in 2008 as a UK-based educational charity. Our co-founders wanted to inspire more young people to explore the joys of coding and creating with technology, with the goal of increasing both the number and diversity of kids choosing to study computer science and engineering.
Their idea was to create a low-cost, programmable computer that could rekindle some of the excitement sparked in young minds at the start of the personal computing revolution by platforms like the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum (incidentally also invented in Cambridge, UK).
Raspberry Pi Ltd was incorporated in 2012 as the commercial subsidiary of the Foundation and is responsible for all aspects of design, production, and distribution of Raspberry Pi computers and associated technologies. It has always been a commercial company, albeit one that was initially wholly owned by a charity.
It’s fairly common for UK charities to have subsidiaries that handle their commercial activities. Guidance from the regulator, the Charity Commission, explains that it helps protect the charity’s assets and ensures that the charity benefits from tax relief on profits that are generated from commercial activities and used to advance the charity’s objectives.
So Raspberry Pi has pretty much always been a tale of two organisations: the Foundation, which is a charity, and Raspberry Pi Ltd, which is a commercial company. While we are legally and practically separate organisations, we are united by a mission to democratise computing, and by a set of values that reflect the community of makers, engineers, and educators that have always been such a central part of the Raspberry Pi story.
Computing for everybody
In the years since the launch of the first Raspberry Pi computer in 2012, Raspberry Pi Ltd has continued to innovate and expand its range of products, evolving into a leading provider of high-performance, single-board computers and associated technologies for industrial and embedded uses, as well as for enthusiasts and educators, in markets worldwide. For more information on the company and all it has achieved, you should take a look at the Investor Portal.
For me, one of the most important things about a Raspberry Pi computer is that kids are learning to code on the same platform that is used by the world’s leading engineers and scientists. It’s not a toy, although it is a lot of fun.
Crucially, the commitment to low-cost computing that was at the heart of Raspberry Pi’s founding ethos remains unchanged and has been enshrined in a legally binding agreement between the Foundation and the company. This means that Raspberry Pi will always produce low-cost, general-purpose computers that can be used for teaching and learning.
Over that same period, the Foundation has innovated and expanded its educational products and learning experiences to the point where we are now widely recognised as one of the world’s leading contributors to the democratisation of computing education.
We create curricula and classroom resources that are used in schools all over the globe, covering everything from basic digital skills to computer science and AI literacy. We provide high-quality professional development for teachers and we build software tools that reduce barriers, save time, and improve learning outcomes. We also support the world’s largest network of free coding clubs and inspire young people to get creative with tech through showcases and challenges. All of this is completely free for teachers and students wherever they are in the world.
We are also advancing the field of computing education through undertaking original research and translating evidence of what works into practice.
Importantly, the Foundation is device- and platform-agnostic. That means that, while Raspberry Pi computers make a huge contribution to our educational mission, you don’t need to use a Raspberry Pi computer to engage with our learning experiences and resources.
The next stage of growth and impact
The proposed IPO is all about securing the next stage of growth and impact for both the Foundation and the commercial company.
To date, Raspberry Pi Ltd has donated nearly $50m from its profits to the Foundation, which we have used to advance our educational mission combined with over $60m in funding from philanthropy, sponsorship, and contracts for educational services.
As the company has continued to grow, it has needed working capital and funding to invest in innovation and product development. Over the past few years that has mainly come from retained profits. Listing Raspberry Pi Ltd on a public market will enable the company to raise additional capital through issuing new shares, which will lead to broader reach, greater impact, and ultimately more value being created for the benefit of all shareholders, including the Foundation.
From the Foundation’s perspective, an IPO provides us with the ability to sell some of our shares to raise money to finance a sustainable expansion of our educational activities. Put simply, instead of receiving a share of the company’s profits each year, we will convert some of our shareholding into an endowment that we will use to fund our educational programmes.
What happens after the IPO?
Assuming we proceed with the IPO, what is now Raspberry Pi Ltd will become a public company that trades its shares on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange.
The Foundation will remain a significant shareholder and we will continue to share the Raspberry Pi brand. We will be involved in decision making on the same basis as all other shareholders. Our goal will be to support the company to be as successful as possible in its mission to make computing accessible and affordable for everybody.
The Foundation will use any funds that we raise through the sale of shares at the IPO — or subsequently — to advance our ambitious global strategy to enable every young person to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
Partnership will continue to be at the heart of our strategy and we will work closely with businesses, foundations, and governments to ensure that our work reaches as many teachers and young people as possible. Our ambition is that around 50% of our activities will be funded from the endowment and 50% through partnerships and donations, enabling us to reach many more teachers and students by combining our resources and expertise with those of the many partners who share our mission.
Creating a lasting legacy
Whatever happens with the IPO, Raspberry Pi has already had a huge impact on the world. It’s been an enormous privilege to be part of the journey so far, and I am hugely excited about the potential of this next phase.
I want to pay tribute to all of our co-founders for setting us off on this great adventure, and particularly to Jack Lang, who very sadly passed away earlier this month. Jack made an exceptional and unique contribution to the Raspberry Pi story, and he deserves to go down in history as one of the most significant figures in computing education in the UK. I know he would have shared my excitement about this next chapter in the Raspberry Pi story.
With the pace of technological advances in fields like AI, our mission has never been more vital. We have the potential to positively impact the lives of tens of millions of young people who might otherwise miss out on the opportunity to change the world for the better through technology.
Change happens at an increasingly rapid and intense pace in the hyperconnected world we live in. This affects consumer relationships, forcing retailers to find more efficient ways of attracting customers. Linx, a company under the StoneCo group and a technology specialist for retail, understands this and has been using Zabbix to provide a better experience for their customers since 2017.
With extensive operations in over 20 retail segments and a portfolio of more than 180 solutions, Linx serves both small entrepreneurs and large retailers, offering the largest retail ecosystem in Latin America. In 2018, a presentation by the company at the Zabbix Conference Latin America stood out as a practical demonstration of how Zabbix served as a key tool in Linx’s business. Keep reading to find out how Zabbix has stayed central to the company’s strategy ever since.
Table of Contents
The challenge
It all began in 2017 when Linx, understanding the importance of a stable IT environment, real-time data collection, and a quality customer journey, faced a challenge. They needed to transform their current Network Operation Center (NOC) into a structure aligned with the business that generated real value for customers. This required multiple actions, including:
Migrating the physical operation and monitoring structure from Porto Alegre-RS to São Paulo-SP
Reviewing the monitoring structure to generate indicators focused on customer success and experience
Replacing their existing monitoring tool with a more flexible one to keep up with new challenges and guarantee technical investment
Managing the mix of technologies used in the environment with a significant need for hybrid, cloud, and on-premises monitoring
Making this new structure the main provider of information for the rest of the company
Implementing a new NOC structure aligned with the business that would also generate value for customers
Speeding up the response time whenever incidents and anomalies were detected
To meet the business challenges and needs, Linx partnered with Unirede Inteligência em TI, a Zabbix Premium Partner in Brazil, to support the validation and subsequent implementation project. At that time, Linx’s solutions were specialized in retail as well as on-premises and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, with a data and cloud services platform focusing on customer experience.
The solution
Linx needed a robust and flexible tool that could meet business needs and share data with multiple teams.
“Linx chose Zabbix because it is an open-source, flexible platform capable of monitoring various technologies with different collection methods. Having a specialized partner to support deliveries— in this case, Unirede— also impacted the decision.”
Gabriel Pedroso, CEO of Unirede Inteligência em TI
Linx’s existing monitoring structure focused only on network infrastructure, much like a traditional NOC. A new objective arose – to understand the customer journey across all products and service segments. Linx needed to be able to map what kind of retail experience was being promoted to customers, predict peak moments, and gain insight into other behaviors that could influence the customer experience and compromise transactions.
This led to the creation of the xCenter, a structure that would become Linx’s experience monitoring center, expanding the view of servers, communication links, memory usage, and other infrastructure details.
“The xCenter goes beyond assets to establish the monitoring of complex solutions in hybrid environments (on-premises and cloud), delivering mobility, relevant content, and flexibility. Everything is oriented towards customer success.”
Nelson Lima, Coordinator of Linx’s xCenter
During the project’s initial phase, there was a mindset shift among the company’s teams, resulting in cooperation towards the project’s success and a renewed focus on the customer experience.
The first discoveries in Linx’s network were also made, along with adjustments and improvements in existing monitoring, including business metrics and the use of dashboards for visual management. In the same year (2017) xCenter operations began, delivering the first monitoring results.
By 2018, gains were evident: teams no longer thought exclusively about servers, storage, and network assets, but rather about services, transactions, and delivery excellence. That year, the project evolved into what was called “Partiu Cloud,” introducing the first Azure cloud environment monitoring. This took place alongside the ongoing evolution of existing monitoring and the democratization of information generated by the structure for decision-making. Examples of business services monitored at that time included NFCe, TEF, POS, sales reports, fiscal coupon issuance time, POS synchronization, and SaaS delivery.
In 2019, the focus shifted to business, with assessments, structuring, and development of metrics for Linx’s products. By then, Linx’s sales force was already using availability and performance information in their service routine, accessing product dashboards from mobile devices and using the data in their pitches to customers.
A significant update occurred in 2021 with the upgrade to Zabbix 5.0 LTS, which increasingly supported the delivery of connectivity services to customers alongside the already delivered platform and software solutions.
2022 was marked by significant variations in the tool’s use – integration with Jira software, integration with Linx’s AD for secure login (SSO), and integrations with other communications tools. The tool was also customized, involving script execution and remote commands for specific collections.
2023 brought a new focus on automation, using integrations with other tools to automate functions in Zabbix. For example, Microsoft Power Automate was able to facilitate daily operational processes and improve the use of media types. The entire journey was a continuous process of adaptation and improvement, showing an increased focus on business metrics and customer experience.
“Zabbix enabled the democratization of fundamental business data and information across different company areas. In other words, monitoring has become a strategic element for Linx’s business.”
Gabriel Pedroso, CEO of Unirede Inteligência em TI
The results
After the cultural shift and Zabbix implementation, the following strategic and operational gains were observed:
Improved efficiency and agility. Problems are detected and resolved faster, with incidents directly handled by Zabbix through integrations that automate actions.
Additional integrations. Zabbix’s flexibility and scalability allow for integration with other structural components, supporting operational efficiency.
More customer-oriented features and a renewed customer focus. Using Zabbix enabled a focus on customer success through a change in culture and business perspective, with features reviewed from a user experience perspective.
Improved scalability. This came about thanks to Zabbix’s capacity to support large loads, perform distributed data collection, and expand as needed.
Better market alignment. Aligning operations and monitoring with market needs created specific panels and monitoring for major national retail dates, such as Black Friday and Christmas.
Better sales pitches. Sales pitches are now based on data and performance monitored by xCenter. The sales team presents real monitoring data as a pitch for service quality.
Consolidation. Integrating all monitoring in a single tool eliminates the need for multiple tools and integrations.
An investment guarantee. Zabbix is now seen as a tool that accompanies Linx through future challenges, negating the need for tool changes.
A democratization of information. xCenter provides information to the entire company, improving decision-making in the process.
What’s next?
The journey to success is never-ending, and the following steps demonstrate Linx’s ongoing commitment to improvement and innovation in monitoring and the future of managing customer experiences for the services provided by the company.
Upgrading to Zabbix LTS 6.0. This upgrade is a crucial step to keep the platform updated with the latest features and security improvements.
Integrating with WhatsApp. Linx aims to improve communication and notification flexibility by offering alerts and updates via the popular messaging app.
Application Tracking Monitoring (APM). This involves a renewed focus on enhancing application monitoring, which is essential for maintaining and optimizing system performance. This improvement is planned in Zabbix’s roadmap.
Business layer evolution. Enhancing the monitoring and analysis of business indicators for better data-based decision-making.
Enhancing Availability Metrics. Improving the precision and relevance of metrics related to service and product availability.
Evolving predictive metrics. Implementing and refining metrics that can predict trends or future problems, allowing proactive actions.
In conclusion
When taken together with Unirede’s support of retail monitoring, Linx’s success story with Zabbix is a true inspiration. With the help of Zabbix, Linx has turned data into information and information into action in order to prove the excellence of its services. Throughout its growth trajectory, the company has managed to turn challenges into opportunities, using Zabbix to optimize operations and focus on what really matters – satisfying their customers.
To find out more about what Zabbix can do across a variety of industries, feel free to visit our website or request a demo.
Geoff Huston suggests
that it is time to give up on DNSSEC and look for a better way to secure
the Internet namespace.
What appears to be very clear (to me at any rate!) is that DNSSEC
as we know it today is just not going anywhere. It’s too complex,
too fragile and just too slow to use for the majority of services
and their users. Some value its benefits highly enough that they
are prepared to live with its shortcomings, but that’s not the case
for the overall majority of name holders and for the majority of
users, and no amount of passionate exhortations about DNSSEC will
change this.
Last week, Dr. Matt Wood, VP for AI Products at Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered the keynote at the AWS Summit Los Angeles. Matt and guest speakers shared the latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), developer tooling, and foundational infrastructure, showcasing how they come together to change what’s possible for builders. You can watch the full keynote on YouTube.
Announcements during the LA Summit included two new Amazon Q courses as part of Amazon’s AI Ready initiative to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025. The courses are part of the Amazon Q learning plan. But that’s not all that happened last week.
Last week’s launches Here are some launches that got my attention:
LlamaIndex support for Amazon Neptune — You can now build Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) applications by combining knowledge graphs stored in Amazon Neptune and LlamaIndex, a popular open source framework for building applications with large language models (LLMs) such as those available in Amazon Bedrock. To learn more, check the LlamaIndex documentation for Amazon Neptune Graph Store.
AWS CloudFormation launches a new parameter called DeletionMode for the DeleteStack API — You can use the AWS CloudFormation DeleteStack API to delete your stacks and stack resources. However, certain stack resources can prevent the DeleteStack API from successfully completing, for example, when you attempt to delete non-empty Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The DeleteStack API can enter into the DELETE_FAILED state in such scenarios. With this launch, you can now pass FORCE_DELETE_STACK value to the new DeletionMode parameter and delete such stacks. To learn more, check the DeleteStack API documentation.
Mistral Small now available in Amazon Bedrock — The Mistral Small foundation model (FM) from Mistral AI is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock. This a fast-follow to our recent announcements of Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B in March, and Mistral Large in April. Mistral Small, developed by Mistral AI, is a highly efficient large language model (LLM) optimized for high-volume, low-latency language-based tasks. To learn more, check Esra’s post.
New Amazon CloudFront edge location in Cairo, Egypt — The new AWS edge location brings the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront, a secure, highly distributed, and scalable content delivery network (CDN) that delivers static and dynamic content, APIs, and live and on-demand video with low latency and high performance. Customers in Egypt can expect up to 30 percent improvement in latency, on average, for data delivered through the new edge location. To learn more about AWS edge locations, visit CloudFront edge locations.
Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon S3 — This Amazon OpenSearch Service integration offers a new efficient way to query operational logs in Amazon S3 data lakes, eliminating the need to switch between tools to analyze data. You can get started by installing out-of-the-box dashboards for AWS log types such as Amazon VPC Flow Logs, AWS WAF Logs, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). To learn more, check out the Amazon OpenSearch Service Integrations page and the Amazon OpenSearch Service Developer Guide.
Upcoming AWS events Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:
AWS Summits — It’s AWS Summit season! Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Dubai (May 29), Bangkok (May 30), Stockholm (June 4), Madrid (June 5), and Washington, DC (June 26–27).
AWS re:Inforce — Join us for AWS re:Inforce (June 10–12) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity. Connect with the AWS teams that build the security tools and meet AWS customers to learn about their security journeys.
AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), New Zealand (August 15), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).
Alan Jowett gave a remote presentation at the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about what features could be
added to LLVM to make writing BPF programs easier. While there is nothing specific
to LLVM about BPF code (and the next session in the track was led by GCC
developer José Marchesi about better support for that compiler), LLVM is currently the most
common way to turn C code into BPF bytecode. That translation, however, runs
into problems when the BPF verifier cannot understand the code LLVM’s
optimizations produce.
One of the long-term goals of the folio conversion in the kernel’s
memory-management subsystem is the replacement of the page
structure, which describes a page of physical memory, with an eight-byte
“memory descriptor”. This change would reduce the overhead of tracking
physical memory, increase type safety, and make memory management more
flexible. Thus far, though, details on what the memory-descriptor future
will look like have been relatively scarce. At the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Matthew Wilcox led a
discussion to try to fill in the picture somewhat.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2, bluez, chromium, fossil, libreoffice, python-pymysql, redmine, and ruby-rack), Fedora (buildah, crosswords, dotnet7.0, glycin-loaders, gnome-tour, helix, helvum, libipuz, loupe, maturin, mingw-libxml2, ntpd-rs, perl-Email-MIME, and a huge list of Rust-based packages due to a “mini-mass-rebuild” that updated the toolchain to Rust 1.78 and picked up fixes for various pieces), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, mariadb, and roundcubemail), Oracle (kernel, libreoffice, nodejs, and tomcat), and SUSE (cJSON, libfastjson, opera, postgresql15, python3, and qt6-networkauth).
Linus Torvalds released 6.10-rc1 and closed
the 6.10 merge window on May 26. By that time, 11,534 non-merge
changesets had been pulled into the mainline for the next release; nearly
5,000 of those came in after “The first half of
the 6.10 merge window” was written. While the latter half of the merge
window tends to focus more on fixes, there was also a lot of new
functionality that landed during this time.
The maple tree data structure was added
during the 6.1 development cycle; since then, it has taken its
place at the core of the kernel’s memory-management subsystem.
Unsurprisingly, work on maple trees is not yet done. Maple-tree maintainer
Liam Howlett ran a session in the memory-management track of the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit to discuss the current
state of the maple tree and which features can be expected next.
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Build On Generative AI — Now streaming every Thursday, 2:00 PM US PT on 
