Tag Archives: Choice

Microsoft acquires GitHub

2018-06-04 corbet

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/756443/rss

Here’s the
press release announcing Microsoft’s agreement to acquire GitHub for a
mere $7.5 billion. “GitHub will retain its developer-first
ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all
developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use
the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for
their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any
operating system, any cloud and any device.”

Orchestrate Apache Spark applications using AWS Step Functions and Apache Livy

2018-05-25 Tanzir Musabbir

Post Syndicated from Tanzir Musabbir original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/orchestrate-apache-spark-applications-using-aws-step-functions-and-apache-livy/

The adoption of Apache Spark has increased significantly over the past few years, and running Spark-based application pipelines is the new normal. Spark jobs that are in an ETL (extract, transform, and load) pipeline have different requirements—you must handle dependencies in the jobs, maintain order during executions, and run multiple jobs in parallel. In most of these cases, you can use workflow scheduler tools like Apache Oozie, Apache Airflow, and even Cron to fulfill these requirements.

Apache Oozie is a widely used workflow scheduler system for Hadoop-based jobs. However, its limited UI capabilities, lack of integration with other services, and heavy XML dependency might not be suitable for some users. On the other hand, Apache Airflow comes with a lot of neat features, along with powerful UI and monitoring capabilities and integration with several AWS and third-party services. However, with Airflow, you do need to provision and manage the Airflow server. The Cron utility is a powerful job scheduler. But it doesn’t give you much visibility into the job details, and creating a workflow using Cron jobs can be challenging.

What if you have a simple use case, in which you want to run a few Spark jobs in a specific order, but you don’t want to spend time orchestrating those jobs or maintaining a separate application? You can do that today in a serverless fashion using AWS Step Functions. You can create the entire workflow in AWS Step Functions and interact with Spark on Amazon EMR through Apache Livy.

In this post, I walk you through a list of steps to orchestrate a serverless Spark-based ETL pipeline using AWS Step Functions and Apache Livy.

Input data

For the source data for this post, I use the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) trip record data. For a description of the data, see this detailed dictionary of the taxi data. In this example, we’ll work mainly with the following three columns for the Spark jobs.

Column name	Column description
RateCodeID	Represents the rate code in effect at the end of the trip (for example, 1 for standard rate, 2 for JFK airport, 3 for Newark airport, and so on).
FareAmount	Represents the time-and-distance fare calculated by the meter.
TripDistance	Represents the elapsed trip distance in miles reported by the taxi meter.

The trip data is in comma-separated values (CSV) format with the first row as a header. To shorten the Spark execution time, I trimmed the large input data to only 20,000 rows. During the deployment phase, the input file tripdata.csv is stored in Amazon S3 in the <<your-bucket>>/emr-step-functions/input/ folder.

The following image shows a sample of the trip data:

Solution overview

The next few sections describe how Spark jobs are created for this solution, how you can interact with Spark using Apache Livy, and how you can use AWS Step Functions to create orchestrations for these Spark applications.

At a high level, the solution includes the following steps:

Trigger the AWS Step Function state machine by passing the input file path.
The first stage in the state machine triggers an AWS Lambda
The Lambda function interacts with Apache Spark running on Amazon EMR using Apache Livy, and submits a Spark job.
The state machine waits a few seconds before checking the Spark job status.
Based on the job status, the state machine moves to the success or failure state.
Subsequent Spark jobs are submitted using the same approach.
The state machine waits a few seconds for the job to finish.
The job finishes, and the state machine updates with its final status.

Let’s take a look at the Spark application that is used for this solution.

Spark jobs

For this example, I built a Spark jar named spark-taxi.jar. It has two different Spark applications:

MilesPerRateCode – The first job that runs on the Amazon EMR cluster. This job reads the trip data from an input source and computes the total trip distance for each rate code. The output of this job consists of two columns and is stored in Apache Parquet format in the output path.

The following are the expected output columns:

rate_code – Represents the rate code for the trip.
total_distance – Represents the total trip distance for that rate code (for example, sum(trip_distance)).

RateCodeStatus – The second job that runs on the EMR cluster, but only if the first job finishes successfully. This job depends on two different input sets:

csv – The same trip data that is used for the first Spark job.
miles-per-rate – The output of the first job.

This job first reads the tripdata.csv file and aggregates the fare_amount by the rate_code. After this point, you have two different datasets, both aggregated by rate_code. Finally, the job uses the rate_code field to join two datasets and output the entire rate code status in a single CSV file.

The output columns are as follows:

rate_code_id – Represents the rate code type.
total_distance – Derived from first Spark job and represents the total trip distance.
total_fare_amount – A new field that is generated during the second Spark application, representing the total fare amount by the rate code type.

Note that in this case, you don’t need to run two different Spark jobs to generate that output. The goal of setting up the jobs in this way is just to create a dependency between the two jobs and use them within AWS Step Functions.

Both Spark applications take one input argument called rootPath. It’s the S3 location where the Spark job is stored along with input and output data. Here is a sample of the final output:

The next section discusses how you can use Apache Livy to interact with Spark applications that are running on Amazon EMR.

Using Apache Livy to interact with Apache Spark

Apache Livy provides a REST interface to interact with Spark running on an EMR cluster. Livy is included in Amazon EMR release version 5.9.0 and later. In this post, I use Livy to submit Spark jobs and retrieve job status. When Amazon EMR is launched with Livy installed, the EMR master node becomes the endpoint for Livy, and it starts listening on port 8998 by default. Livy provides APIs to interact with Spark.

Let’s look at a couple of examples how you can interact with Spark running on Amazon EMR using Livy.

To list active running jobs, you can execute the following from the EMR master node:

curl localhost:8998/sessions

If you want to do the same from a remote instance, just change localhost to the EMR hostname, as in the following (port 8998 must be open to that remote instance through the security group):

curl http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/sessions

To submit a Spark job through Livy pointing to the application jar in S3, you can do the following:

curl -X POST --data '{"file": "s3://<<bucket-location>/spark.jar", "className": "com.example.SparkApp "]}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/batches

Spark submit through Livy returns a session ID that starts from 0. Using that session ID, you can retrieve the status of the job as shown following:

curl http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/batches/0 | python -m json.tool

Through Spark submit, you can pass multiple arguments for the Spark job and Spark configuration settings. You can also do that using Livy, by passing the S3 path through the args parameter, as shown following:

curl -X POST --data '{"file": "s3://<<bucket-location>>/spark.jar", "className": "com.example.SparkApp", “args”: [“s3://bucket-path”]}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/batches

All Apache Livy REST calls return a response as JSON, as shown in the following image:

If you want to pretty-print that JSON response, you can pipe command with Python’s JSON tool as follows:

curl http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/batches/3 | python -m json.tool

For a detailed list of Livy APIs, see the Apache Livy REST API page. This post uses GET /batches and POST /batches.

In the next section, you create a state machine and orchestrate Spark applications using AWS Step Functions.

Using AWS Step Functions to create a Spark job workflow

AWS Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step and retries when it encounters errors. So your application executes in order and as expected every time. To create a Spark job workflow using AWS Step Functions, you first create a Lambda state machine using different types of states to create the entire workflow.

First, you use the Task state—a simple state in AWS Step Functions that performs a single unit of work. You also use the Wait state to delay the state machine from continuing for a specified time. Later, you use the Choice state to add branching logic to a state machine.

The following is a quick summary of how to use different states in the state machine to create the Spark ETL pipeline:

Task state – Invokes a Lambda function. The first Task state submits the Spark job on Amazon EMR, and the next Task state is used to retrieve the previous Spark job status.
Wait state – Pauses the state machine until a job completes execution.
Choice state – Each Spark job execution can return a failure, an error, or a success state So, in the state machine, you use the Choice state to create a rule that specifies the next action or step based on the success or failure of the previous step.

Here is one of my Task states, MilesPerRateCode, which simply submits a Spark job:

"MilesPerRate Job": {
      "Type": "Task",
      "Resource":"arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:xxxxxx:function:blog-miles-per-rate-job-submit-function",
      "ResultPath": "$.jobId",
      "Next": "Wait for MilesPerRate job to complete"
 }

This Task state configuration specifies the Lambda function to execute. Inside the Lambda function, it submits a Spark job through Livy using Livy’s POST API. Using ResultPath, it tells the state machine where to place the result of the executing task. As discussed in the previous section, Spark submit returns the session ID, which is captured with $.jobId and used in a later state.

The following code section shows the Lambda function, which is used to submit the MilesPerRateCode job. It uses the Python request library to submit a POST against the Livy endpoint hosted on Amazon EMR and passes the required parameters in JSON format through payload. It then parses the response, grabs id from the response, and returns it. The Next field tells the state machine which state to go to next.

from botocore.vendored import requests
import json

def lambda_handler(event, context):
  headers = { "content-type": "application/json" }
  url = 'http://xxxxxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/batches'
  payload = {
    'file' : 's3://<<s3-location>>/emr-step-functions/spark-taxi.jar',
    'className' : 'com.example.MilesPerRateCode',
    'args' : [event.get('rootPath')]
  }
  res = requests.post(url, data = json.dumps(payload), headers = headers, verify = False)
  json_data = json.loads(res.text)
  return json_data.get('id')

Just like in the MilesPerRate job, another state submits the RateCodeStatus job, but it executes only when all previous jobs have completed successfully.

Here is the Task state in the state machine that checks the Spark job status:

"Query RateCodeStatus job status": {
   "Type": "Task",
   "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:xxxxx:function:blog-spark-job-status-function",
   "Next": "RateCodeStatus job complete?",
   "ResultPath": "$.jobStatus"
}

Just like other states, the preceding Task executes a Lambda function, captures the result (represented by jobStatus), and passes it to the next state. The following is the Lambda function that checks the Spark job status based on a given session ID:

from botocore.vendored import requests
import json

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    jobid = event.get('jobId')
    url     = 'http://xxxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8998/batches/' + str(jobid)
    res = requests.get(url)
    json_data = json.loads(res.text)
    return json_data.get('state')

In the Choice state, it checks the Spark job status value, compares it with a predefined state status, and transitions the state based on the result. For example, if the status is success, move to the next state (RateCodeJobStatus job), and if it is dead, move to the MilesPerRate job failed state.

"MilesPerRate job complete?": {
   "Type": "Choice",
   "Choices": [{
       "Variable": "$.jobStatus",
       "StringEquals": "success",
       "Next": "RateCodeStatus Job"
   },{
       "Variable": "$.jobStatus",
       "StringEquals": "dead",
       "Next": "MilesPerRate job failed"
   }],
   "Default": "Wait for MilesPerRate job to complete"
}

Walkthrough using AWS CloudFormation

To set up this entire solution, you need to create a few AWS resources. To make it easier, I have created an AWS CloudFormation template. This template creates all the required AWS resources and configures all the resources that are needed to create a Spark-based ETL pipeline on AWS Step Functions.

This CloudFormation template requires you to pass the following four parameters during initiation.

Parameter	Description
`ClusterSubnetID`	The subnet where the Amazon EMR cluster is deployed and Lambda is configured to talk to this subnet.
`KeyName`	The name of the existing EC2 key pair to access the Amazon EMR cluster.
`VPCID`	The ID of the virtual private cloud (VPC) where the EMR cluster is deployed and Lambda is configured to talk to this VPC.
`S3RootPath`	The Amazon S3 path where all required files (input file, Spark job, and so on) are stored and the resulting data is written.

IMPORTANT: These templates are designed only to show how you can create a Spark-based ETL pipeline on AWS Step Functions using Apache Livy. They are not intended for production use without modification. And if you try this solution outside of the us-east-1 Region, download the necessary files from s3://aws-data-analytics-blog/emr-step-functions, upload the files to the buckets in your Region, edit the script as appropriate, and then run it.

To launch the CloudFormation stack, choose Launch Stack:

Launching this stack creates the following list of AWS resources.

Logical ID	Resource Type	Description
`StepFunctionsStateExecutionRole`	IAM role	IAM role to execute the state machine and have a trust relationship with the states service.
`SparkETLStateMachine`	AWS Step Functions state machine	State machine in AWS Step Functions for the Spark ETL workflow.
`LambdaSecurityGroup`	Amazon EC2 security group	Security group that is used for the Lambda function to call the Livy API.
`RateCodeStatusJobSubmitFunction`	AWS Lambda function	Lambda function to submit the RateCodeStatus job.
`MilesPerRateJobSubmitFunction`	AWS Lambda function	Lambda function to submit the MilesPerRate job.
`SparkJobStatusFunction`	AWS Lambda function	Lambda function to check the Spark job status.
`LambdaStateMachineRole`	IAM role	IAM role for all Lambda functions to use the lambda trust relationship.
`EMRCluster`	Amazon EMR cluster	EMR cluster where Livy is running and where the job is placed.

During the AWS CloudFormation deployment phase, it sets up S3 paths for input and output. Input files are stored in the <<s3-root-path>>/emr-step-functions/input/ path, whereas spark-taxi.jar is copied under <<s3-root-path>>/emr-step-functions/.

The following screenshot shows how the S3 paths are configured after deployment. In this example, I passed a bucket that I created in the AWS account s3://tm-app-demos for the S3 root path.

If the CloudFormation template completed successfully, you will see Spark-ETL-State-Machine in the AWS Step Functions dashboard, as follows:

Choose the Spark-ETL-State-Machine state machine to take a look at this implementation. The AWS CloudFormation template built the entire state machine along with its dependent Lambda functions, which are now ready to be executed.

On the dashboard, choose the newly created state machine, and then choose New execution to initiate the state machine. It asks you to pass input in JSON format. This input goes to the first state MilesPerRate Job, which eventually executes the Lambda function blog-miles-per-rate-job-submit-function.

Pass the S3 root path as input:

{

“rootPath”: “s3://tm-app-demos”

}

Then choose Start Execution:

The rootPath value is the same value that was passed when creating the CloudFormation stack. It can be an S3 bucket location or a bucket with prefixes, but it should be the same value that is used for AWS CloudFormation. This value tells the state machine where it can find the Spark jar and input file, and where it will write output files. After the state machine starts, each state/task is executed based on its definition in the state machine.

At a high level, the following represents the flow of events:

Execute the first Spark job, MilesPerRate.
The Spark job reads the input file from the location <<rootPath>>/emr-step-functions/input/tripdata.csv. If the job finishes successfully, it writes the output data to <<rootPath>>/emr-step-functions/miles-per-rate.
If the Spark job fails, it transitions to the error state MilesPerRate job failed, and the state machine stops. If the Spark job finishes successfully, it transitions to the RateCodeStatus Job state, and the second Spark job is executed.
If the second Spark job fails, it transitions to the error state RateCodeStatus job failed, and the state machine stops with the Failed status.
If this Spark job completes successfully, it writes the final output data to the <<rootPath>>/emr-step-functions/rate-code-status/ It also transitions the RateCodeStatus job finished state, and the state machine ends its execution with the Success status.

This following screenshot shows a successfully completed Spark ETL state machine:

The right side of the state machine diagram shows the details of individual states with their input and output.

When you execute the state machine for the second time, it fails because the S3 path already exists. The state machine turns red and stops at MilePerRate job failed. The following image represents that failed execution of the state machine:

You can also check your Spark application status and logs by going to the Amazon EMR console and viewing the Application history tab:

I hope this walkthrough paints a picture of how you can create a serverless solution for orchestrating Spark jobs on Amazon EMR using AWS Step Functions and Apache Livy. In the next section, I share some ideas for making this solution even more elegant.

Next steps

The goal of this post is to show a simple example that uses AWS Step Functions to create an orchestration for Spark-based jobs in a serverless fashion. To make this solution robust and production ready, you can explore the following options:

In this example, I manually initiated the state machine by passing the rootPath as input. You can instead trigger the state machine automatically. To run the ETL pipeline as soon as the files arrive in your S3 bucket, you can pass the new file path to the state machine. Because CloudWatch Events supports AWS Step Functions as a target, you can create a CloudWatch rule for an S3 event. You can then set AWS Step Functions as a target and pass the new file path to your state machine. You’re all set!
You can also improve this solution by adding an alerting mechanism in case of failures. To do this, create a Lambda function that sends an alert email and assigns that Lambda function to a Fail That way, when any part of your state fails, it triggers an email and notifies the user.
If you want to submit multiple Spark jobs in parallel, you can use the Parallel state type in AWS Step Functions. The Parallel state is used to create parallel branches of execution in your state machine.

With Lambda and AWS Step Functions, you can create a very robust serverless orchestration for your big data workload.

Cleaning up

When you’ve finished testing this solution, remember to clean up all those AWS resources that you created using AWS CloudFormation. Use the AWS CloudFormation console or AWS CLI to delete the stack named Blog-Spark-ETL-Step-Functions.

Summary

In this post, I showed you how to use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate your Spark jobs that are running on Amazon EMR. You used Apache Livy to submit jobs to Spark from a Lambda function and created a workflow for your Spark jobs, maintaining a specific order for job execution and triggering different AWS events based on your job’s outcome.
Go ahead—give this solution a try, and share your experience with us!

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Building a Real World Evidence Platform on AWS and Building High-Throughput Genomics Batch Workflows on AWS: Workflow Layer (Part 4 of 4).

About the Author

Tanzir Musabbir is an EMR Specialist Solutions Architect with AWS. He is an early adopter of open source Big Data technologies. At AWS, he works with our customers to provide them architectural guidance for running analytics solutions on Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena & AWS Glue. Tanzir is a big Real Madrid fan and he loves to travel in his free time.

Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS

2018-05-24 Roderick Bauer

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/replacing-macos-server-with-synology-nas/

Businesses and organizations that rely on macOS server for essential office and data services are facing some decisions about the future of their IT services.

Apple recently announced that it is deprecating a significant portion of essential network services in macOS Server, as they described in a support statement posted on April 24, 2018, “Prepare for changes to macOS Server.” Apple’s note includes:

macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.

The note lists the services that will be removed in a future release of macOS Server, including calendar and contact support, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name Services (DNS), mail, instant messages, virtual private networking (VPN), NetInstall, Web server, and the Wiki.

Apple assures users who have already configured any of the listed services that they will be able to use them in the spring 2018 macOS Server update, but the statement ends with links to a number of alternative services, including hosted services, that macOS Server users should consider as viable replacements to the features it is removing. These alternative services are all FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software).

As difficult as this could be for organizations that use macOS server, this is not unexpected. Apple left the server hardware space back in 2010, when Steve Jobs announced the company was ending its line of Xserve rackmount servers, which were introduced in May, 2002. Since then, macOS Server has hardly been a prominent part of Apple’s product lineup. It’s not just the product itself that has lost some luster, but the entire category of SMB office and business servers, which has been undergoing a gradual change in recent years.

Some might wonder how important the news about macOS Server is, given that macOS Server represents a pretty small share of the server market. macOS Server has been important to design shops, agencies, education users, and small businesses that likely have been on Macs for ages, but it’s not a significant part of the IT infrastructure of larger organizations and businesses.

What Comes After macOS Server?

Lovers of macOS Server don’t have to fear having their Mac minis pried from their cold, dead hands quite yet. Installed services will continue to be available. In the fall of 2018, new installations and upgrades of macOS Server will require users to migrate most services to other software. Since many of the services of macOS Server were already open-source, this means that a change in software might not be required. It does mean more configuration and management required from those who continue with macOS Server, however.

Users can continue with macOS Server if they wish, but many will see the writing on the wall and look for a suitable substitute.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

For many people working in organizations, what is significant about this announcement is how it reflects the move away from the once ubiquitous server-based IT infrastructure. Services that used to be centrally managed and office-based, such as storage, file sharing, communications, and computing, have moved to the cloud.

In selecting the next office IT platforms, there’s an opportunity to move to solutions that reflect and support how people are working and the applications they are using both in the office and remotely. For many, this means including cloud-based services in office automation, backup, and business continuity/disaster recovery planning. This includes Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service (Saas, PaaS, IaaS) options.

IT solutions that integrate well with the cloud are worth strong consideration for what comes after a macOS Server-based environment.

Synology NAS as a macOS Server Alternative

One solution that is becoming popular is to replace macOS Server with a device that has the ability to provide important office services, but also bridges the office and cloud environments. Using Network-Attached Storage (NAS) to take up the server slack makes a lot of sense. Many customers are already using NAS for file sharing, local data backup, automatic cloud backup, and other uses. In the case of Synology, their operating system, Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM), is Linux based, and integrates the basic functions of file sharing, centralized backup, RAID storage, multimedia streaming, virtual storage, and other common functions.

Synology NAS

Since DSM is based on Linux, there are numerous server applications available, including many of the same ones that are available for macOS Server, which shares conceptual roots with Linux as it comes from BSD Unix.

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center

According to Ed Lukacs, COO at 2FIFTEEN Systems Management in Salt Lake City, their customers have found the move from macOS Server to Synology NAS not only painless, but positive. DSM works seamlessly with macOS and has been faster for their customers, as well. Many of their customers are running Adobe Creative Suite and Google G Suite applications, so a workflow that combines local storage, remote access, and the cloud, is already well known to them. Remote users are supported by Synology’s QuickConnect or VPN.

Business continuity and backup are simplified by the flexible storage capacity of the NAS. Synology has built-in backup to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Synology’s Cloud Sync, as well as a choice of a number of other B2-compatible applications, such as Cloudberry, Comet, and Arq.

Customers have been able to get up and running quickly, with only initial data transfers requiring some time to complete. After that, management of the NAS can be handled in-house or with the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP).

Are You Sticking with macOS Server or Moving to Another Platform?

If you’re affected by this change in macOS Server, please let us know in the comments how you’re planning to cope. Are you using Synology NAS for server services? Please tell us how that’s working for you.

The post Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

HackSpace magazine 7: Internet of Everything

2018-05-24 Andrew Gregory

Post Syndicated from Andrew Gregory original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hackspace-magazine-7-internet-of-everything/

We’re usually averse to buzzwords at HackSpace magazine, but not this month: in issue 7, we’re taking a deep dive into the Internet of Things.

Internet of Things (IoT)

To many people, IoT is a shady term used by companies to sell you something you already own, but this time with WiFi; to us, it’s a way to make our builds smarter, more useful, and more connected. In HackSpace magazine #7, you can join us on a tour of the boards that power IoT projects, marvel at the ways in which other makers are using IoT, and get started with your first IoT project!

Awesome projects

DIY retro computing: this issue, we’re taking our collective hat off to Spencer Owen. He stuck his home-brew computer on Tindie thinking he might make a bit of beer money — now he’s paying the mortgage with his making skills and inviting others to build modules for his machine. And if that tickles your fancy, why not take a crack at our Z80 tutorial? Get out your breadboard, assemble your jumper wires, and prepare to build a real-life computer!

Shameless patriotism: combine Lego, Arduino, and the car of choice for 1960 gold bullion thieves, and you’ve got yourself a groovy weekend project. We proudly present to you one man’s epic quest to add LED lights (controllable via a smartphone!) to his daughter’s LEGO Mini Cooper.

Makerspaces

Patriotism intensifies: for the last 200-odd years, the Black Country has been a hotbed of making. Urban Hax, based in Walsall, is the latest makerspace to show off its riches in the coveted Space of the Month pages. Every space has its own way of doing things, but not every space has a portrait of Rob Halford on the wall. All hail!

Diversity: advice on diversity often boils down to ‘Be nice to people’, which might feel more vague than actionable. This is where we come in to help: it is truly worth making the effort to give people of all backgrounds access to your makerspace, so we take a look at why it’s nice to be nice, and at the ways in which one makerspace has put niceness into practice — with great results.

And there’s more!

We also show you how to easily calculate the size and radius of laser-cut gears, use a bank of LEDs to etch PCBs in your own mini factory, and use chemistry to mess with your lunch menu.

All this plus much, much more waits for you in HackSpace magazine issue 7!

Get your copy of HackSpace magazine

If you like the sound of that, you can find HackSpace magazine in WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and independent newsagents in the UK. If you live in the US, check out your local Barnes & Noble, Fry’s, or Micro Center next week. We’re also shipping to stores in Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Belgium, and Brazil, so be sure to ask your local newsagent whether they’ll be getting HackSpace magazine.

And if you can’t get to the shops, fear not: you can subscribe from £4 an issue from our online shop. And if you’d rather try before you buy, you can always download the free PDF. Happy reading, and happy making!

The post HackSpace magazine 7: Internet of Everything appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Naturebytes’ weatherproof Pi and camera case

2018-05-18 Helen Lynn

Post Syndicated from Helen Lynn original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/naturebytes-weatherproof-pi-and-camera-case/

Naturebytes are making their weatherproof Wildlife Cam Case available as a standalone product for the first time, a welcome addition to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem that should take some of the hassle out of your outdoor builds.

A robin on a bird feeder in a garden with a Naturebytes Wildlife Cam mounted beside it

Weatherproofing digital making projects

People often use Raspberry Pis and Camera Modules for outdoor projects, but weatherproofing your set-up can be tricky. You need to keep water — and tiny creatures — out, but you might well need access for wires and cables, whether for power or sensors; if you’re using a camera, it’ll need something clear and cleanable in front of the lens. You can use sealant, but if you need to adjust anything that you’ve applied it to, you’ll have to remove it and redo it. While we’ve seen a few reasonable options available to buy, the choice has never been what you’d call extensive.

The Naturebytes case

For all these reasons, I was pleased to learn that Naturebytes, the wildlife camera people, are releasing their Wildlife Cam Case as a standalone product for the first time.

Naturebytes case open

The Wildlife Cam Case is ideal for nature camera projects, of course, but it’ll also be useful for anyone who wants to take their Pi outdoors. It has weatherproof lenses that are transparent to visible and IR light, for all your nature observation projects. Its opening is hinged to allow easy access to your hardware, and the case has waterproof access for cables. Inside, there’s a mount for fixing any model of Raspberry Pi and camera, as well as many other components. On top of all that, the case comes with a sturdy nylon strap to make it easy to attach it to a post or a tree.

Naturebytes case additional components

Order yours now!

At the moment, Naturebytes are producing a limited run of the cases. The first batch of 50 are due to be dispatched next week to arrive just in time for the Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, so get them while they’re hot. It’s the perfect thing for recording a timelapse of exactly how quickly the slugs obliterate your vegetable seedlings, and of lots more heartening things that must surely happen in gardens other than mine.

The post Naturebytes’ weatherproof Pi and camera case appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Refining Access to Branches in AWS CodeCommit

2018-05-16 Chris Barclay

Post Syndicated from Chris Barclay original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/refining-access-to-branches-in-aws-codecommit/

Thanks to Susan Ferrell, Senior Technical Writer, for a great blog post on how to use CodeCommit branch-level permissions.
—-

AWS CodeCommit users have been asking for a way to restrict commits to some repository branches to just a few people. In this blog post, we’re going to show you how to do that by creating and applying a conditional policy, an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy that contains a context key.

Why would I do this?

When you create a branch in an AWS CodeCommit repository, the branch is available, by default, to all repository users. Here are some scenarios in which refining access might help you:

You maintain a branch in a repository for production-ready code, and you don’t want to allow changes to this branch except from a select group of people.
You want to limit the number of people who can make changes to the default branch in a repository.
You want to ensure that pull requests cannot be merged to a branch except by an approved group of developers.

We’ll show you how to create a policy in IAM that prevents users from pushing commits to and merging pull requests to a branch named master. You’ll attach that policy to one group or role in IAM, and then test how users in that group are affected when that policy is applied. We’ll explain how it works, so you can create custom policies for your repositories.

What you need to get started

You’ll need to sign in to AWS with sufficient permissions to:
- - Create and apply policies in IAM.
  - Create groups in IAM.
  - Add users to those groups.
  - Apply policies to those groups.
You can use existing IAM groups, but because you’re going to be changing permissions, you might want to first test this out on groups and users you’ve created specifically for this purpose.
You’ll need a repository in AWS CodeCommit with at least two branches: master and test-branch. For information about how to create repositories, see Create a Repository. For information about how to create branches, see Create a Branch. In this blog post, we’ve named the repository MyDemoRepo. You can use an existing repository with branches of another name, if you prefer.

Let’s get started!

Create two groups in IAM

We’re going to set up two groups in IAM: Developers and Senior_Developers. To start, both groups will have the same managed policy, AWSCodeCommitPowerUsers, applied. Users in each group will have exactly the same permissions to perform actions in IAM.

Figure 1: Two example groups in IAM, with distinct users but the same managed policy applied to each group

First, create the Developers group.

Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.
In the navigation pane, choose Groups, and then choose Create New Group.
In the Group Name box, type Developers, and then choose Next Step.
In the list of policies, select the check box for AWSCodeCommitPowerUsers, then choose Next Step.
Choose Create Group.

Now, follow these steps to create the Senior_Developers group and attach the AWSCodeCommitPowerUsers managed policy. You now have two empty groups with the same policy attached.

Create users in IAM

Next, add at least one unique user to each group. You can use existing IAM users, but because you’ll be affecting their access to AWS CodeCommit, you might want to create two users just for testing purposes. Let’s go ahead and create Arnav and Mary.

In the navigation pane, choose Users, and then choose Add user.
For the new user, type Arnav_Desai.
Choose Add another user, and then type Mary_Major.
Select the type of access (programmatic access, access to the AWS Management Console, or both). In this blog post, we’ll be testing everything from the console, but if you want to test AWS CodeCommit using the AWS CLI, make sure you include programmatic access and console access.
For Console password type, choose Custom password. Each user is assigned the password that you type in the box. Write these down so you don’t forget them. You’ll need to sign in to the console using each of these accounts.
Choose Next: Permissions.
On the Set permissions page, choose Add user to group. Add Arnav to the Developers group. Add Mary to the Senior_Developers group.
Choose Next: Review to see all of the choices you made up to this point. When you are ready to proceed, choose Create user.

Sign in as Arnav, and then follow these steps to go to the master branch and add a file. Then sign in as Mary and follow the same steps.

Open the AWS CodeCommit console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/codecommit.
On the Dashboard page, from the list of repositories, choose MyDemoRepo.
In the Code view, choose the branch named master.
Choose Add file, and then choose Create file. Type some text or code in the editor.
Provide information to other users about who added this file to the repository and why.
1. In Author name, type the name of the user (Arnav or Mary).
2. In Email address, type an email address so that other repository users can contact you about this change.
3. In Commit message, type a brief description to help you remember why you added this file or any other details you might find helpful.
4. Type a name for the file.
Choose Commit file.

Now follow the same steps to add a file in a different branch. (In our example repository, that’s the branch named test-branch.) You should be able to add a file to both branches regardless of whether you’re signed in as Arnav or Mary.

Let’s change that.

Create a conditional policy in IAM

You’re going to create a policy in IAM that will deny API actions if certain conditions are met. We want to prevent users with this policy applied from updating a branch named master, but we don’t want to prevent them from viewing the branch, cloning the repository, or creating pull requests that will merge to that branch. For this reason, we want to pick and choose our APIs carefully. Looking at the Permissions Reference, the logical permissions for this are:

GitPush
PutFile
MergePullRequestByFastForward

Now’s the time to think about what else you might want this policy to do. For example, because we don’t want users with this policy to make changes to this branch, we probably don’t want them to be able to delete it either, right? So let’s add one more permission:

DeleteBranch

The branch in which we want to deny these actions is master. The repository in which the branch resides is MyDemoRepo. We’re going to need more than just the repository name, though. We need the repository ARN. Fortunately, that’s easy to find. Just go to the AWS CodeCommit console, choose the repository, and choose Settings. The repository ARN is displayed on the General tab.

Now we’re ready to create a policy.
1. Open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/. Make sure you’re signed in with the account that has sufficient permissions to create policies, and not as Arnav or Mary.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Policies, and then choose Create policy.
3. Choose JSON, and then paste in the following:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
            "Action": [
                "codecommit:GitPush",
                "codecommit:DeleteBranch",
                "codecommit:PutFile",
                "codecommit:MergePullRequestByFastForward"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:codecommit:us-east-2:80398EXAMPLE:MyDemoRepo",
            "Condition": {
                "StringEqualsIfExists": {
                    "codecommit:References": [
                        "refs/heads/master"   
                    ]
                },
                "Null": {
                    "codecommit:References": false
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

You’ll notice a few things here. First, change the repository ARN to the ARN for your repository and include the repository name. Second, if you want to restrict access to a branch with a name different from our example, master, change that reference too.

Now let’s talk about this policy and what it does. You might be wondering why we’re using a Git reference (refs/heads) value instead of just the branch name. The answer lies in how Git references things, and how AWS CodeCommit, as a Git-based repository service, implements its APIs. A branch in Git is a simple pointer (reference) to the SHA-1 value of the head commit for that branch.

You might also be wondering about the second part of the condition, the nullification language. This is necessary because of the way git push and git-receive-pack work. Without going into too many technical details, when you attempt to push a change from a local repo to AWS CodeCommit, an initial reference call is made to AWS CodeCommit without any branch information. AWS CodeCommit evaluates that initial call to ensure that:

a) You’re authorized to make calls.

b) A repository exists with the name specified in the initial call. If you left that null out of the policy, users with that policy would be unable to complete any pushes from their local repos to the AWS CodeCommit remote repository at all, regardless of which branch they were trying to push their commits to.

Could you write a policy in such a way that the null is not required? Of course. IAM policy language is flexible. There’s an example of how to do this in the AWS CodeCommit User Guide, if you’re curious. But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s continue with this policy as written.

So what have we essentially said in this policy? We’ve asked IAM to deny the relevant CodeCommit permissions if the request is made to the resource MyDemoRepo and it meets the following condition: the reference is to refs/heads/master. Otherwise, the deny does not apply.

I’m sure you’re wondering if this policy has to be constrained to a specific repository resource like MyDemoRepo. After all, it would be awfully convenient if a single policy could apply to all branches in any repository in an AWS account, particularly since the default branch in any repository is initially the master branch. Good news! Simply replace the ARN with an *, and your policy will affect ALL branches named master in every AWS CodeCommit repository in your AWS account. Make sure that this is really what you want, though. We suggest you start by limiting the scope to just one repository, and then changing things when you’ve tested it and are happy with how it works.

When you’re sure you’ve modified the policy for your environment, choose Review policy to validate it. Give this policy a name, such as DenyChangesToMaster, provide a description of its purpose, and then choose Create policy.

Now that you have a policy, it’s time to apply and test it.

Apply the policy to a group

In theory, you could apply the policy you just created directly to any IAM user, but that really doesn’t scale well. You should apply this policy to a group, if you use IAM groups to manage users, or to a role, if your users assume a role when interacting with AWS resources.

In the IAM console, choose Groups, and then choose Developers.
On the Permissions tab, choose Attach Policy.
Choose DenyChangesToMaster, and then choose Attach policy.

Your groups now have a critical difference: users in the Developers group have an additional policy applied that restricts their actions in the master branch. In other words, Mary can continue to add files, push commits, and merge pull requests in the master branch, but Arnav cannot.

Figure 2: Two example groups in IAM, one with an additional policy applied that will prevent users in this group from making changes to the master branch

Test it out. Sign in as Arnav, and do the following:

Open the AWS CodeCommit console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/codecommit.
On the Dashboard page, from the list of repositories, choose MyDemoRepo.
In the Code view, choose the branch named master.
Choose Add file, and then choose Create file, just as you did before. Provide some text, and then add the file name and your user information.
Choose Commit file.

This time you’ll see an error after choosing Commit file. It’s not a pretty message, but at the very end, you’ll see a telling phrase: “explicit deny”. That’s the policy in action. You, as Arnav, are explicitly denied PutFile, which prevents you from adding a file to the master branch. You’ll see similar results if you try other actions denied by that policy, such as deleting the master branch.

Stay signed in as Arnav, but this time add a file to test-branch. You should be able to add a file without seeing any errors. You can create a branch based on the master branch, add a file to it, and create a pull request that will merge to the master branch, all just as before. However, you cannot perform denied actions on that master branch.

Sign out as Arnav and sign in as Mary. You’ll see that as that IAM user, you can add and edit files in the master branch, merge pull requests to it, and even, although we don’t recommend this, delete it.

Conclusion

You can use conditional statements in policies in IAM to refine how users interact with your AWS CodeCommit repositories. This blog post showed how to use such a policy to prevent users from making changes to a branch named master. There are many other options. We hope this blog post will encourage you to experiment with AWS CodeCommit, IAM policies, and permissions. If you have any questions or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.

A serverless solution for invoking AWS Lambda at a sub-minute frequency

2018-05-11 Emanuele Menga

Post Syndicated from Emanuele Menga original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/a-serverless-solution-for-invoking-aws-lambda-at-a-sub-minute-frequency/

If you’ve used Amazon CloudWatch Events to schedule the invocation of a Lambda function at regular intervals, you may have noticed that the highest frequency possible is one invocation per minute. However, in some cases, you may need to invoke Lambda more often than that. In this blog post, I’ll cover invoking a Lambda function every 10 seconds, but with some simple math you can change to whatever interval you like.

To achieve this, I’ll show you how to leverage Step Functions and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

The Solution

For this example, I’ve created a Step Functions State Machine that invokes our Lambda function 6 times, 10 seconds apart. Such State Machine is then executed once per minute by a CloudWatch Events Rule. This state machine is then executed once per minute by an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule. Finally, the Kinesis Data Stream triggers our Lambda function for each record inserted. The result is our Lambda function being invoked every 10 seconds, indefinitely.

Below is a diagram illustrating how the various services work together.

Step 1: My sampleLambda function doesn’t actually do anything, it just simulates an execution for a few seconds. This is the (Python) code of my dummy function:

import time

import random


def lambda_handler(event, context):

rand = random.randint(1, 3)

print('Running for {} seconds'.format(rand))

time.sleep(rand)

return True

Step 2:

The next step is to create a second Lambda function, that I called Iterator, which has two duties:

It keeps track of the current number of iterations, since Step Function doesn’t natively have a state we can use for this purpose.
It asynchronously invokes our Lambda function at every loops.

This is the code of the Iterator, adapted from here.

import boto3

client = boto3.client('kinesis')

def lambda_handler(event, context):

index = event['iterator']['index'] + 1

response = client.put_record(

StreamName='LambdaSubMinute',

PartitionKey='1',

Data='',

)

return {

'index': index,

'continue': index < event['iterator']['count'],

'count': event['iterator']['count']

}

This function does three things:

Increments the counter.
Verifies if we reached a count of (in this example) 6.
Sends an empty record to the Kinesis Stream.

Now we can create the Step Functions State Machine; the definition is, again, adapted from here.

{

"Comment": "Invoke Lambda every 10 seconds",

"StartAt": "ConfigureCount",

"States": {

"ConfigureCount": {

"Type": "Pass",

"Result": {

"index": 0,

"count": 6

},

"ResultPath": "$.iterator",

"Next": "Iterator"

},

"Iterator": {

"Type": "Task",

"Resource": “arn:aws:lambda:REGION:ACCOUNT_ID:function:Iterator",

"ResultPath": "$.iterator",

"Next": "IsCountReached"

},

"IsCountReached": {

"Type": "Choice",

"Choices": [

{

"Variable": "$.iterator.continue",

"BooleanEquals": true,

"Next": "Wait"

}

],

"Default": "Done"

},

"Wait": {

"Type": "Wait",

"Seconds": 10,

"Next": "Iterator"

},

"Done": {

"Type": "Pass",

"End": true

}

}

}

This is how it works:

The state machine starts and sets the index at 0 and the count at 6.
Iterator function is invoked.
If the iterator function reached the end of the loop, the IsCountReached state terminates the execution, otherwise the machine waits for 10 seconds.
The machine loops back to the iterator.

Step 3: Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule scheduled to trigger every minute and add the state machine as its target. I’ve actually prepared an Amazon CloudFormation template that creates the whole stack and starts the Lambda invocations, you can find it here.

Performance

Let’s have a look at a sample series of invocations and analyse how precise the timing is. In the following chart I reported the delay (in excess of the expected 10-second-wait) of 30 consecutive invocations of my dummy function, when the Iterator is configured with a memory size of 1024MB.

Invocations Delay

Notice the delay increases by a few hundred milliseconds at every invocation. The good news is it accrues only within the same loop, 6 times; after that, a new CloudWatch Events kicks in and it resets.

This delay is due to the work that AWS Step Function does outside of the Wait state, the main component of which is the Iterator function itself, that runs synchronously in the state machine and therefore adds up its duration to the 10-second-wait.

As we can easily imagine, the memory size of the Iterator Lambda function does make a difference. Here are the Average and Maximum duration of the function with 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB of memory.

Average Duration

Maximum Duration

Given those results, I’d say that a memory of 1024MB is a good compromise between costs and performance.

Caveats

As mentioned, in our Amazon CloudWatch Events documentation, in rare cases a rule can be triggered twice, causing two parallel executions of the state machine. If that is a concern, we can add a task state at the beginning of the state machine that checks if any other executions are currently running. If the outcome is positive, then a choice state can immediately terminate the flow. Since the state machine is invoked every 60 seconds and runs for about 50, it is safe to assume that executions should all be sequential and any parallel executions should be treated as duplicates. The task state that checks for current running executions can be a Lambda function similar to the following:

import boto3

client = boto3.client('stepfunctions')

def lambda_handler(event, context):

response = client.list_executions(

stateMachineArn='arn:aws:states:REGION:ACCOUNTID:stateMachine:LambdaSubMinute',

statusFilter='RUNNING'

)

return {

'alreadyRunning': len(response['executions']) > 0

}

About the Author

Emanuele Menga, Cloud Support Engineer

Supply-Chain Security

2018-05-10 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/supply-chain_se.html

Earlier this month, the Pentagon stopped selling phones made by the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei on military bases because they might be used to spy on their users.

It’s a legitimate fear, and perhaps a prudent action. But it’s just one instance of the much larger issue of securing our supply chains.

All of our computerized systems are deeply international, and we have no choice but to trust the companies and governments that touch those systems. And while we can ban a few specific products, services or companies, no country can isolate itself from potential foreign interference.

In this specific case, the Pentagon is concerned that the Chinese government demanded that ZTE and Huawei add “backdoors” to their phones that could be surreptitiously turned on by government spies or cause them to fail during some future political conflict. This tampering is possible because the software in these phones is incredibly complex. It’s relatively easy for programmers to hide these capabilities, and correspondingly difficult to detect them.

This isn’t the first time the United States has taken action against foreign software suspected to contain hidden features that can be used against us. Last December, President Trump signed into law a bill banning software from the Russian company Kaspersky from being used within the US government. In 2012, the focus was on Chinese-made Internet routers. Then, the House Intelligence Committee concluded: “Based on available classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems.”

Nor is the United States the only country worried about these threats. In 2014, China reportedly banned antivirus products from both Kaspersky and the US company Symantec, based on similar fears. In 2017, the Indian government identified 42 smartphone apps that China subverted. Back in 1997, the Israeli company Check Point was dogged by rumors that its government added backdoors into its products; other of that country’s tech companies have been suspected of the same thing. Even al-Qaeda was concerned; ten years ago, a sympathizer released the encryption software Mujahedeen Secrets, claimed to be free of Western influence and backdoors. If a country doesn’t trust another country, then it can’t trust that country’s computer products.

But this trust isn’t limited to the country where the company is based. We have to trust the country where the software is written — and the countries where all the components are manufactured. In 2016, researchers discovered that many different models of cheap Android phones were sending information back to China. The phones might be American-made, but the software was from China. In 2016, researchers demonstrated an even more devious technique, where a backdoor could be added at the computer chip level in the factory that made the chips without the knowledge of, and undetectable by, the engineers who designed the chips in the first place. Pretty much every US technology company manufactures its hardware in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Taiwan.

We also have to trust the programmers. Today’s large software programs are written by teams of hundreds of programmers scattered around the globe. Backdoors, put there by we-have-no-idea-who, have been discovered in Juniper firewalls and D-Link routers, both of which are US companies. In 2003, someone almost slipped a very clever backdoor into Linux. Think of how many countries’ citizens are writing software for Apple or Microsoft or Google.

We can go even farther down the rabbit hole. We have to trust the distribution systems for our hardware and software. Documents disclosed by Edward Snowden showed the National Security Agency installing backdoors into Cisco routers being shipped to the Syrian telephone company. There are fake apps in the Google Play store that eavesdrop on you. Russian hackers subverted the update mechanism of a popular brand of Ukrainian accounting software to spread the NotPetya malware.

In 2017, researchers demonstrated that a smartphone can be subverted by installing a malicious replacement screen.

I could go on. Supply-chain security is an incredibly complex problem. US-only design and manufacturing isn’t an option; the tech world is far too internationally interdependent for that. We can’t trust anyone, yet we have no choice but to trust everyone. Our phones, computers, software and cloud systems are touched by citizens of dozens of different countries, any one of whom could subvert them at the demand of their government. And just as Russia is penetrating the US power grid so they have that capability in the event of hostilities, many countries are almost certainly doing the same thing at the consumer level.

We don’t know whether the risk of Huawei and ZTE equipment is great enough to warrant the ban. We don’t know what classified intelligence the United States has, and what it implies. But we do know that this is just a minor fix for a much larger problem. It’s doubtful that this ban will have any real effect. Members of the military, and everyone else, can still buy the phones. They just can’t buy them on US military bases. And while the US might block the occasional merger or acquisition, or ban the occasional hardware or software product, we’re largely ignoring that larger issue. Solving it borders on somewhere between incredibly expensive and realistically impossible.

Perhaps someday, global norms and international treaties will render this sort of device-level tampering off-limits. But until then, all we can do is hope that this particular arms race doesn’t get too far out of control.

This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post.

Use AWS Glue to run ETL jobs against non-native JDBC data sources

2018-05-10 Kapil Shardha

Post Syndicated from Kapil Shardha original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/use-aws-glue-to-run-etl-jobs-against-non-native-jdbc-data-sources/

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easier to prepare and load your data for analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks on the AWS Management Console. Just point AWS Glue to your data store. AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata (for example, a table definition and schema) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

AWS Glue has native connectors to data sources using JDBC drivers, either on AWS or elsewhere, as long as there is IP connectivity. In this post, we demonstrate how to connect to data sources that are not natively supported in AWS Glue today. We walk through connecting to and running ETL jobs against two such data sources, IBM DB2 and SAP Sybase. However, you can use the same process with any other JDBC-accessible database.

AWS Glue data sources

AWS Glue natively supports the following data stores by using the JDBC protocol:

Publicly accessible databases
- Amazon Aurora
- MariaDB
- Microsoft SQL Server
- MySQL
- Oracle
- PostgreSQL

For more information, see Adding a Connection to Your Data Store in the AWS Glue Developer Guide.

One of the fastest growing architectures deployed on AWS is the data lake. The ETL processes that are used to ingest, clean, transform, and structure data are critically important for this architecture. Having the flexibility to interoperate with a broader range of database engines allows for a quicker adoption of the data lake architecture.

For data sources that AWS Glue doesn’t natively support, such as IBM DB2, Pivotal Greenplum, SAP Sybase, or any other relational database management system (RDBMS), you can import custom database connectors from Amazon S3 into AWS Glue jobs. In this case, the connection to the data source must be made from the AWS Glue script to extract the data, rather than using AWS Glue connections. To learn more, see Providing Your Own Custom Scripts in the AWS Glue Developer Guide.

Setting up an ETL job for an IBM DB2 data source

The first example demonstrates how to connect the AWS Glue ETL job to an IBM DB2 instance, transform the data from the source, and store it in Apache Parquet format in Amazon S3. To successfully create the ETL job using an external JDBC driver, you must define the following:

The S3 location of the job script
The S3 location of the temporary directory
The S3 location of the JDBC driver
The S3 location of the Parquet data (output)
The IAM role for the job

By default, AWS Glue suggests bucket names for the scripts and the temporary directory using the following format:

s3://aws-glue-scripts-<ACCOUNT_ID>-<REGION>/<USER>
s3://aws-glue-temporary-<ACCOUNT_ID>-<REGION>/<USER>

For JDBC drivers, you can create a similar location:

s3://aws-glue-jdbc-drivers-<ACCOUNT_ID>-<REGION>/<USER>

Also for the Parquet data (output), you can create a similar location:

s3://aws-glue-data-output-<ACCOUNT_ID>-<REGION>/<USER>

Keep in mind that having the AWS Glue job and S3 buckets in the same AWS Region helps save on cross-Region data transfer fees. For this post, we will work in the US East (Ohio) Region (us-east-2).

Creating the IAM role

The next step is to set up the IAM role that the ETL job will use:

On the IAM console, choose Roles in the left navigation pane.
Choose Create role. The role type of trusted entity must be an AWS service, specifically AWS Glue.

Choose Next: Permissions.
Search for the AWSGlueServiceRole policy, and select it.

Search again, now for the SecretsManagerReadWrite This policy allows the AWS Glue job to access database credentials that are stored in AWS Secrets Manager.

CAUTION: This policy is open and is being used for testing purposes only. You should create a custom policy to narrow the access just to the secrets that you want to use in the ETL job.

Select this policy, and choose Next: Review.
Give your role a name, for example, GluePermissions, and confirm that both policies were selected.

Choose Create role.

Now that you have created the IAM role, it’s time to upload the JDBC driver to the defined location in Amazon S3. For this example, we will use the DB2 driver, which is available on the IBM Support site.

Storing database credentials

It is a best practice to store database credentials in a safe store. In this case, we use AWS Secrets Manager to securely store credentials. Follow these steps to create those credentials:

Open the console, and search for Secrets Manager.
In the AWS Secrets Manager console, choose Store a new secret.
Under Select a secret type, choose Other type of secrets.
In the Secret key/value, set one row for each of the following parameters:
- db_username
- db_password
- db_url (for example, jdbc:db2://10.10.12.12:50000/SAMPLE)
- db_table
- driver_name (ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver)
- output_bucket: (for example, aws-glue-data-output-1234567890-us-east-2/User)
Choose Next.
For Secret name, use DB2_Database_Connection_Info.
Choose Next.
Keep the Disable automatic rotation check box selected.
Choose Next.
Choose Store.

Adding a job in AWS Glue

The next step is to author the AWS Glue job, following these steps:

In the AWS Management Console, search for AWS Glue.

In the navigation pane on the left, choose Jobs under the ETL
Choose Add job.

Fill in the basic Job properties:
Give the job a name (for example, db2-job).
Choose the IAM role that you created previously (GluePermissions).
For This job runs, choose A new script to be authored by you.
For ETL language, choose Python.

In the Script libraries and job parameters section, choose the location of your JDBC driver for Dependent jars path.

Choose Next.
On the Connections page, choose Next
On the summary page, choose Save job and edit script. This creates the job and opens the script editor.

In the editor, replace the existing code with the following script. Important: Line 47 of the script corresponds to the mapping of the fields in the source table to the destination, dropping of the null fields to save space in the Parquet destination, and finally writing to Amazon S3 in Parquet format.

import sys
import boto3
import json
from awsglue.transforms import *
from awsglue.utils import getResolvedOptions
from pyspark.context import SparkContext
from awsglue.context import GlueContext
from awsglue.dynamicframe import DynamicFrame
from awsglue.job import Job


## @params: [JOB_NAME]
args = getResolvedOptions(sys.argv, ['JOB_NAME'])

sc = SparkContext()
glueContext = GlueContext(sc)
spark = glueContext.spark_session
job = Job(glueContext)
job.init(args['JOB_NAME'], args)

# Getting DB credentials from Secrets Manager
client = boto3.client("secretsmanager", region_name="us-east-2")

get_secret_value_response = client.get_secret_value(
        SecretId="DB2_Database_Connection_Info"
)

secret = get_secret_value_response['SecretString']
secret = json.loads(secret)

db_username = secret.get('db_username')
db_password = secret.get('db_password')
db_url = secret.get('db_url')
table_name = secret.get('db_table')
jdbc_driver_name = secret.get('driver_name')
s3_output = "s3://" + secret.get('output_bucket') + "/" + table_name

# Connecting to the source
df = glueContext.read.format("jdbc").option("driver", jdbc_driver_name).option("url", db_url).option("dbtable", table_name).option("user", db_username).option("password", db_password).load()

df.printSchema()
print df.count()

datasource0 = DynamicFrame.fromDF(df, glueContext, "datasource0")

# Defining mapping for the transformation
applymapping1 = ApplyMapping.apply(frame = datasource0, mappings = [("EMPNO", "string", "EMPNO", "string"), ("FIRSTNME", "string", "FIRSTNME", "string"), ("MIDINIT", "string", "MIDINIT", "string"), ("LASTNAME", "string", "LASTNAME", "string"), ("WORKDEPT", "string", "WORKDEPT", "string"), ("PHONENO", "string", "PHONENO", "string"), ("HIREDATE", "date", "HIREDATE", "date"), ("JOB", "string", "JOB", "string"), ("EDLEVEL", "integer", "EDLEVEL", "integer"), ("SEX", "string", "SEX", "string"), ("BIRTHDATE", "date", "BIRTHDATE", "date"), ("SALARY", "double", "SALARY", "double"), ("BONUS", "double", "BONUS", "double"), ("COMM", "double", "COMM", "double")], transformation_ctx = "applymapping1")
resolvechoice2 = ResolveChoice.apply(frame = applymapping1, choice = "make_struct", transformation_ctx = "resolvechoice2")
dropnullfields3 = DropNullFields.apply(frame = resolvechoice2, transformation_ctx = "dropnullfields3")

# Writing to destination
datasink4 = glueContext.write_dynamic_frame.from_options(frame = dropnullfields3, connection_type = "s3", connection_options = {"path": s3_output}, format = "parquet", transformation_ctx = "datasink4")

job.commit()

Choose Save.
Choose the black X on the right side of the screen to close the editor.

Running the ETL job

Now that you have created the job, the next step is to execute it as follows:

On the Jobs page, select your new job. On the Action menu, choose Run job, and confirm that you want to run the job. Wait a few moments as it finishes the execution.

After the job shows as Succeeded, choose Logs to read the output of the job.

In the output of the job, you will find the result of executing the df.printSchema() and the message with the df.count().

Also, if you go to your output bucket in S3, you will find the Parquet result of the ETL job.

Using AWS Glue, you have created an ETL job that connects to an existing database using an external JDBC driver. It enables you to execute any transformation that you need.

Setting up an ETL job for an SAP Sybase data source

In this section, we describe how to create an AWS Glue ETL job against an SAP Sybase data source. The process mentioned in the previous section works for a Sybase data source with a few changes required in the job:

While creating the job, choose the correct jar for the JDBC dependency.
In the script, change the reference to the secret to be used from AWS Secrets Manager:

get_secret_value_response = client.get_secret_value(
        SecretId="Sybase_Database_Connection_Info"
)

And change the mapping of the fields in line 47, as follows:

applymapping1 = ApplyMapping.apply(frame = datasource0, mappings = [("au_id", "string", "au_id", "string"), ("au_lname", "string", "au_lname", "string"), ("au_fname", "string", "au_fname", "string"), ("phone", "string", "phone", "string"), ("address", "string", "address", "string"), ("city", "string", "city", "string"), ("state", "string", "state", "string"), ("country", "string", "country", "string"), ("postalcode", "string", "postalcode", "string")], transformation_ctx = "applymapping1")

After you successfully execute the new ETL job, the output contains the same type of information that was generated with the DB2 data source.

Note that each of these JDBC drivers has its own nuances and different licensing terms that you should be aware of before using them.

Maximizing JDBC read parallelism

Something to keep in mind while working with big data sources is the memory consumption. In some cases, “Out of Memory” errors are generated when all the data is read into a single executor. One approach to optimize this is to rely on the parallelism on read that you can implement with Apache Spark and AWS Glue. To learn more, see the Apache Spark SQL module.

You can use the following options:

partitionColumn: The name of an integer column that is used for partitioning.
lowerBound: The minimum value of partitionColumn that is used to decide partition stride.
upperBound: The maximum value of partitionColumn that is used to decide partition stride.
numPartitions: The number of partitions. This, along with lowerBound (inclusive) and upperBound (exclusive), form partition strides for generated WHERE clause expressions used to split the partitionColumn When unset, this defaults to SparkContext.defaultParallelism.
Those options specify the parallelism of the table read. lowerBound and upperBound decide the partition stride, but they don’t filter the rows in the table. Therefore, Spark partitions and returns all rows in the table. For example:

df = glueContext.read.format("jdbc").option("driver", jdbc_driver_name).option("url", db_url).option("dbtable", table_name).option("user", db_username).option("password", db_password).option("partitionColumn", <column_name>).option("lowerBound", 1).option("upperBound", 100).option("numPartitions", 2).load()

It’s important to be careful with the number of partitions because too many partitions could also result in Spark crashing your external database systems.

Conclusion

Using the process described in this post, you can connect to and run AWS Glue ETL jobs against any data source that can be reached using a JDBC driver. This includes new generations of common analytical databases like Greenplum and others.

You can improve the query efficiency of these datasets by using partitioning and pushdown predicates. For more information, see Managing Partitions for ETL Output in AWS Glue. This technique opens the door to moving data and feeding data lakes in hybrid environments.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Work with partitioned data in AWS Glue.

About the Authors

Kapil Shardha is a Technical Account Manager and supports enterprise customers with their AWS adoption. He has background in infrastructure automation and DevOps.

William Torrealba is an AWS Solutions Architect supporting customers with their AWS adoption. He has background in Application Development, High Available Distributed Systems, Automation, and DevOps.

YouTube Won’t Put Up With Blatant Piracy Tutorials Forever

2018-05-06 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-wont-put-up-with-blatant-piracy-tutorials-forever-180506/

Once upon a time, Internet users’ voices would be heard in limited circles, on platforms such as Usenet or other niche platforms.

Then, with the rise of forum platforms such as phpBB in 2000 and Invision Power Board in 2002, thriving communities could gather in public to discuss endless specialist topics, including file-sharing of course.

When dedicated piracy forums began to gain traction, it was pretty much a free-for-all. People discussed obtaining free content absolutely openly. Nothing was taboo and no one considered that there would be any repercussions. As such, moderation was limited to keeping troublemakers in check.

As the years progressed and lawsuits against both sites and services became more commonplace, most sites that weren’t actually serving illegal content began to consider their positions. Run by hobbyists, most didn’t want the hassle of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, so links to pirate content began to diminish and the more overt piracy tutorials began to disappear underground.

Those that remained in plain sight became much more considered. Tutorials on how to pirate specific Hollywood blockbusters were no longer needed, a plain general tutorial would suffice. And, as communities matured and took time to understand the implications of their actions, those without political motivations realized that drawing attention to potential criminality was neither required nor necessary.

Then YouTube and social media happened and almost overnight, no one was in charge and anyone could say whatever they liked.

In this new reality, there were no irritating moderator-type figures removing links to this and that, and nobody warning people against breaking rules that suddenly didn’t exist anymore. In essence, previously tight-knit and street-wise file-sharing and piracy communities not only became fragmented, but also chaotic.

This meant that anyone could become a leader and in some cases, this was the utopia that many had hoped for. Not only couldn’t the record labels or Hollywood tell people what to do anymore, discussion site operators couldn’t either. For those who didn’t abuse the power and for those who knew no better, this was a much-needed breath of fresh air. But, like all good things, it was unlikely to last forever.

Where most file-sharing of yesterday was carried out by hobbyist enthusiasts, many of today’s pirates are far more casual. They’re just as thirsty for content, but they don’t want to spend hours hunting for it. They want it all on a plate, at the flick of a switch, delivered to their TV with a minimum of hassle.

With online discussions increasingly seen as laborious and old-fashioned, many mainstream pirates have turned to easy-to-consume videos. In support of their Kodi media player habits, YouTube has become the educational platform of choice for millions.

As a result, there is now a long line of self-declared Kodi piracy specialists scooping up millions of views on YouTube. Their videos – which in many cases are thinly veiled advertisements for third party addons, Kodi ‘builds’, illegal IPTV services, and obscure Android APKs – are now the main way for a new generation to obtain direct advice on pirating.

Many of the videos are incredibly blatant, like the past 15 years of litigation never happened. All the lessons learned by the phpBB board operators of yesteryear, of how to achieve their goals of sharing information without getting shut down, have been long forgotten. In their place, a barrage of daily videos designed to generate clicks and affiliate revenue, no matter what the cost, no matter what the risk.

It’s pretty clear that these videos are at least partly responsible for the phenomenal uptick in Kodi and Android-based piracy over the past few years. In that respect, many lovers of free content will be eternally grateful for the service they’ve provided. But like many piracy movements over the years, people shouldn’t get too attached to them, at least in their current form.

Thanks to the devil-may-care approach of many influential YouTubers, it won’t be long before a whole new set of moderators begin flexing their muscles. While your average phpBB moderator could be reasoned with in order to get a second chance, a determined and largely faceless YouTube will eject offenders without so much as a clear explanation.

When this happens (and it’s only a question of time given the growing blatancy of many tutorials) YouTubers will not only lose their voices but their revenue streams too. While YouTube’s partner programs bring in some welcome cash, the profitable affiliate schemes touted on these channels for external products will also be under threat.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in this drama-waiting-to-happen is that many of the most popular YouTubers can hardly be considered young and naive. While some are of more tender years, most – with their undoubted skill, knowledge and work ethic – should know better for their 30 or 40 years on this planet. Yet not only do they make their names public, they feature their faces heavily in their videos too.

Still, it’s likely that it will take some big YouTube accounts to fall before YouTubers respond by shaving the sharp edges off their blatant promotion of illegal activity. And there’s little doubt that those advertising products (which is most of them) will have to do so sooner rather than later.

Just this week, YouTube made it clear that it won’t tolerate people making money from the promotion of illegal activities.

“YouTube creators may include paid endorsements as part of their content only if the product or service they are endorsing complies with our advertising policies,” YouTube told the BBC.

“We will be working with creators going forward so they better understand that in video promotions [they] must not promote dishonest activity.”

That being said, like many other players in the piracy and file-sharing space over the past 18 years, YouTubers will eventually begin to learn that not only can the smart survive, they can flourish too.

Sure, there will be people out there who’ll protest that free speech allows citizens to express themselves in a manner of their choosing. But try PM’ing that to YouTube in response to a strike, and see how that fares.

When they say you’re done, the road back is a long one.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

3D-printed speakers from the Technical University of Denmark

2018-05-03 Alex Bate

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/technical-university-denmark-speakers/

Students taking Design of Mechatronics at the Technical University of Denmark have created some seriously elegant and striking Raspberry Pi speakers. Their builds are part of a project asking them to “explore, design and build a 3D printed speaker, around readily available electronics and components”.

The students have been uploading their designs, incorporating Raspberry Pis and HiFiBerry HATs, to Thingiverse throughout April. The task is a collaboration with luxury brand Bang & Olufsen’s Create initiative, and the results wouldn’t look out of place in a high-end showroom; I’d happily take any of these home.

The Sphere

Søren Qvist’s wall-mounted kitchen sphere uses 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, along with the HiFiBerry HAT and B&O speakers to create a sleek-looking design.

Hex One

Otto Ømann’s group have designed the Hex One – a work-in-progress wireless 360° speaker. A particular objective for their project is to create a speaker using as many 3D-printed parts as possible.

Portable B&O-Create Speaker

“The design is supposed to resemble that of a B&O speaker, and from a handful of categories we chose to create a portable and wearable speaker,” explain Gustav Larsen and his team.

Desktop Loudspeaker

Oliver Repholtz Behrens and team have housed a Raspberry Pi and HiFiBerry HAT inside this this stylish airplay speaker. You can follow their design progress on their team blog.

B&O TILE

Tue Thomsen’s six-person team Mechatastic have produced the B&O TILE. “The speaker consists of four 3D-printed cabinet and top parts, where the top should be covered by fabric,” they explain. “The speaker insides consists of laser-cut wood to hold the tweeter and driver and encase the Raspberry Pi.”

The team aimed to design a speaker that would be at home in a kitchen. With a removable upper casing allowing for a choice of colour, the TILE can be customised to fit particular tastes and colour schemes.

Build your own speakers with Raspberry Pis

Raspberry Pi’s onboard audio jack, along with third-party HATs such as the HiFiBerry and Pimoroni Speaker pHAT, make speaker design and fabrication with the Pi an interesting alternative to pre-made tech. These builds don’t tend to be technically complex, and they provide some lovely examples of tech-based projects that reflect makers’ own particular aesthetic style.

If you have access to a 3D printer or a laser cutter, perhaps at a nearby maker space, then those can be excellent resources, but fancy kit isn’t a requirement. Basic joinery and crafting with card or paper are just a couple of ways you can build things that are all your own, using familiar tools and materials. We think more people would enjoy getting hands-on with this sort of thing if they gave it a whirl, and we publish a free magazine to help.

Raspberry Pi Zero AirPlay Speaker

Looking for a new project to build around the Raspberry Pi Zero, I came across the pHAT DAC from Pimoroni. This little add-on board adds audio playback capabilities to the Pi Zero. Because the pHAT uses the GPIO pins, the USB OTG port remains available for a wifi dongle.

This video by Frederick Vandenbosch is a great example of building AirPlay speakers using a Pi and HAT, and a quick search will find you lots more relevant tutorials and ideas.

Have you built your own? Share your speaker-based Pi builds with us in the comments.

The post 3D-printed speakers from the Technical University of Denmark appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

How to encrypt and sign DynamoDB data in your application

2018-05-03 June Blender

Post Syndicated from June Blender original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-encrypt-and-sign-dynamodb-data-in-your-application/

If you store sensitive or confidential data in Amazon DynamoDB, you might want to encrypt that data as close as possible to its origin so your data is protected throughout its lifecycle.

You can use the DynamoDB Encryption Client to protect your table data before you send it to DynamoDB. Encrypting your sensitive data in transit and at rest helps assure that your plaintext data isn’t available to any third party, including AWS.

You don’t need to be a cryptography expert to use the DynamoDB Encryption Client. The encryption and signing elements are designed to work with your existing DynamoDB applications. After you create and configure the required components, the DynamoDB Encryption Client transparently encrypts and signs your table items when you call PutItem and verifies and decrypts them when you call GetItem.

You can create your own custom components, or use the basic implementations that are included in the library. We’ve made sure that the classes that we provide implement strong and secure cryptography.

You can use the DynamoDB Encryption Client with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) or AWS CloudHSM, but the library doesn’t require AWS or any AWS service.

The DynamoDB Encryption Client is now available in Python, as well as Java. All supported language implementations are interoperable. For example, you can encrypt table data with the Python library and decrypt it with the Java library.

The DynamoDB Encryption Client is an open-source project. We hope that you will join us in developing the libraries and writing great documentation.

How it works

The DynamoDB Encryption Client processes one table item at a time. First, it encrypts the values (but not the names) of attributes that you specify. Then, it calculates a signature over the attributes that you specify, so you can detect unauthorized changes to the item as a whole, including adding or deleting attributes, or substituting one encrypted value for another.

However, attribute names, and the names and values in the primary key (the partition key and sort key, if one is provided) must remain in plaintext to make the item discoverable. They’re included in the signature by default.

Important: Do not put any sensitive data in the table name, attribute names, the names and values of the primary key attributes, or any attribute values that you tell the client not to encrypt.

How to use it

I’ll demonstrate how to use the DynamoDB Encryption Client in Python with a simple example. I’ll encrypt and sign one table item, and then add it to an existing table. This example uses a test item with arbitrary data, but you can use a similar procedure to protect a table item that contains highly sensitive data, such as a customer’s personal information.

You can see the complete example in the examples directory of the aws-dynamodb-encryption-python repository.

Step 1: Create a table

I’ll start by creating a DynamoDB table resource that represents an existing table. If you use the code, be sure to supply a valid table name.


# Create a DynamoDB table
table = boto3.resource('dynamodb').Table(table_name)

Step 2: Create a cryptographic materials provider

Next, create an instance of a cryptographic materials provider (CMP). The CMP is the component that gathers the encryption and signing keys that are used to encrypt and sign your table items. The CMP also determines the encryption algorithms that are used and whether you create unique keys for every item or reuse them.

The DynamoDB Encryption Client includes several CMPs and you can create your own. And, if you’re in doubt, we help you to choose a CMP that fits your application and its security requirements.

In this example, I’ll use the Direct KMS Provider, which gets its cryptographic material from the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). The encryption and signing keys that you use are protected by a customer master key in your AWS account that never leaves AWS KMS unencrypted.

To create a Direct KMS Provider, you specify an AWS KMS customer master key. Be sure to replace the fictitious customer master key ID (the value of aws-cmk-id) in this example with a valid one.


# Create a Direct KMS provider. Pass in a valid KMS customer master key.
aws_cmk_id = '1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab'
aws_kms_cmp = AwsKmsCryptographicMaterialsProvider(key_id=aws_cmk_id)

Step 3: Create an attribute actions object

An attribute actions object tells the DynamoDB Encryption Client which item attribute values to encrypt and which attributes to include in the signature. The options are: ENCRYPT_AND_SIGN, SIGN_ONLY, and DO_NOTHING.

This sample attribute action encrypts and signs all attributes values except for the value of the test attribute; that attribute is neither encrypted nor included in the signature.


# Tell the encrypted table to encrypt and sign all attributes except one.
actions = AttributeActions(
    default_action=CryptoAction.ENCRYPT_AND_SIGN,
    attribute_actions={
        'test': CryptoAction.DO_NOTHING
    }
)

If you’re using a helper class, such as the EncryptedTable class that I use in the next step, you can’t specify an attribute action for the primary key. The helper classes make sure that the primary key is signed, but never encrypted (SIGN_ONLY).

Step 4: Create an encrypted table

Now I can use the original table object, along with the materials provider and attribute actions, to create an encrypted table.


# Use these objects to create an encrypted table resource.
encrypted_table = EncryptedTable(
    table=table,
    materials_provider=aws_kms_cmp,
    attribute_actions=actions
)

In this example, I’m using the EncryptedTable helper class, which adds encryption features to the DynamoDB Table class in the AWS SDK for Python (Boto 3). The DynamoDB Encryption Client in Python also includes EncryptedClient and EncryptedResource helper classes.

The DynamoDB Encryption Client helper classes call the DescribeTable operation to find the primary key. The application that runs the code must have permission to call the operation.

We’re done configuring the client. Now, we can encrypt, sign, verify, and decrypt table items.

Step 5: Add an item to the table

Let’s add an item to the DynamoDB table.


plaintext_item = {
    'partition_key': 'key1',
    'sort_key': 'key2'
    'example': 'data',
    'numbers': 99,
    'binary': Binary(b'\x00\x01\x02'),
    'test': 'test-value'
}

When we call the PutItem operation, the item is transparently encrypted and signed, except for the primary key, which is signed, but not encrypted, and the test attribute, which is ignored.


encrypted_table.put_item(Item=plaintext_item)

And, when we call the GetItem operation, the item is transparently verified and decrypted.


decrypted_item = encrypted_table.get_item(Key=partition_key)['Item']

To view the encrypted item, call the GetItem operation on the original table object, instead of the encrypted_table object. It gets the item from the DynamoDB table without verifying and decrypting it.


encrypted_item = table.get_item(Key=partition_key)['Item']

Here’s an excerpt of the output that displays the encrypted item:

Figure 1: Output that displays the encrypted item

Client-side or server-side encryption?

The DynamoDB Encryption Client is designed for client-side encryption, where you encrypt your data before you send it to DynamoDB.

But, you have other options. DynamoDB supports encryption at rest, a server-side encryption option that transparently encrypts the data in your table whenever DynamoDB saves the table to disk. You can even use both the DynamoDB Encryption Client and encryption at rest together. The encrypted and signed items that the client generates are standard table items that have binary data in their attribute values. Your choice depends on the sensitivity of your data and the security requirements of your application.

Although the Java and Python versions of the DynamoDB Encryption Client are fully compatible, the DynamoDB Encryption Client isn’t compatible with other client-side encryption libraries, such as the AWS Encryption SDK or the S3 Encryption Client. You can’t encrypt data with one library and decrypt it with another. For data that you store in DynamoDB, we recommend the DynamoDB Encryption Client.

Encryption is crucial

Using tools like the DynamoDB Encryption Client helps you to protect your table data and comply with the security requirements for your application. We hope that you use the client and join us in developing it on GitHub.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on the AWS Key Management Service forum or contact AWS Support.

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How to Eliminate the Need for Hardcoded AWS Credentials in Devices by Using the AWS IoT Credentials Provider

2018-04-30 Ramkishore Bhattacharyya

Post Syndicated from Ramkishore Bhattacharyya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-eliminate-the-need-for-hardcoded-aws-credentials-in-devices-by-using-the-aws-iot-credentials-provider/

The Internet of Things (IoT) has precipitated to an influx of connected devices and data that can be mined to gain useful business insights. If you own an IoT device, you might want the data to be uploaded seamlessly from your connected devices to the cloud so that you can make use of cloud storage and the processing power to perform sophisticated analysis of data. To upload the data to the AWS Cloud, devices must pass authentication and authorization checks performed by the respective AWS services. The standard way of authenticating AWS requests is the Signature Version 4 algorithm that requires the caller to have an access key ID and secret access key. Consequently, you need to hardcode the access key ID and the secret access key on your devices. Alternatively, you can use the built-in X.509 certificate as the unique device identity to authenticate AWS requests.

AWS IoT has introduced the credentials provider feature that allows a caller to authenticate AWS requests by having an X.509 certificate. The credentials provider authenticates a caller using an X.509 certificate, and vends a temporary, limited-privilege security token. The token can be used to sign and authenticate any AWS request. Thus, the credentials provider relieves you from having to manage and periodically refresh the access key ID and secret access key remotely on your devices.

In the process of retrieving a security token, you use AWS IoT to create a thing (a representation of a specific device or logical entity), register a certificate, and create AWS IoT policies. You also configure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role and attach appropriate IAM policies to the role so that the credentials provider can assume the role on your behalf. You also make an HTTP-over-Transport Layer Security (TLS) mutual authentication request to the credentials provider that uses your preconfigured thing, certificate, policies, and IAM role to authenticate and authorize the request, and obtain a security token on your behalf. You can then use the token to sign any AWS request using Signature Version 4.

In this blog post, I explain the AWS IoT credentials provider design and then demonstrate the end-to-end process of retrieving a security token from AWS IoT and using the token to write a temperature and humidity record to a specific Amazon DynamoDB table.

Note: This post assumes you are familiar with AWS IoT and IAM to perform steps using the AWS CLI and OpenSSL. Make sure you are running the latest version of the AWS CLI.

Overview of the credentials provider workflow

The following numbered diagram illustrates the credentials provider workflow. The diagram is followed by explanations of the steps.

To explain the steps of the workflow as illustrated in the preceding diagram:

The AWS IoT device uses the AWS SDK or custom client to make an HTTPS request to the credentials provider for a security token. The request includes the device X.509 certificate for authentication.
The credentials provider forwards the request to the AWS IoT authentication and authorization module to verify the certificate and the permission to request the security token.
If the certificate is valid and has permission to request a security token, the AWS IoT authentication and authorization module returns success. Otherwise, it returns failure, which goes back to the device with the appropriate exception.
On successful validation, the credentials provider invokes the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) to assume the preconfigured IAM role.
If assuming the role succeeds, AWS STS returns a temporary, limited-privilege security token to the credentials provider.
The credentials provider returns the security token to the device.
The AWS SDK on the device uses the security token to sign an AWS request with AWS Signature Version 4.
The requested service invokes IAM to validate the signature and authorize the request against access policies attached to the preconfigured IAM role.
If IAM validates the signature successfully and authorizes the request, the request goes through.

In another solution, you could configure an AWS Lambda rule that ingests your device data and sends it to another AWS service. However, in applications that require the uploading of large files such as videos or aggregated telemetry to the AWS Cloud, you may want your devices to be able to authenticate and send data directly to the AWS service of your choice. The credentials provider enables you to do that.

Outline of the steps to retrieve and use security token

Perform the following steps as part of this solution:

Create an AWS IoT thing: Start by creating a thing that corresponds to your home thermostat in the AWS IoT thing registry database. This allows you to authenticate the request as a thing and use thing attributes as policy variables in AWS IoT and IAM policies.
Register a certificate: Create and register a certificate with AWS IoT, and attach it to the thing for successful device authentication.
Create and configure an IAM role: Create an IAM role to be assumed by the service on behalf of your device. I illustrate how to configure a trust policy and an access policy so that AWS IoT has permission to assume the role, and the token has necessary permission to make requests to DynamoDB.
Create a role alias: Create a role alias in AWS IoT. A role alias is an alternate data model pointing to an IAM role. The credentials provider request must include a role alias name to indicate which IAM role to assume for obtaining a security token from AWS STS. You may update the role alias on the server to point to a different IAM role and thus make your device obtain a security token with different permissions.
Attach a policy: Create an authorization policy with AWS IoT and attach it to the certificate to control which device can assume which role aliases.
Request a security token: Make an HTTPS request to the credentials provider and retrieve a security token and use it to sign a DynamoDB request with Signature Version 4.
Use the security token to sign a request: Use the retrieved token to sign a request to DynamoDB and successfully write a temperature and humidity record from your home thermostat in a specific table. Thus, starting with an X.509 certificate on your home thermostat, you can successfully upload your thermostat record to DynamoDB and use it for further analysis. Before the availability of the credentials provider, you could not do this.

Deploy the solution

1. Create an AWS IoT thing

Register your home thermostat in the AWS IoT thing registry database by creating a thing type and a thing. You can use the AWS CLI with the following command to create a thing type. The thing type allows you to store description and configuration information that is common to a set of things.

aws iot create-thing-type --thing-type-name Thermostat

The following is sample output of the create-thing-type command. It contains the thingTypeName, thingTypeId, and thingTypeArn.

{
    "thingTypeName": "Thermostat", 
    "thingTypeId": "11f6d708-919e-479d-8a37-790ce48204d8",
    "thingTypeArn": "arn:aws:iot:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:thingtype/Thermostat"
}

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to create a thing.

aws iot create-thing --thing-name MyHomeThermostat --thing-type-name Thermostat --attribute-payload "{\"attributes\": {\"Owner\":\"Alice\"}}"

The following is sample output of the create-thing command. It contains the thingArn, thingName, and thingId.

{
    "thingArn": "arn:aws:iot:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:thing/MyHomeThermostat", 
    "thingName": "MyHomeThermostat",
    "thingId": "a9b098ac-2ee9-4ba6-aa40-163113eb18d0"
}

2. Register a certificate

Now, you need to have a Certificate Authority (CA) certificate, sign a device certificate using the CA certificate, and register both certificates with AWS IoT before your device can authenticate to AWS IoT. If you do not already have a CA certificate, you can use OpenSSL to create a CA certificate, as described in Use Your Own Certificate. To register your CA certificate with AWS IoT, follow the steps on Registering Your CA Certificate.

You then have to create a device certificate signed by the CA certificate and register it with AWS IoT, which you can do by following the steps on Creating a Device Certificate Using Your CA Certificate. Save the certificate and the corresponding key pair; you will use them when you request a security token later. Also, remember the password you provide when you create the certificate.

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to attach the device certificate to your thing so that you can use thing attributes in policy variables.

aws iot attach-thing-principal --thing-name MyHomeThermostat --principal <certificate-arn>

If the attach-thing-principal command succeeds, the output is empty.

3. Configure an IAM role

Next, configure an IAM role in your AWS account that will be assumed by the credentials provider on behalf of your device. You are required to associate two policies with the role: a trust policy that controls who can assume the role, and an access policy that controls which actions can be performed on which resources by assuming the role.

The following trust policy grants the credentials provider permission to assume the role. Put it in a text document and save the document with the name, trustpolicyforiot.json.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Principal": {"Service": "credentials.iot.amazonaws.com"},
    "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
  }
}

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to create an IAM role with the preceding trust policy.

aws iam create-role --role-name dynamodb-access-role --assume-role-policy-document file://trustpolicyforiot.json

The following is sample output of the create-role command.

{
    "Role": {
        "AssumeRolePolicyDocument": {
            "Version": "2012-10-17", 
            "Statement": {
                "Action": "sts:AssumeRole", 
                "Effect": "Allow", 
                "Principal": {
                    "Service": "credentials.iot.amazonaws.com"
                }
            }
        }, 
        "RoleId": "AROAJWE6XX2DBF3PMINT6", 
        "CreateDate": "2018-01-18T08:40:03.788Z", 
        "RoleName": "dynamodb-access-role", 
        "Path": "/", 
        "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:role/dynamodb-access-role"
    }
}

The following access policy allows DynamoDB operations on the table that has the same name as the thing name that you created in Step 1, MyHomeThermostat, by using credentials-iot:ThingName as a policy variable. I explain after Step 5 about using thing attributes as policy variables. Put the following policy in a text document and save the document with the name, accesspolicyfordynamodb.json.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": [
      "dynamodb:GetItem",
      "dynamodb:BatchGetItem",
      "dynamodb:PutItem",
      "dynamodb:UpdateItem",
      "dynamodb:DeleteItem"
    ],
    "Resource": "arn:aws:dynamodb:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:table/${credentials-iot:ThingName}"
  }
}

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to create the access policy.

aws iam create-policy --policy-name accesspolicyfordynamodb --policy-document file://accesspolicyfordynamodb.json

The following is sample output of the create-policy command.

{
    "Policy": {
        "PolicyName": "accesspolicyfordynamodb", 
        "CreateDate": "2018-01-18T08:47:38.368Z", 
        "AttachmentCount": 0, 
        "IsAttachable": true, 
        "PolicyId": "ANPAJMRTTZH25SEHZOBYG", 
        "DefaultVersionId": "v1", 
        "Path": "/", 
        "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:policy/accesspolicyfordynamodb", 
        "UpdateDate": "2018-01-18T08:47:38.368Z"
    }
}

Finally, run the following command in the AWS CLI to attach the access policy to your role.

aws iam attach-role-policy --role-name dynamodb-access-role --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:policy/accesspolicyfordynamodb

If the attach-role-policy command succeeds, the output is empty.

Configure the PassRole permissions

The IAM role that you have created must be passed to AWS IoT to create a role alias, as described in Step 4. The user who performs the operation requires iam:PassRole permission to authorize this action. You also should add permission for the iam:GetRole action to allow the user to retrieve information about the specified role. Create the following policy to grant iam:PassRole and iam:GetRole permissions. Name this policy, passrolepermission.json.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": [
        "iam:GetRole",
        "iam:PassRole"
    ],
    "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:role/dynamodb-access-role"
  }
}

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to create the policy in your AWS account.

aws iam create-policy --policy-name passrolepermission --policy-document file://passrolepermission.json

The following is sample output of the create-policy command.

{
    "Policy": {
        "PolicyName": "passrolepermission", 
        "CreateDate": "2018-01-18T08:53:35.016Z", 
        "AttachmentCount": 0, 
        "IsAttachable": true, 
        "PolicyId": "ANPAJ6HSQYSBLAUCR5XRC", 
        "DefaultVersionId": "v1", 
        "Path": "/", 
        "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:policy/passrolepermission", 
        "UpdateDate": "2018-01-18T08:53:35.016Z"
    }
}

Now, run the following command to attach the policy to the user.

aws iam attach-user-policy --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:policy/passrolepermission --user-name <user_name>

If the attach-user-policy command succeeds, the output is empty.

4. Create a role alias

Now that you have configured the IAM role, you will create a role alias with AWS IoT. You must provide the following pieces of information when creating a role alias:

RoleAlias: This is the primary key of the role alias data model and hence a mandatory attribute. It is a string; the minimum length is 1 character, and the maximum length is 128 characters.
RoleArn: This is the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the IAM role you have created. This is also a mandatory attribute.
CredentialDurationSeconds: This is an optional attribute specifying the validity (in seconds) of the security token. The minimum value is 900 seconds (15 minutes), and the maximum value is 3,600 seconds (60 minutes); the default value is 3,600 seconds, if not specified.

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to create a role alias. Use the credentials of the user to whom you have given the iam:PassRole permission.

aws iot create-role-alias --role-alias Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias --role-arn arn:aws:iam::<your_aws_account_id>:role/dynamodb-access-role --credential-duration-seconds 3600

The following is sample output of the create-role-alias command. It contains the roleAlias as specified in the request and the roleArn.

{
    "roleAlias": "Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias",
    "roleAliasArn": "arn:aws:iot:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:rolealias/Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias"
}

5. Attach a policy

You created and registered a certificate with AWS IoT earlier for successful authentication of your device. Now, you need to create and attach a policy to the certificate to authorize the request for the security token.

Let’s say you want to allow a thing to get credentials for the role alias, Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias, with thing owner Alice, thing type thermostat, and the thing attached to a principal. The following policy, with thing attributes as policy variables, achieves these requirements. After this step, I explain more about using thing attributes as policy variables. Put the policy in a text document, and save it with the name, alicethermostatpolicy.json.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": "iot:AssumeRoleWithCertificate",
    "Resource": "arn:aws:iot:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:rolealias/${iot:Connection.Thing.ThingTypeName}-dynamodb-access-role-alias",
    "Condition": {
      "StringEquals": {
        "iot:Connection.Thing.Attributes[Owner]": "Alice",
        "iot:Connection.Thing.ThingTypeName": "Thermostat"
      },
      "Bool": {
        "iot:Connection.Thing.IsAttached": "true"
      }
    }
  }
}

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to create the policy in your AWS IoT database.

aws iot create-policy --policy-name AliceThermostatPolicy --policy-document file://alicethermostatpolicy.json

The following is sample output of the create-policy command. It contains the policyName, policyArn, policyDocument, and policyVersionId.

{
    "policyName": "AliceThermostatPolicy", 
    "policyArn": "arn:aws:iot:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:policy/AliceThermostatPolicy", 
    "policyDocument": "{\n  \"Version\": \"2012-10-17\",\n  \"Statement\": {\n    \"Effect\": \"Allow\",\n    \"Action\": \"iot:AssumeRoleWithCertificate\",\n    \"Resource\": \"arn:aws:iot:us-east-1:<your_aws_account_id>:rolealias/${iot:Connection.Thing.ThingTypeName}-dynamodb-access-role-alias\",\n    \"Condition\": {\n      \"StringEquals\": {\n        \"iot:Connection.Thing.Attributes[Owner]\": \"Alice\",\n        \"iot:Connection.Thing.ThingTypeName\": \"Thermostat\"\n      },\n      \"Bool\": {\n        \"iot:Connection.Thing.IsAttached\": \"true\"\n      }\n    }\n  }\n}\n", 
    "policyVersionId": "1"
}

Use the following command to attach the policy with the certificate you registered earlier.

aws iot attach-policy --policy-name AliceThermostatPolicy --target <certificate-arn>

If the attach-policy command succeeds, the output is empty.

You have completed all the necessary steps to request an AWS security token from the credentials provider!

Using thing attributes as policy variables

Before I show how to request a security token, I want to explain more about how to use thing attributes as policy variables and the advantage of using them. As a prerequisite, a device must provide a thing name in the credentials provider request.

Thing substitution variables in AWS IoT policies

AWS IoT Simplified Permission Management allows you to associate a connection with a specific thing, and allow the thing name, thing type, and other thing attributes to be available as substitution variables in AWS IoT policies. You can write a generic AWS IoT policy as in alicethermostatpolicy.json in Step 5, attach it to multiple certificates, and authorize the connection as a thing. For example, you could attach alicethermostatpolicy.json to certificates corresponding to each of the thermostats you have that you want to assume the role alias, Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias, and allow operations only on the table with the name that matches the thing name. For more information, see the full list of thing policy variables.

Thing substitution variables in IAM policies

You also can use the following three substitution variables in the IAM role’s access policy (I used credentials-iot:ThingName in accesspolicyfordynamodb.json in Step 3):

credentials-iot:ThingName
credentials-iot:ThingTypeName
credentials-iot:AwsCertificateId

When the device provides the thing name in the request, the credentials provider fetches these three variables from the database and adds them as context variables to the security token. When the device uses the token to access DynamoDB, the variables in the role’s access policy are replaced with the corresponding values in the security token. Note that you also can use credentials-iot:AwsCertificateId as a policy variable; AWS IoT returns certificateId during registration.

6. Request a security token

Make an HTTPS request to the credentials provider to fetch a security token. You have to supply the following information:

Certificate and key pair: Because this is an HTTP request over TLS mutual authentication, you have to provide the certificate and the corresponding key pair to your client while making the request. Use the same certificate and key pair that you used during certificate registration with AWS IoT.
RoleAlias: Provide the role alias (in this example, Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias) to be assumed in the request.
ThingName: Provide the thing name that you created earlier in the AWS IoT thing registry database. This is passed as a header with the name, x-amzn-iot-thingname. Note that the thing name is mandatory only if you have thing attributes as policy variables in AWS IoT or IAM policies.

Run the following command in the AWS CLI to obtain your AWS account-specific endpoint for the credentials provider. See the DescribeEndpoint API documentation for further details.

aws iot describe-endpoint --endpoint-type iot:CredentialProvider

The following is sample output of the describe-endpoint command. It contains the endpointAddress.

{
    "endpointAddress": "<your_aws_account_specific_prefix>.credentials.iot.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
}

Note that if you are on Mac OS X, you need to export your certificate to a .pfx or .p12 file before you can pass it in the https request. Use OpenSSL with the following command to convert the device certificate from .pem to .pfx format. Remember the password because you will need it subsequently in a curl command.

openssl pkcs12 -export -out deviceCert.pfx -inkey <device-certificate-key-pair> -in <device-certificate-pem>

Now, make an HTTPS request to the credentials provider to fetch a security token. You may use your preferred HTTP client for the request. I use curl in the following examples.

curl --cert deviceCert.pfx --pass <certificate-password> --key <device-certificate-key-pair> -H "x-amzn-iot-thingname: MyHomeThermostat" https://<your_credentials_provider_endpoint>/role-aliases/Thermostat-dynamodb-access-role-alias/credentials

This command returns a security token object that has an accessKeyId, a secretAccessKey, a sessionToken, and an expiration. The following is sample output of the curl command.

{"credentials":{"accessKeyId":"ASIAJAKDHYFVFZCETC4A","secretAccessKey":"6RcojWDX0uWj3hRekTu/kOhXyyfqMU+T5U81LZzf","sessionToken":"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","expiration":"2018-01-18T09:18:06Z"}}

7. Use the security token to sign a request

Create a DynamoDB table called MyHomeThermostat in your AWS account. You will have to choose the hash (partition key) and the range (sort key) while creating the table to uniquely identify a record. Make the hash the serial_number of the thermostat and the range the timestamp of the record. Create a text file with the following JSON to put a temperature and humidity record in the table. Name the file, item.json.

{
  "serial_number": {"S": "123456789"},
  "timestamp": {"S": "2017-11-20T06:00:00.000Z"},
  "current_temp": {"N": "65"},
  "target_temp": {"N": "70"},
  "humidity": {"N": "45"}
}

You can use the accessKeyId, secretAccessKey, and sessionToken retrieved from the output of the curl command to sign a request that writes the temperature and humidity record to the DynamoDB table. Use the following commands to accomplish this.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<access-key-id>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<secret-access-key>
export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=<session-token>
aws dynamodb put-item --table-name MyHomeThermostat --item file://item.json --return-consumed-capacity TOTAL

The following is sample output of the put-item command.

{
    "ConsumedCapacity": {
        "CapacityUnits": 1.0, 
        "TableName": "MyHomeThermostat"
    }
}

Conclusion

In this blog post, I demonstrated how to retrieve a security token by using an X.509 certificate and then writing an item to a DynamoDB table by using the security token. Similarly, you could run applications on surveillance cameras or sensor devices that exchange the X.509 certificate for an AWS security token and use the token to upload video streams to Amazon Kinesis or telemetry data to Amazon CloudWatch.

If you have comments about this blog post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about or issues implementing this solution, start a new thread on the AWS IoT forum.

– Ramkishore

Congratulations to Oracle on MySQL 8.0

2018-04-24 Michael "Monty" Widenius

Post Syndicated from Michael "Monty" Widenius original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2018/04/congratulations-to-oracle-on-mysql-80.html

Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL 8.0. This is good news for database users, as it means Oracle is still developing MySQL.

I decide to celebrate the event by doing a quick test of MySQL 8.0. Here follows a step-by-step description of my first experience with MySQL 8.0.
Note that I did the following without reading the release notes, as is what I have done with every MySQL / MariaDB release up to date; In this case it was not the right thing to do.

I pulled MySQL 8.0 from [email protected]:mysql/mysql-server.git
I was pleasantly surprised that ‘cmake . ; make‘ worked without without any compiler warnings! I even checked the used compiler options and noticed that MySQL was compiled with -Wall + several other warning flags. Good job MySQL team!

I did have a little trouble finding the mysqld binary as Oracle had moved it to ‘runtime_output_directory’; Unexpected, but no big thing.

Now it’s was time to install MySQL 8.0.

I did know that MySQL 8.0 has removed mysql_install_db, so I had to use the mysqld binary directly to install the default databases:
(I have specified datadir=/my/data3 in the /tmp/my.cnf file)

> cd runtime_output_directory
> mkdir /my/data3
> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf –install

2018-04-22T12:38:18.332967Z 1 [ERROR] [MY-011011] [Server] Failed to find valid data directory.
2018-04-22T12:38:18.333109Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010020] [Server] Data Dictionary initialization failed.
2018-04-22T12:38:18.333135Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting

A quick look in mysqld –help –verbose output showed that the right command option is –-initialize. My bad, lets try again,

> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf –initialize

2018-04-22T12:39:31.910509Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010457] [Server] –initialize specified but the data directory has files in it. Aborting.
2018-04-22T12:39:31.910578Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting

Now I used the right options, but still didn’t work.
I took a quick look around:

> ls /my/data3/
binlog.index

So even if the mysqld noticed that the data3 directory was wrong, it still wrote things into it. This even if I didn’t have –log-binlog enabled in the my.cnf file. Strange, but easy to fix:

> rm /my/data3/binlog.index
> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf –initialize

2018-04-22T12:40:45.633637Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-011071] [Server] unknown variable ‘max-tmp-tables=100’
2018-04-22T12:40:45.633657Z 0 [Warning] [MY-010952] [Server] The privilege system failed to initialize correctly. If you have upgraded your server, make sure you’re executing mysql_upgrade to correct the issue.
2018-04-22T12:40:45.633663Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting

The warning about the privilege system confused me a bit, but I ignored it for the time being and removed from my configuration files the variables that MySQL 8.0 doesn’t support anymore. I couldn’t find a list of the removed variables anywhere so this was done with the trial and error method.

> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf

2018-04-22T12:42:56.626583Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010735] [Server] Can’t open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it.
2018-04-22T12:42:56.827685Z 0 [Warning] [MY-010015] [Repl] Gtid table is not ready to be used. Table ‘mysql.gtid_executed’ cannot be opened.
2018-04-22T12:42:56.838501Z 0 [Warning] [MY-010068] [Server] CA certificate ca.pem is self signed.
2018-04-22T12:42:56.848375Z 0 [Warning] [MY-010441] [Server] Failed to open optimizer cost constant tables
2018-04-22T12:42:56.848863Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-013129] [Server] A message intended for a client cannot be sent there as no client-session is attached. Therefore, we’re sending the information to the error-log instead: MY-001146 – Table ‘mysql.component’ doesn’t exist
2018-04-22T12:42:56.848916Z 0 [Warning] [MY-013129] [Server] A message intended for a client cannot be sent there as no client-session is attached. Therefore, we’re sending the information to the error-log instead: MY-003543 – The mysql.component table is missing or has an incorrect definition.
….
2018-04-22T12:42:56.854141Z 0 [System] [MY-010931] [Server] /home/my/mysql-8.0/runtime_output_directory/mysqld: ready for connections. Version: ‘8.0.11’ socket: ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ port: 3306 Source distribution.

I figured out that if there is a single wrong variable in the configuration file, running mysqld –initialize will leave the database in an inconsistent state. NOT GOOD! I am happy I didn’t try this in a production system!

Time to start over from the beginning:

> rm -r /my/data3/*
> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf –initialize

2018-04-22T12:44:45.548960Z 5 [Note] [MY-010454] [Server] A temporary password is generated for [email protected]: px)NaaSp?6um
2018-04-22T12:44:51.221751Z 0 [System] [MY-013170] [Server] /home/my/mysql-8.0/runtime_output_directory/mysqld (mysqld 8.0.11) initializing of server has completed

Success!

I wonder why the temporary password is so complex; It could easily have been something that one could easily remember without decreasing security, it’s temporary after all. No big deal, one can always paste it from the logs. (Side note: MariaDB uses socket authentication on many system and thus doesn’t need temporary installation passwords).

Now lets start the MySQL server for real to do some testing:

> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf

2018-04-22T12:45:43.683484Z 0 [System] [MY-010931] [Server] /home/my/mysql-8.0/runtime_output_directory/mysqld: ready for connections. Version: ‘8.0.11’ socket: ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ port: 3306 Source distribution.

And the lets start the client:

> ./client/mysql –socket=/tmp/mysql.sock –user=root –password=”px)NaaSp?6um”
ERROR 2059 (HY000): Plugin caching_sha2_password could not be loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/plugin/caching_sha2_password.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Apparently MySQL 8.0 doesn’t work with old MySQL / MariaDB clients by default 🙁

I was testing this in a system with MariaDB installed, like all modern Linux system today, and didn’t want to use the MySQL clients or libraries.

I decided to try to fix this by changing the authentication to the native (original) MySQL authentication method.

> mysqld –skip-grant-tables

> ./client/mysql –socket=/tmp/mysql.sock –user=root
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’ (using password: NO)

Apparently –skip-grant-tables is not good enough anymore. Let’s try again with:

> mysqld –skip-grant-tables –default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password

> ./client/mysql –socket=/tmp/mysql.sock –user=root mysql
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 7
Server version: 8.0.11 Source distribution

Great, we are getting somewhere, now lets fix “root” to work with the old authenticaion:

MySQL [mysql]> update mysql.user set plugin=”mysql_native_password”,authentication_string=password(“test”) where user=”root”;
ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘(“test”) where user=”root”‘ at line 1

A quick look in the MySQL 8.0 release notes told me that the PASSWORD() function is removed in 8.0. Why???? I don’t know how one in MySQL 8.0 is supposed to generate passwords compatible with old installations of MySQL. One could of course start an old MySQL or MariaDB version, execute the password() function and copy the result.

I decided to fix this the easy way and use an empty password:

(Update:: I later discovered that the right way would have been to use: FLUSH PRIVILEGES; ALTER USER’ root’@’localhost’ identified by ‘test’ ; I however dislike this syntax as it has the password in clear text which is easy to grab and the command can’t be used to easily update the mysql.user table. One must also disable the –skip-grant mode to do use this)

MySQL [mysql]> update mysql.user set plugin=”mysql_native_password”,authentication_string=”” where user=”root”;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.077 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

I restarted mysqld:
> mysqld –default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password

> ./client/mysql –user=root –password=”” mysql
ERROR 1862 (HY000): Your password has expired. To log in you must change it using a client that supports expired passwords.

Ouch, forgot that. Lets try again:

> mysqld –skip-grant-tables –default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password

> ./client/mysql –user=root –password=”” mysql
MySQL [mysql]> update mysql.user set password_expired=”N” where user=”root”;

Now restart and test worked:

> ./mysqld –default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password

>./client/mysql –user=root –password=”” mysql

Finally I had a working account that I can use to create other users!

When looking at mysqld –help –verbose again. I noticed the option:

–initialize-insecure
Create the default database and exit. Create a super user
with empty password.

I decided to check if this would have made things easier:

> rm -r /my/data3/*
> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf –initialize-insecure

2018-04-22T13:18:06.629548Z 5 [Warning] [MY-010453] [Server] [email protected] is created with an empty password ! Please consider switching off the –initialize-insecure option.

Hm. Don’t understand the warning as–initialize-insecure is not an option that one would use more than one time and thus nothing one would ‘switch off’.

> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf

> ./client/mysql –user=root –password=”” mysql
ERROR 2059 (HY000): Plugin caching_sha2_password could not be loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/plugin/caching_sha2_password.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Back to the beginning 🙁

To get things to work with old clients, one has to initialize the database with:
> ./mysqld –defaults-file=/tmp/my.cnf –initialize-insecure –default_authentication_plugin=mysql_native_password

Now I finally had MySQL 8.0 up and running and thought I would take it up for a spin by running the “standard” MySQL/MariaDB sql-bench test suite. This was removed in MySQL 5.7, but as I happened to have MariaDB 10.3 installed, I decided to run it from there.

sql-bench is a single threaded benchmark that measures the “raw” speed for some common operations. It gives you the ‘maximum’ performance for a single query. Its different from other benchmarks that measures the maximum throughput when you have a lot of users, but sql-bench still tells you a lot about what kind of performance to expect from the database.

I tried first to be clever and create the “test” database, that I needed for sql-bench, with
> mkdir /my/data3/test

but when I tried to run the benchmark, MySQL 8.0 complained that the test database didn’t exist.

MySQL 8.0 has gone away from the original concept of MySQL where the user can easily
create directories and copy databases into the database directory. This may have serious
implication for anyone doing backup of databases and/or trying to restore a backup with normal OS commands.

I created the ‘test’ database with mysqladmin and then tried to run sql-bench:

> ./run-all-tests –user=root

The first run failed in test-ATIS:

Can’t execute command ‘create table class_of_service (class_code char(2) NOT NULL,rank tinyint(2) NOT NULL,class_description char(80) NOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (class_code))’
Error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘rank tinyint(2) NOT NULL,class_description char(80) NOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (class_’ at line 1

This happened because ‘rank‘ is now a reserved word in MySQL 8.0. This is also reserved in ANSI SQL, but I don’t know of any other database that has failed to run test-ATIS before. I have in the past run it against Oracle, PostgreSQL, Mimer, MSSQL etc without any problems.

MariaDB also has ‘rank’ as a keyword in 10.2 and 10.3 but one can still use it as an identifier.

I fixed test-ATIS and then managed to run all tests on MySQL 8.0.

I did run the test both with MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.3 with the InnoDB storage engine and by having identical values for all InnoDB variables, table-definition-cache and table-open-cache. I turned off performance schema for both databases. All test are run with a user with an empty password (to keep things comparable and because it’s was too complex to generate a password in MySQL 8.0)

The result are as follows
Results per test in seconds:

Operation |MariaDB|MySQL-8|

———————————–
ATIS        | 153.00| 228.00|
alter-table | 92.00| 792.00|
big-tables        | 990.00|2079.00|
connect | 186.00| 227.00|
create        | 575.00|4465.00|
insert        |4552.00|8458.00|
select    | 333.00| 412.00|
table-elimination |1900.00|3916.00|
wisconsin | 272.00| 590.00|
———————————–

This is of course just a first view of the performance of MySQL 8.0 in a single user environment. Some reflections about the results:

Alter-table test is slower (as expected) in 8.0 as some of the alter tests benefits of the instant add column in MariaDB 10.3.
connect test is also better for MariaDB as we put a lot of efforts to speed this up in MariaDB 10.2
table-elimination shows an optimization in MariaDB for the Anchor table model, which MySQL doesn’t have.
CREATE and DROP TABLE is almost 8 times slower in MySQL 8.0 than in MariaDB 10.3. I assume this is the cost of ‘atomic DDL’. This may also cause performance problems for any thread using the data dictionary when another thread is creating/dropping tables.
When looking at the individual test results, MySQL 8.0 was slower in almost every test, in many significantly slower.
The only test where MySQL was faster was “update_with_key_prefix”. I checked this and noticed that there was a bug in the test and the columns was updated to it’s original value (which should be instant with any storage engine). This is an old bug that MySQL has found and fixed and that we have not been aware of in the test or in MariaDB.
While writing this, I noticed that MySQL 8.0 is now using utf8mb4 as the default character set instead of latin1. This may affect some of the benchmarks slightly (not much as most tests works with numbers and Oracle claims that utf8mb4 is only 20% slower than latin1), but needs to be verified.
Oracle claims that MySQL 8.0 is much faster on multi user benchmarks. The above test indicates that they may have done this by sacrificing single user performance.
We need to do more and many different benchmarks to better understand exactly what is going on. Stay tuned!

Short summary of my first run with MySQL 8.0:

Using the new caching_sha2_password authentication as default for new installation is likely to cause a lot of problems for users. No old application will be able to use MySQL 8.0, installed with default options, without moving to MySQL’s client libraries. While working on this blog I saw MySQL users complain on IRC that not even MySQL Workbench can authenticate with MySQL 8.0. This is the first time in MySQL’s history where such an incompatible change has ever been done!
Atomic DDL is a good thing (We plan to have this in MariaDB 10.4), but it should not have such a drastic impact on performance. I am also a bit skeptical of MySQL 8.0 having just one copy of the data dictionary as if this gets corrupted you will lose all your data. (Single point of failure)
MySQL 8.0 has several new reserved words and has removed a lot of variables, which makes upgrades hard. Before upgrading to MySQL 8.0 one has to check all one’s databases and applications to ensure that there are no conflicts.
As my test above shows, if you have a single deprecated variable in your configuration files, the installation of MySQL will abort and can leave the database in inconsistent state. I did of course my tests by installing into an empty data dictionary, but one can assume that some of the problems may also happen when upgrading an old installation.

Conclusions:
In many ways, MySQL 8.0 has caught up with some earlier versions of MariaDB. For instance, in MariaDB 10.0, we introduced roles (four years ago). In MariaDB 10.1, we introduced encrypted redo/undo logs (three years ago). In MariaDB 10.2, we introduced window functions and CTEs (a year ago). However, some catch-up of MariaDB Server 10.2 features still remains for MySQL (such as check constraints, binlog compression, and log-based rollback).

MySQL 8.0 has a few new interesting features (mostly Atomic DDL and JSON TABLE functions), but at the same time MySQL has strayed away from some of the fundamental corner stone principles of MySQL:

From the start of the first version of MySQL in 1995, all development has been focused around 3 core principles:

Ease of use
Performance
Stability

With MySQL 8.0, Oracle has sacrifices 2 of 3 of these.

In addition (as part of ease of use), while I was working on MySQL, we did our best to ensure that the following should hold:

Upgrades should be trivial
Things should be kept compatible, if possible (don’t remove features/options/functions that are used)
Minimize reserved words, don’t remove server variables
One should be able to use normal OS commands to create and drop databases, copy and move tables around within the same system or between different systems. With 8.0 and data dictionary taking backups of specific tables will be hard, even if the server is not running.
mysqldump should always be usable backups and to move to new releases
Old clients and application should be able to use ‘any’ MySQL server version unchanged. (Some Oracle client libraries, like C++, by default only supports the new X protocol and can thus not be used with older MySQL or any MariaDB version)

We plan to add a data dictionary to MariaDB 10.4 or MariaDB 10.5, but in a way to not sacrifice any of the above principles!

The competition between MySQL and MariaDB is not just about a tactical arms race on features. It’s about design philosophy, or strategic vision, if you will.

This shows in two main ways: our respective view of the Storage Engine structure, and of the top-level direction of the roadmap.

On the Storage Engine side, MySQL is converging on InnoDB, even for clustering and partitioning. In doing so, they are abandoning the advantages of multiple ways of storing data. By contrast, MariaDB sees lots of value in the Storage Engine architecture: MariaDB Server 10.3 will see the general availability of MyRocks (for write-intensive workloads) and Spider (for scalable workloads). On top of that, we have ColumnStore for analytical workloads. One can use the CONNECT engine to join with other databases. The use of different storage engines for different workloads and different hardware is a competitive differentiator, now more than ever.

On the roadmap side, MySQL is carefully steering clear of features that close the gap between MySQL and Oracle. MariaDB has no such constraints. With MariaDB 10.3, we are introducing PL/SQL compatibility (Oracle’s stored procedures) and AS OF (built-in system versioned tables with point-in-time querying). For both of those features, MariaDB is the first Open Source database doing so. I don’t except Oracle to provide any of the above features in MySQL!

Also on the roadmap side, MySQL is not working with the ecosystem in extending the functionality. In 2017, MariaDB accepted more code contributions in one year, than MySQL has done during its entire lifetime, and the rate is increasing!

I am sure that the experience I had with testing MySQL 8.0 would have been significantly better if MySQL would have an open development model where the community could easily participate in developing and testing MySQL continuously. Most of the confusing error messages and strange behavior would have been found and fixed long before the GA release.

Before upgrading to MySQL 8.0 please read https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html to see what problems you can run into! Don’t expect that old installations or applications will work out of the box without testing as a lot of features and options has been removed (query cache, partition of myisam tables etc)! You probably also have to revise your backup methods, especially if you want to ever restore just a few tables. (With 8.0, I don’t know how this can be easily done).

According to the MySQL 8.0 release notes, one can’t use mysqldump to copy a database to MySQL 8.0. One has to first to move to a MySQL 5.7 GA version (with mysqldump, as recommended by Oracle) and then to MySQL 8.0 with in-place update. I assume this means that all old mysqldump backups are useless for MySQL 8.0?

MySQL 8.0 seams to be a one way street to an unknown future. Up to MySQL 5.7 it has been trivial to move to MariaDB and one could always move back to MySQL with mysqldump. All MySQL client libraries has worked with MariaDB and all MariaDB client libraries has worked with MySQL. With MySQL 8.0 this has changed in the wrong direction.

As long as you are using MySQL 5.7 and below you have choices for your future, after MySQL 8.0 you have very little choice. But don’t despair, as MariaDB will always be able to load a mysqldump file and it’s very easy to upgrade your old MySQL installation to MariaDB 🙂

I wish you good luck to try MySQL 8.0 (and also the upcoming MariaDB 10.3)!

Integrating Amazon MQ with other AWS services via Apache Camel

2018-04-23 Tara Van Unen

Post Syndicated from Tara Van Unen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/integrating-amazon-mq-with-other-aws-services-via-apache-camel/

This post courtesy of Massimiliano Angelino, AWS Solutions Architect

Different enterprise systems—ERP, CRM, BI, HR, etc.—need to exchange information but normally cannot do that natively because they are from different vendors. Enterprises have tried multiple ways to integrate heterogeneous systems, generally referred to as enterprise application integration (EAI).

Modern EAI systems are based on a message-oriented middleware (MoM), also known as enterprise service bus (ESB). An ESB provides data communication via a message bus, on top of which it also provides components to orchestrate, route, translate, and monitor the data exchange. Communication with the ESB is done via adapters or connectors provided by the ESB. In this way, the different applications do not have to have specific knowledge of the technology used to provide the integration.

Amazon MQ used with Apache Camel is an open-source alternative to commercial ESBs. With the launch of Amazon MQ, integration between on-premises applications and cloud services becomes much simpler. Amazon MQ provides a managed message broker service currently supporting ApacheMQ 5.15.0.

In this post, I show how a simple integration between Amazon MQ and other AWS services can be achieved by using Apache Camel.

Apache Camel provides built-in connectors for integration with a wide variety of AWS services such as Amazon MQ, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon SWF, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon Kinesis Streams. It also provides a broad range of other connectors including Cassandra, JDBC, Spark, and even Facebook and Slack.

EAI system architecture

Different applications use different data formats, hence the need for a translation/transformation service. Such services can be provided to or from a common “normalized” format, or specifically between two applications.

The use of normalized formats simplifies the integration process when multiple applications need to share the same data, as the number of conversions to be realized is N (number of applications). This is at the cost of a more complex adaptation to a common format, which is required to cover all needs from the different applications, current and future.

Another characteristic of an EAI system is the support of distributed transactions to ensure data consistency across multiple applications.

EAI system architecture is normally composed of the following components:

A centralized broker that handles security, access control, and data communications. Amazon MQ provides these features through the support of multiple transport protocols (AMQP, Openwire, MQTT, WebSocket), security (all communications are encrypted via SSL), and per destination granular access control.
An independent data model, also known as the canonical data model. XML is the de facto standard for the data representation.
Connectors/agents that allow the applications to communicate with the broker.
A system model to allow a standardized way for all components to interface with the EAI. Java Message Service (JMS) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) are standard APIs to interact with constructs such as queues and topics to implement the different messaging patterns.

Walkthrough

This solution walks you through the following steps:

Creating the broker
Writing a simple application
Adding the dependencies
Triaging files into S3
Writing the Camel route
Sending files to the AMQP queue
Setting up AMQP
Testing the code

Creating the broker

To create a new broker, log in to your AWS account and choose Amazon MQ. Amazon MQ is currently available in six AWS Regions:

US East (N. Virginia)
US East (Ohio)
US West (Oregon)
EU (Ireland)
EU (Frankfurt)
Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

Make sure that you have selected one of these Regions.

The master user name and password are used to access the monitoring console of the broker and can be also used to authenticate when connecting the clients to the broker. I recommend creating separate users, without console access, to authenticate the clients to the broker, after the broker has been created.

For this example, create a single broker without failover. If your application requires a higher availability level, check the Create standby in a different zone check box. In case the principal broker instance would fail, the standby takes over in seconds. To make the client aware of the standby, use the failover:// protocol in the connection configuration pointing to both broker endpoints.

Leave the other settings as is. The broker takes few minutes to be created. After it’s done, you can see the list of endpoints available for the different protocols.

After the broker has been created, modify the security group to add the allowed ports and sources for access.

For this example, you need access to the ActiveMQ admin page and to AMQP. Open up ports 8162 and 5671 to the public address of your laptop.

You can also create a new user for programmatic access to the broker. In the Users section, choose Create User and add a new user named sdk.

Writing a simple application

The complete code for this walkthrough is available from the aws-amazonmq-apachecamel-sample GitHub repo. Clone the repository on your local machine to have the fully functional example. The rest of this post offers step-by-step instructions to build this solution.

To write the application, use Apache Maven and the Camel archetypes provided by Maven. If you do not have Apache Maven installed on your machine, you can follow the instructions at Installing Apache Maven.

From a terminal, run the following command:

mvn archetype:generate

You get a list of archetypes. Type camel to get only the one related to camel. In this case, use the java8 example and type the following:

90 + ENTER

Then, select a Camel version (pick the most recent) and fill in other properties for the project, such as groupId, artifactId, and version. For more information, see Guide to naming conventions on groupId, artifactId and version.

For this example, use the following values:

groupId: com.angmas
artifactId: camel-aws-simple
version: 1.0-SNAPSHOT

Maven now generates the skeleton code in a folder named as the artifactId. In this case:

camel-aws-simple

Next, test that the environment is configured correctly to run Camel. At the prompt, run the following commands:

cd camel-aws-simple
mvn install
mvn exec:java

You should see a log appearing in the console, printing the following:

[INFO] --- exec-maven-plugin:1.6.0:java (default-cli) @ camel-aws-test ---
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] DefaultCamelContext            INFO  Apache Camel 2.20.1 (CamelContext: camel-1) is starting
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] ManagedManagementStrategy      INFO  JMX is enabled
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] DefaultTypeConverter           INFO  Type converters loaded (core: 192, classpath: 0)
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] DefaultCamelContext            INFO  StreamCaching is not in use. If using streams then its recommended to enable stream caching. See more details at http://camel.apache.org/stream-caching.html
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] DefaultCamelContext            INFO  Route: route1 started and consuming from: timer://simple?period=1000
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] DefaultCamelContext            INFO  Total 1 routes, of which 1 are started
[     com.angmas.MainApp.main()] DefaultCamelContext            INFO  Apache Camel 2.20.1 (CamelContext: camel-1) started in 0.419 seconds
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got a String body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got an Integer body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got a Double body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got a String body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got an Integer body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got a Double body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got a String body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got an Integer body
[-1) thread #2 - timer://simple] route1                         INFO  Got a Double body

Adding the dependencies

Now that you have verified that the sample works, modify it to add the dependencies to interface to Amazon MQ/ActiveMQ and AWS.

For the following steps, you can use a normal text editor, such as vi, Sublime Text, or Visual Studio Code. Or, open the maven project in an IDE such as Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA.

Open pom.xml and add the following lines inside the <dependencies> tag:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-amqp</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-aws</artifactId>
</dependency>

The camel-aws component is taking care of the interface with the supported AWS services without requiring any in-depth knowledge of the AWS Java SDK. For more information, see Camel Components for Amazon Web Services.

Triaging files into S3

Write a Camel component that receives files as a payload to messages in a queue and write them to an S3 bucket with different prefixes depending on the extension.

Because the broker that you created is exposed via a public IP address, you can execute the code from anywhere that there is an internet connection that allows communication on the specific ports. In this example, run the code from your own laptop. A broker can also be created without public IP address, in which case it is only accessible from inside the VPC in which it has been created, or by any peered VPC or network connected via a virtual gateway (VPN or AWS Direct Connect).

First, look at the code created by Maven. The archetype chosen created a standalone Camel context run via the helper org.apache.camel.main.Main class. This provides an easy way to run Camel routes from an IDE or the command line without needing to deploy it inside a container. Apache Camel can be also run as an OSGi module, or Spring and SpringBoot bean.

package com.angmas;
import org.apache.camel.main.Main;
/**
 * A Camel Application
 */
public class MainApp {
    /**
     * A main() so you can easily run these routing rules in your IDE
     */
    public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
        Main main = new Main();
        main.addRouteBuilder(new MyRouteBuilder());
        main.run(args);
    }
}

The main method instantiates the Camel Main helper class and the routes, and runs the Camel application. The MyRouteBuilder class creates a route using Java DSL. It is also possible to define routes in Spring XML and load them dynamically in the code.

public void configure() {
        // this sample sets a random body then performs content-based
        // routing on the message using method references
        from("timer:simple?period=1000")
            .process()
                .message(m -> m.setHeader("index", index++ % 3))
            .transform()
                .message(this::randomBody)
            .choice()
                .when()
                    .body(String.class::isInstance)
                    .log("Got a String body")
                .when()
                    .body(Integer.class::isInstance)
                    .log("Got an Integer body")
                .when()
                    .body(Double.class::isInstance)
                    .log("Got a Double body")
                .otherwise()
                    .log("Other type message");
    }

Writing the Camel route

Replace the existing route with one that fetches messages from Amazon MQ over AMQP, and routes the content to different S3 buckets depending on the file name extension.

import com.amazonaws.regions.Regions;
import com.amazonaws.services.s3.AmazonS3ClientBuilder;
…
public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
        Main main = new Main();
        main.bind("s3Client", AmazonS3ClientBuilder.standard().withRegion(Regions.US_EAST_1).build());
        main.addRouteBuilder(new MyRouteBuilder());
        main.addRouteBuilder(new MessageProducerBuilder());
        main.run(args);
    }


public class MyRouteBuilder extends RouteBuilder {
    private String secretKey = System.getenv("AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY");
    private String accessKey = System.getenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY");
    
    public void configure() {
        from("amqp:filequeue")
        .process()
            .message(this::setExtensionHeader)
        .choice()
            .when(header("ext").isEqualTo("txt"))
                .setHeader("CamelAwsS3Key").simple("text-files/${headers.CamelFileName}")
                .to("aws-s3://my-camel-example-bucket? amazonS3Client=#s3Client")
            .when(header("ext").isEqualTo("html"))
                .setHeader("CamelAwsS3Key").simple("html-files/${headers.CamelFileName}")
                .to("aws-s3://my-camel-example-bucket? amazonS3Client=#s3Client")
            .otherwise()
                .setHeader("CamelAwsS3Key").simple("other-files/${headers.CamelFileName}")
                .to("aws-s3://my-camel-example-bucket? amazonS3Client=#s3Client");

    }

    private void setExtensionHeader(Message m) {
        String fileName = (String) m.getHeader("CamelFileName");
        String ext = fileName.substring(fileName.lastIndexOf(".")+1);
        m.setHeader("ext", ext);
    }

}

The above code does the following:

Reads messages from the AMQP queue named filequeue.
Processes the message and sets a new ext header using the setExtensionHeader method (see below).
Checks the value of the ext header and write the body of the message as an object in an S3 bucket using different key prefixes, retaining the original name of the file.

The Amazon S3 component is configured with the bucket name, and a reference to an S3 client (amazonS3client=#s3Client) that you added to the Camel registry in the Main method of the app. Adding the object to the Camel registry allows Camel to find the object at runtime. Even though you could pass the region, accessKey, and secretKey parameters directly in the component URI, this way is more secure. It can make use of EC2 instance roles, so that you never need to pass the secrets.

Sending files to the AMQP queue

To send the files to the AMQP queue for testing, add another Camel route. In a real scenario, the messages to the AMQP queue are generated by another client. You are going to create a new route builder, but you could also add this route inside the existing MyRouteBuilder.

package com.angmas;

import org.apache.camel.builder.RouteBuilder;

/**
 * A Camel Java8 DSL Router
 */
public class MessageProducerBuilder extends RouteBuilder {
    /**
     * Configure the Camel routing rules using Java code...
     */
    public void configure() {
        from("file://input?delete=false&noop=true")
        .log("Content ${body} ${headers.CamelFileName}")
        .to("amqp:filequeue");
    }
}

The code reads files from the input folder in the work directory and publishes it to the queue. The route builder is added in the main class:

main.addRouteBuilder(new MessageProducerBuilder());

Setting up AMQP

By default, Camel tries to connect to a local AMQP broker. Configure it to connect to your Amazon MQ broker.

Create an AMQPConnectionDetails object that is configured to connect to Amazon MQ broker with SSL and pass the user name and password that you set on the broker. Adding the object to the Camel registry allows Camel to find the object at runtime and use it as the default connection to AMQP.

public class MainApp {
    public static String BROKER_URL = System.getenv("BROKER_URL");
    public static String AMQP_URL = "amqps://"+BROKER_URL+":5671";
    public static String BROKER_USERNAME = System.getenv("BROKER_USERNAME");
    public static String BROKER_PASSWORD = System.getenv("BROKER_PASSWORD");
    /**
     * A main() so you can easily run these routing rules in your IDE
     */
    public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
        Main main = new Main();
        main.bind("amqp", getAMQPconnection());
        main.bind("s3Client", AmazonS3ClientBuilder.standard().withRegion(Regions.US_EAST_1).build());
        main.addRouteBuilder(new MyRouteBuilder());
        main.addRouteBuilder(new MessageProducerBuilder());
        main.run(args);
    }

    public static AMQPConnectionDetails getAMQPconnection() {
        return new AMQPConnectionDetails(AMQP_URL, BROKER_USERNAME, BROKER_PASSWORD);
    }

}

The AMQP_URL uses the amqps schema that indicates that you are using SSL. You then add the component to the registry. Camel finds it by matching the class type.
main.bind("amqp-ssl", getAMQPConnection());

Testing the code

Create an input folder in the project root, and create few files with different extensions, such as txt, html, and csv.

Set the different environment variables required by the code, either in the shell or in your IDE as execution configuration.

export BROKER_URL="xxx.mq.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
export BROKER_PASSWORD="***"
export BROKER_USERNAME="admin"

If you are running the example from an EC2 instance, ensure that the EC2 instance role has read permission on the S3 bucket.

If you are running this on your laptop, ensure that you have configured the AWS credentials in the environment, for example, by using the aws configure command.

From the command line, execute the code:

mvn exec:java

If you are using an IDE, execute the main class. Camel outputs logging information and you should see messages listing the content and names of the files in the input folder.

Keep adding some more files to the input folder. You see that they are triaged in S3 a few seconds later. You can open the S3 console to check that they have been created.

To stop Camel, press CTRL+C in the shell.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed you how to create a publicly accessible Amazon MQ broker, and how to use Apache Camel to easily integrate AWS services with the broker. In the example, you created a Camel route that reads messages containing files from the AMQP queue and triages them by file extension into an S3 bucket.

Camel supports several components and provides blueprints for several enterprise integration patterns. Used in combination with the Amazon MQ, it provides a powerful and flexible solution to extend traditional enterprise solutions to the AWS Cloud, and integrate them seamlessly with cloud-native services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Lambda.

To learn more, see the Amazon MQ website. You can try Amazon MQ for free with the AWS Free Tier, which includes up to 750 hours of a single-instance mq.t2.micro broker and up to 1 GB of storage per month for one year.

Pirates Taunt Amazon Over New “Turd Sandwich” Prime Video Quality

2018-04-19 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-taunt-amazon-over-new-turd-sandwich-prime-video-quality-180419/

Even though they generally aren’t paying for the content they consume, don’t fall into the trap of believing that all pirates are eternally grateful for even poor quality media.

Without a doubt, some of the most quality-sensitive individuals are to be found in pirate communities and they aren’t scared to make their voices known when release groups fail to come up with the best possible goods.

This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.

Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10.

Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.

Indeed, one legitimate customer reported that he’d raised the quality issue with Amazon and they’d said that the problem was “probably on his end”.

“I have Amazon Prime Video and I noticed the quality was always great for their exclusive shows, so I decided to try buying the shows on Amazon instead of iTunes this year. I paid for season pass subscriptions for Legion, Billions and Homeland this year,” he wrote.

“Just this past weekend, I have noticed a significant drop in details compared to weeks before! So naturally I assumed it was an issue on my end. I started trying different devices, calling support, etc, but nothing really helped.

“Billions continued to look like a blurry mess, almost like I was watching a standard definition DVD instead of the crystal clear HD I paid for and have experienced in the past! And when I check the previous episodes, sure enough, they look fantastic again. What the heck??”

With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.

“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday.

“Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”

Arrr! The quality be fallin’

So what’s happening exactly?

A TorrentFreak source (who tells us he’s been working in the BluRay/DCP authoring business for the last 10 years) was kind enough to give us two opinions, one aimed at the techies and another at us mere mortals.

“In technical terms, it appears [Amazon has] increased the CRF [Constant Rate Factor] value they use when encoding for both the HEVC [H265] and H264 streams. Previously, their H264 streams were using CRF 18 and a max bitrate of 15Mbit/s, which usually resulted in file sizes of roughly 3GB, or around 10Mbit/s. Similarly with their HEVC streams, they were using CRF 20 and resulting in streams which were around the same size,” he explained.

“In the past week, the H264 streams have decreased by up to 50% for some streams. While there are no longer any x264 headers embedded in the H264 streams, the HEVC streams still retain those headers and the CRF value used has been increased, so it does appear this change has been done on purpose.”

In layman’s terms, our source believes that Amazon had previously been using an encoding profile that was “right on the edge of relatively good quality” which kept bitrates relatively low but high enough to ensure no perceivable loss of quality.

“H264 streams encoded with CRF 18 could provide an acceptable compromise between quality and file size, where the loss of detail is often negligible when watched at regular viewing distances, at a desk, or in a lounge room on a larger TV,” he explained.

“Recently, it appears these values have been intentionally changed in order to lower the bitrate and file sizes for reasons unknown. As a result, the quality of some streams has been reduced by up to 50% of their previous values. This has introduced a visual loss of quality, comparable to that of viewing something in standard definition versus high definition.”

With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.

“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.

With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.

You wouldn’t ~~download~~ stream….

TorrentFreak contacted Amazon Prime for comment on both the recent changes and growing customer complaints but at the time of publication we were yet to receive a response.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Duplicati, a Free, Cross-Platform Client for B2 Cloud Storage

2018-04-12 Roderick Bauer

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/duplicati-backups-cloud-storage/

Home and business computer users who want best-of-class backup of their Windows and Mac computers have Backblaze Cloud Backup for easy, automatic, and unlimited backup of their desktops and laptops. Those who need to back up and archive servers, NAS, and Linux systems, or require capabilities not available in Backblaze Backup, often are looking for a straightforward and reliable client with a strong set of features to manage their backups to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. A candidate worth considering is Duplicati, which not only has a good feature set with an easy-to-use interface, but runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. On top of that, it is free.

Duplicati Highlights

Interface

Duplicati is available through a consistent, wizard-style web interface or as a command line tool.
Web interface can be used on mobile devices as well as on headless systems such as servers or a NAS.

File Handling

Duplicati allows backups of folders, file types (e.g. documents, images), and supports a number of custom filter rules.
Duplicati uploads a full backup initially and stores smaller, incremental updates afterwards to save bandwidth and storage space.
Duplicatil finds duplicate files and similar content and will store this data only once in the backup. This is true even if files and folders are moved or renamed.
All backup data is compressed before it is encrypted and uploaded. Duplicati supports Zip/Deflate or 7z/LZMA2 compression.
Duplicati can make proper backups of opened or locked files using the Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) under Windows or the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) under Linux. This allows Duplicati to back up open files such as the Microsoft Outlook PST file while Outlook is running.
Duplicati stores the metadata of files in the backup. When backup files are restored, the timestamps (last modified, created) will also be restored as well as (optionally) the system’s access permissions.

Backends

Encrypted backup files are transferred to backends such as FTP, WebDAV, SSH (SFTP), and cloud storage destinations including Backblaze B2, and others.

Security

Duplicati uses AES-256 encryption (or GNU Privacy Guard) to secure all data before it is uploaded.

Automation

A scheduler keeps backups up-to-date automatically.
An integrated updater notifies you when a new release is available.
There are many options and filters, including deletion rules, transfer and bandwidth options.

Data Intergrity

To avoid bit rot and corrupted data that might occur in substandard storage systems, Duplicati regularly downloads a random set of backup files, restores their content, and checks their integrity.
Duplicati can handle network hiccups, interrupted backups, and unavailable or corrupt storage systems. Interrupted backups can be continued at a later time. Duplicati will then back up everything that was missed in the last backup.
Duplicati will try to repair corrupted files.

History of Duplicati

The Duplicati project was started in June 2008 and originally intended to produce a graphical user interface for the Duplicity program. This included a port of the Duplicity code for use on Windows. A decision was made to work on a clean re-implementation with a new name, which was released in June of 2009.

In 2012, work on Duplicati 2 started, which was a complete rewrite of the original release. It included a new block-based storage engine that allowed efficient, incremental, continuous backups. (Note: we previously wrote about old-school vs. new-school backup approaches in Backing Up Linux to Backblaze B2 with Duplicity and Restic.) The first beta of Duplicati 2 was released in September of 2017.

A second beta version of Duplicati 2.0 was recently released. This update includes a smart backup retention policy, new backup backends, performance enhancements, and many other fixes and improvements. It’s a product that has years of investment — and the efforts show in its functionality and relative polish. The Duplicati project can be found on Github at https://github.com/duplicati.

Using Duplicati with B2

Duplicati has a good Getting Started Guide on its website on how to set up the source and destinations for backups and configure application options. A complete manual also is available on their website. Its wizard interface is so easy, though, that you can probably get started without reading any documentation. There are many optional filters and configurations, though, so it’s good to check out all the options.

To use Duplicati with B2, you just need a unique bucket name for the backup destination and your B2 Account ID and B2 Application Key, which can be obtained from your Backblaze account dashboard.

To get started creating a new backup, select Add backup from the home page.

That brings you to the Add a new backup page.

For backup destination, select B2 Cloud Storage.

On the Backup destination page, enter your B2 details. After you’ve filled them in, you can test your connection to B2.

From there, you use the wizard to complete the configuration with the source data, schedule, and options.

A Couple of Options to Note

Backup Test Samples Duplicati by default will perform verification of your backups by randomly downloading a file and comparing a stored checksum against the file to ensure it hasn’t changed. If you wish to avoid the bandwidth from this option, you can disable it in Settings: Default options, or by using –backup-test-samples=0 from the command line.

Thread Priority This option in Settings: Default options sets the CPU priority for Duplicati, which can determine how fast your backups and restores complete. Command Line Usage: –thread-priority=[idle to highest]

Congratulations! You’ve configured your first Duplicati backup task.

Once the backup configuration is completed and saved, you can monitor the status of your backups on the Duplicati homepage.

Duplicati is One of Many Integrations with B2

In addition to Duplicati, B2 users have a wide variety of ways to get data into and out of B2 Cloud Storage. The choices range from Backblaze’s own command-line tool and SDK (software development kit), to commercial and freeware applications that run on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For the latest on what tools are integrated with B2, check out our integrations page.

Let Us Know How You’re Using Duplicati and B2

If you’re using Duplicati or another integration tool with B2, please let us know in the comments how it’s working for you.

The post Duplicati, a Free, Cross-Platform Client for B2 Cloud Storage appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Build a house in Minecraft using Python

2018-04-12 Rob Zwetsloot

Post Syndicated from Rob Zwetsloot original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/build-minecraft-house-using-python/

In this tutorial from The MagPi issue 68, Steve Martin takes us through the process of house-building in Minecraft Pi. Get your copy of The MagPi in stores now, or download it as a free PDF here.

Minecraft Pi is provided for free as part of the Raspbian operating system. To start your Minecraft: Pi Edition adventures, try our free tutorial Getting started with Minecraft.

Writing programs that create things in Minecraft is not only a great way to learn how to code, but it also means that you have a program that you can run again and again to make as many copies of your Minecraft design as you want. You never need to worry about your creation being destroyed by your brother or sister ever again — simply rerun your program and get it back! Whilst it might take a little longer to write the program than to build one house, once it’s finished you can build as many houses as you want.

Co-ordinates in Minecraft

Let’s start with a review of the coordinate system that Minecraft uses to know where to place blocks. If you are already familiar with this, you can skip to the next section. Otherwise, read on.

Plan view of our house design

Minecraft shows us a three-dimensional (3D) view of the world. Imagine that the room you are in is the Minecraft world and you want to describe your location within that room. You can do so with three numbers, as follows:

How far across the room are you? As you move from side to side, you change this number. We can consider this value to be our X coordinate.
How high off the ground are you? If you are upstairs, or if you jump, this value increases. We can consider this value to be our Y coordinate.
How far into the room are you? As you walk forwards or backwards, you change this number. We can consider this value to be our Z coordinate.

You might have done graphs in school with X going across the page and Y going up the page. Coordinates in Minecraft are very similar, except that we have an extra value, Z, for our third dimension. Don’t worry if this still seems a little confusing: once we start to build our house, you will see how these three dimensions work in Minecraft.

Designing our house

It is a good idea to start with a rough design for our house. This will help us to work out the values for the coordinates when we are adding doors and windows to our house. You don’t have to plan every detail of your house right away. It is always fun to enhance it once you have got the basic design written. The image above shows the plan view of the house design that we will be creating in this tutorial. Note that because this is a plan view, it only shows the X and Z co-ordinates; we can’t see how high anything is. Hopefully, you can imagine the house extending up from the screen.

We will build our house close to where the Minecraft player is standing. This a good idea when creating something in Minecraft with Python, as it saves us from having to walk around the Minecraft world to try to find our creation.

Starting our program

Type in the code as you work through this tutorial. You can use any editor you like; we would suggest either Python 3 (IDLE) or Thonny Python IDE, both of which you can find on the Raspberry Pi menu under Programming. Start by selecting the File menu and creating a new file. Save the file with a name of your choice; it must end with .py so that the Raspberry Pi knows that it is a Python program.

It is important to enter the code exactly as it is shown in the listing. Pay particular attention to both the spelling and capitalisation (upper- or lower-case letters) used. You may find that when you run your program the first time, it doesn’t work. This is very common and just means there’s a small error somewhere. The error message will give you a clue about where the error is.

It is good practice to start all of your Python programs with the first line shown in our listing. All other lines that start with a # are comments. These are ignored by Python, but they are a good way to remind us what the program is doing.

The two lines starting with from tell Python about the Minecraft API; this is a code library that our program will be using to talk to Minecraft. The line starting mc = creates a connection between our Python program and the game. Then we get the player’s location broken down into three variables: x, y, and z.

Building the shell of our house

To help us build our house, we define three variables that specify its width, height, and depth. Defining these variables makes it easy for us to change the size of our house later; it also makes the code easier to understand when we are setting the co-ordinates of the Minecraft bricks. For now, we suggest that you use the same values that we have; you can go back and change them once the house is complete and you want to alter its design.

It’s now time to start placing some bricks. We create the shell of our house with just two lines of code! These lines of code each use the setBlocks command to create a complete block of bricks. This function takes the following arguments:

setBlocks(x1, y1, z1, x2, y2, z2, block-id, data)

x1, y1, and z1 are the coordinates of one corner of the block of bricks that we want to create; x1, y1, and z1 are the coordinates of the other corner. The block-id is the type of block that we want to use. Some blocks require another value called data; we will see this being used later, but you can ignore it for now.

We have to work out the values that we need to use in place of x1, y1, z1, x1, y1, z1 for our walls. Note that what we want is a larger outer block made of bricks and that is filled with a slightly smaller block of air blocks. Yes, in Minecraft even air is actually just another type of block.

Once you have typed in the two lines that create the shell of your house, you almost ready to run your program. Before doing so, you must have Minecraft running and displaying the contents of your world. Do not have a world loaded with things that you have created, as they may get destroyed by the house that we are building. Go to a clear area in the Minecraft world before running the program. When you run your program, check for any errors in the ‘console’ window and fix them, repeatedly running the code again until you’ve corrected all the errors.

You should see a block of bricks now, as shown above. You may have to turn the player around in the Minecraft world before you can see your house.

Adding the floor and door

Now, let’s make our house a bit more interesting! Add the lines for the floor and door. Note that the floor extends beyond the boundary of the wall of the house; can you see how we achieve this?

Hint: look closely at how we calculate the x and z attributes as compared to when we created the house shell above. Also note that we use a value of y-1 to create the floor below our feet.

Minecraft doors are two blocks high, so we have to create them in two parts. This is where we have to use the data argument. A value of 0 is used for the lower half of the door, and a value of 8 is used for the upper half (the part with the windows in it). These values will create an open door. If we add 4 to each of these values, a closed door will be created.

Before you run your program again, move to a new location in Minecraft to build the house away from the previous one. Then run it to check that the floor and door are created; you will need to fix any errors again. Even if your program runs without errors, check that the floor and door are positioned correctly. If they aren’t, then you will need to check the arguments so setBlock and setBlocks are exactly as shown in the listing.

Adding windows

Hopefully you will agree that your house is beginning to take shape! Now let’s add some windows. Looking at the plan for our house, we can see that there is a window on each side; see if you can follow along. Add the four lines of code, one for each window.

Now you can move to yet another location and run the program again; you should have a window on each side of the house. Our house is starting to look pretty good!

Adding a roof

The final stage is to add a roof to the house. To do this we are going to use wooden stairs. We will do this inside a loop so that if you change the width of your house, more layers are added to the roof. Enter the rest of the code. Be careful with the indentation: I recommend using spaces and avoiding the use of tabs. After the if statement, you need to indent the code even further. Each indentation level needs four spaces, so below the line with if on it, you will need eight spaces.

Since some of these code lines are lengthy and indented a lot, you may well find that the text wraps around as you reach the right-hand side of your editor window — don’t worry about this. You will have to be careful to get those indents right, however.

Now move somewhere new in your world and run the complete program. Iron out any last bugs, then admire your house! Does it look how you expect? Can you make it better?

Customising your house

Now you can start to customise your house. It is a good idea to use Save As in the menu to save a new version of your program. Then you can keep different designs, or refer back to your previous program if you get to a point where you don’t understand why your new one doesn’t work.

Consider these changes:

Change the size of your house. Are you able also to move the door and windows so they stay in proportion?
Change the materials used for the house. An ice house placed in an area of snow would look really cool!
Add a back door to your house. Or make the front door a double-width door!

We hope that you have enjoyed writing this program to build a house. Now you can easily add a house to your Minecraft world whenever you want to by simply running this program.

Get the complete code for this project here.

Continue your Minecraft journey

Minecraft Pi’s programmable interface is an ideal platform for learning Python. If you’d like to try more of our free tutorials, check out:

You may also enjoy Martin O’Hanlon’s and David Whale’s Adventures in Minecraft, and the Hacking and Making in Minecraft MagPi Essentials guide, which you can download for free or buy in print here.

The post Build a house in Minecraft using Python appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

More power to your Pi

2018-04-11 James Adams

Post Syndicated from James Adams original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-power-supply-chip/

It’s been just over three weeks since we launched the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Although the product is branded Raspberry Pi 3B+ and not Raspberry Pi 4, a serious amount of engineering was involved in creating it. The wireless networking, USB/Ethernet hub, on-board power supplies, and BCM2837 chip were all upgraded: together these represent almost all the circuitry on the board! Today, I’d like to tell you about the work that has gone into creating a custom power supply chip for our newest computer.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, with custome power supply chip

The new Raspberry Pi 3B+, sporting a new, custom power supply chip (bottom left-hand corner)

Successful launch

The Raspberry Pi 3B+ has been well received, and we’ve enjoyed hearing feedback from the community as well as reading the various reviews and articles highlighting the solid improvements in wireless networking, Ethernet, CPU, and thermal performance of the new board. Gareth Halfacree’s post here has some particularly nice graphs showing the increased performance as well as how the Pi 3B+ keeps cool under load due to the new CPU package that incorporates a metal heat spreader. The Raspberry Pi production lines at the Sony UK Technology Centre are running at full speed, and it seems most people who want to get hold of the new board are able to find one in stock.

Powering your Pi

One of the most critical but often under-appreciated elements of any electronic product, particularly one such as Raspberry Pi with lots of complex on-board silicon (processor, networking, high-speed memory), is the power supply. In fact, the Raspberry Pi 3B+ has no fewer than six different voltage rails: two at 3.3V — one special ‘quiet’ one for audio, and one for everything else; 1.8V; 1.2V for the LPDDR2 memory; and 1.2V nominal for the CPU core. Note that the CPU voltage is actually raised and lowered on the fly as the speed of the CPU is increased and decreased depending on how hard the it is working. The sixth rail is 5V, which is the master supply that all the others are created from, and the output voltage for the four downstream USB ports; this is what the mains power adaptor is supplying through the micro USB power connector.

Power supply primer

There are two common classes of power supply circuits: linear regulators and switching regulators. Linear regulators work by creating a lower, regulated voltage from a higher one. In simple terms, they monitor the output voltage against an internally generated reference and continually change their own resistance to keep the output voltage constant. Switching regulators work in a different way: they ‘pump’ energy by first storing the energy coming from the source supply in a reactive component (usually an inductor, sometimes a capacitor) and then releasing it to the regulated output supply. The switches in switching regulators effect this energy transfer by first connecting the inductor (or capacitor) to store the source energy, and then switching the circuit so the energy is released to its destination.

Linear regulators produce smoother, less noisy output voltages, but they can only convert to a lower voltage, and have to dissipate energy to do so. The higher the output current and the voltage difference across them is, the more energy is lost as heat. On the other hand, switching supplies can, depending on their design, convert any voltage to any other voltage and can be much more efficient (efficiencies of 90% and above are not uncommon). However, they are more complex and generate noisier output voltages.

Designers use both types of regulators depending on the needs of the downstream circuit: for low-voltage drops, low current, or low noise, linear regulators are usually the right choice, while switching regulators are used for higher power or when efficiency of conversion is required. One of the simplest switching-mode power supply circuits is the buck converter, used to create a lower voltage from a higher one, and this is what we use on the Pi.

A history lesson

The BCM2835 processor chip (found on the original Raspberry Pi Model B and B+, as well as on the Zero products) has on-chip power supplies: one switch-mode regulator for the core voltage, as well as a linear one for the LPDDR2 memory supply. This meant that in addition to 5V, we only had to provide 3.3V and 1.8V on the board, which was relatively simple to do using cheap, off-the-shelf parts.

Pi Zero sporting a BCM2835 processor which only needs 2 external switchers (the components clustered behind the camera port)

When we moved to the BCM2836 for Raspberry Pi Model 2 (and subsequently to the BCM2837A1 and B0 for Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+), the core supply and the on-chip LPDDR2 memory supply were not up to the job of supplying the extra processor cores and larger memory, so we removed them. (We also used the recovered chip area to help fit in the new quad-core ARM processors.) The upshot of this was that we had to supply these power rails externally for the Raspberry Pi 2 and models thereafter. Moreover, we also had to provide circuitry to sequence them correctly in order to control exactly when they power up compared to the other supplies on the board.

Power supply design is tricky (but critical)

Raspberry Pi boards take in 5V from the micro USB socket and have to generate the other required supplies from this. When 5V is first connected, each of these other supplies must ‘start up’, meaning go from ‘off’, or 0V, to their correct voltage in some short period of time. The order of the supplies starting up is often important: commonly, there are structures inside a chip that form diodes between supply rails, and bringing supplies up in the wrong order can sometimes ‘turn on’ these diodes, causing them to conduct, with undesirable consequences. Silicon chips come with a data sheet specifying what supplies (voltages and currents) are needed and whether they need to be low-noise, in what order they must power up (and in some cases down), and sometimes even the rate at which the voltages must power up and down.

A Pi3. Power supply components are clustered bottom left next to the micro USB, middle (above LPDDR2 chip which is on the bottom of the PCB) and above the A/V jack.

In designing the power chain for the Pi 2 and 3, the sequencing was fairly straightforward: power rails power up in order of voltage (5V, 3.3V, 1.8V, 1.2V). However, the supplies were all generated with individual, discrete devices. Therefore, I spent quite a lot of time designing circuitry to control the sequencing — even with some design tricks to reduce component count, quite a few sequencing components are required. More complex systems generally use a Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) with multiple supplies on a single chip, and many different PMIC variants are made by various manufacturers. Since Raspberry Pi 2 days, I was looking for a suitable PMIC to simplify the Pi design, but invariably (and somewhat counter-intuitively) these were always too expensive compared to my discrete solution, usually because they came with more features than needed.

One device to rule them all

It was way back in May 2015 when I first chatted to Peter Coyle of Exar (Exar were bought by MaxLinear in 2017) about power supply products for Raspberry Pi. We didn’t find a product match then, but in June 2016 Peter, along with Tuomas Hollman and Trevor Latham, visited to pitch the possibility of building a custom power management solution for us.

I was initially sceptical that it could be made cheap enough. However, our discussion indicated that if we could tailor the solution to just what we needed, it could be cost-effective. Over the coming weeks and months, we honed a specification we agreed on from the initial sketches we’d made, and Exar thought they could build it for us at the target price.

The chip we designed would contain all the key supplies required for the Pi on one small device in a cheap QFN package, and it would also perform the required sequencing and voltage monitoring. Moreover, the chip would be flexible to allow adjustment of supply voltages from their default values via I2C; the largest supply would be capable of being adjusted quickly to perform the dynamic core voltage changes needed in order to reduce voltage to the processor when it is idling (to save power), and to boost voltage to the processor when running at maximum speed (1.4 GHz). The supplies on the chip would all be generously specified and could deliver significantly more power than those used on the Raspberry Pi 3. All in all, the chip would contain four switching-mode converters and one low-current linear regulator, this last one being low-noise for the audio circuitry.

The MXL7704 chip

The project was a great success: MaxLinear delivered working samples of first silicon at the end of May 2017 (almost exactly a year after we had kicked off the project), and followed through with production quantities in December 2017 in time for the Raspberry Pi 3B+ production ramp.

The team behind the power supply chip on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (group of six men, two of whom are holding Raspberry Pi boards)

Front row: Roger with the very first Pi 3B+ prototypes and James with a MXL7704 development board hacked to power a Pi 3. Back row left to right: Will Torgerson, Trevor Latham, Peter Coyle, Tuomas Hollman.

The MXL7704 device has been key to reducing Pi board complexity and therefore overall bill of materials cost. Furthermore, by being able to deliver more power when needed, it has also been essential to increasing the speed of the (newly packaged) BCM2837B0 processor on the 3B+ to 1.4GHz. The result is improvements to both the continuous output current to the CPU (from 3A to 4A) and to the transient performance (i.e. the chip has helped to reduce the ‘transient response’, which is the change in supply voltage due to a sudden current spike that occurs when the processor suddenly demands a large current in a few nanoseconds, as modern CPUs tend to do).

With the MXL7704, the power supply circuitry on the 3B+ is now a lot simpler than the Pi 3B design. This new supply also provides the LPDDR2 memory voltage directly from a switching regulator rather than using linear regulators like the Pi 3, thereby improving energy efficiency. This helps to somewhat offset the extra power that the faster Ethernet, wireless networking, and processor consume. A pleasing side effect of using the new chip is the symmetric board layout of the regulators — it’s easy to see the four switching-mode supplies, given away by four similar-looking blobs (three grey and one brownish), which are the inductors.

Close-up of the power supply chip on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

The Pi 3B+ PMIC MXL7704 — pleasingly symmetric

Kudos

It takes a lot of effort to design a new chip from scratch and get it all the way through to production — we are very grateful to the team at MaxLinear for their hard work, dedication, and enthusiasm. We’re also proud to have created something that will not only power Raspberry Pis, but will also be useful for other product designs: it turns out when you have a low-cost and flexible device, it can be used for many things — something we’re fairly familiar with here at Raspberry Pi! For the curious, the product page (including the data sheet) for the MXL7704 chip is here. Particular thanks go to Peter Coyle, Tuomas Hollman, and Trevor Latham, and also to Jon Cronk, who has been our contact in the US and has had to get up early to attend all our conference calls!

The MXL7704 design team celebrating on Pi Day — it takes a lot of people to design a chip!

I hope you liked reading about some of the effort that has gone into creating the new Pi. It’s nice to finally have a chance to tell people about some of the (increasingly complex) technical work that makes building a $35 computer possible — we’re very pleased with the Raspberry Pi 3B+, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it!

The post More power to your Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Cloud Empire: Meet the Rebel Alliance

2018-04-10 Roderick Bauer

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-empire-meet-the-rebel-alliance/

Last week Backblaze made the exciting announcement that through partnerships with Packet and ServerCentral, cloud computing is available to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage customers.

Those of you familiar with cloud computing will understand the significance of this news. We are now offering the least expensive cloud storage + cloud computing available anywhere. You no longer have to submit to the lock-in tactics and exorbitant prices charged by the other big players in the cloud services biz.

As Robin Harris wrote in ZDNet about last week’s computing partners announcement, Cloud Empire: Meet the Rebel Alliance.

We understand that some of our cloud backup and storage customers might be unfamiliar with cloud computing. Backblaze made its name in cloud backup and object storage, and that’s what our customers know us for. In response to customers requests, we’ve directly connected our B2 cloud object storage with cloud compute providers. This adds the ability to use and run programs on data once it’s in the B2 cloud, opening up a world of new uses for B2. Just some of the possibilities include media transcoding and rendering, web hosting, application development and testing, business analytics, disaster recovery, on-demand computing capacity (cloud bursting), AI, and mobile and IoT applications.

The world has been moving to a multi-cloud / hybrid cloud world, and customers are looking for more choices than those offered by the existing cloud players. Our B2 compute partnerships build on our mission to offer cloud storage that’s astonishingly easy and low-cost. They enable our customers to move into a more flexible and affordable cloud services ecosystem that provides a greater variety of choices and costs far less. We believe we are helping to fulfill the promise of the internet by allowing customers to choose the best-of-breed services from the best vendors.

If You’re Not Familiar with Cloud Computing, Here’s a Quick Overview

Cloud computing is another component of cloud services, like object storage, that replicates in the cloud a basic function of a computer system. Think of services that operate in a cloud as an infinitely scalable version of what happens on your desktop computer. In your desktop computer you have computing/processing (CPU), fast storage (like an SSD), data storage (like your disk drive), and memory (RAM). Their counterparts in the cloud are computing (CPU), block storage (fast storage), object storage (data storage), and processing memory (RAM).

CPU, RAM, fast internal storage, and a hard drive are the basic building blocks of a computer
They also are the basic building blocks of cloud computing

Some customers require only some of these services, such as cloud storage. B2 as a standalone service has proven to be an outstanding solution for those customers interested in backing up or archiving data. There are many customers that would like additional capabilities, such as performing operations on that data once it’s in the cloud. They need object storage combined with computing.

With the just announced compute partnerships, Backblaze is able to offer computing services to anyone using B2. A direct connection between Backblaze’s and our partners’ data centers means that our customers can process data stored in B2 with high speed, low latency, and zero data transfer costs.

Backblaze, Packet and Server Central cloud compute workflow diagram

Cloud service providers package up CPU, storage, and memory into services that you can rent on an hourly basis
You can scale up and down and add or remove services as you need them

How Does Computing + B2 Work?

Those wanting to use B2 with computing will need to sign up for accounts with Backblaze and either Packet or ServerCentral. Packet customers need only select “SJC1” as their region and then get started. The process is also simple for ServerCentral customers — they just need to register with a ServerCentral account rep.

The direct connection between B2 and our compute partners means customers will experience very low latency (less than 10ms) between services. Even better, all data transfers between B2 and the compute partner are free. When combined with Backblaze B2, customers can obtain cloud computing services for as little as 50% of the cost of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Opening Up the Cloud “Walled Garden”

Traditionally, cloud vendors charge fees for customers to move data outside the “walled garden” of that particular vendor. These fees reach upwards of $0.12 per gigabyte (GB) for data egress. This large fee for customers accessing their own data restricts users from using a multi-cloud approach and taking advantage of less expensive or better performing options. With free transfers between B2 and Packet or ServerCentral, customers now have a predictable, scalable solution for computing and data storage while avoiding vendor lock in. Dropbox made waves when they saved $75 million by migrating off of AWS. Adding computing to B2 helps anyone interested in moving some or all of their computing off of AWS and thereby cutting their AWS bill by 50% or more.

What are the Advantages of Cloud Storage + Computing?

Using computing and storage in the cloud provide a number of advantages over using in-house resources.

You don’t have to purchase the actual hardware, software licenses, and provide space and IT resources for the systems.
Cloud computing is available with just a few minutes notice and you only pay for whatever period of time you need. You avoid having additional hardware on your balance sheet.
Resources are in the cloud and can provide online services to customers, mobile users, and partners located anywhere in the world.
You can isolate the work on these systems from your normal production environment, making them ideal for testing and trying out new applications and development projects.
Computing resources scale when you need them to, providing temporary or ongoing extra resources for expected or unexpected demand.
They can provide redundant and failover services when and if your primary systems are unavailable for whatever reason.

Where Can I Learn More?

We encourage B2 customers to explore the options available at our partner sites, Packet and ServerCentral. They are happy to help customers understand what services are available and how to get started.

We are excited to see what you build! And please tell us in the comments what you are doing or have planned with B2 + computing.

P.S. May the force be with all of us!

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