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Integrating JFrog Artifactory with AWS CodePipeline

Post Syndicated from Erin McGill original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/integrating-jfrog-artifactory-with-aws-codepipeline/

When I talk with customers and partners, I find that they are in different stages in the adoption of DevOps methodologies. They are automating the creation of application artifacts and the deployment of their applications to different infrastructure environments. In many cases, they are creating and supporting multiple applications using a variety of coding languages and artifacts.

The management of these processes and artifacts can be challenging, but using the right tools and methodologies can simplify the process.

In this post, I will show you how you can automate the creation and storage of application artifacts through the implementation of a pipeline and custom deploy action in AWS CodePipeline. The example includes a Node.js code base stored in an AWS CodeCommit repository. A Node Package Manager (npm) artifact is built from the code base, and the build artifact is published to a JFrog Artifactory npm repository.

I frequently recommend AWS CodePipeline, the AWS continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. You can use it to quickly innovate through integration and deployment of new features and bug fixes by building a workflow that automates the build, test, and deployment of new versions of your application. And, because AWS CodePipeline is extensible, it allows you to create a custom action that performs customized, automated actions on your behalf.

JFrog’s Artifactory is a universal binary repository manager where you can manage multiple applications, their dependencies, and versions in one place. Artifactory also enables you to standardize the way you manage your package types across all applications developed in your company, no matter the code base or artifact type.

If you already have a Node.js CodeCommit repository, a JFrog Artifactory host, and would like to automate the creation of the pipeline, including the custom action and CodeBuild project, you can use this AWS CloudFormation template to create your AWS CloudFormation stack.

The project code can be found in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-codepipeline-custom-job-worker-for-jfrog-artifactory.

 

The AWS CodePipeline workflow

This figure shows the path defined in the pipeline for this project. It starts with a change to Node.js source code committed to a private code repository in AWS CodeCommit. With this change, CodePipeline triggers AWS CodeBuild to create the npm package from the node.js source code. After the build, CodePipeline triggers the custom action job worker to commit the build artifact to the designated artifact repository in Artifactory.

 

This blog post assumes you have already:

·      Created a CodeCommit repository that contains a Node.js project.

·      Configured a two-stage pipeline in AWS CodePipeline.

The Source stage of the pipeline is configured to poll the Node.js CodeCommit repository. The Build stage is configured to use a CodeBuild project to build the npm package using a buildspec.yml file located in the code repository.

If you do not have a Node.js repository, you can create a CodeCommit repository that contains this simple ‘Hello World’ project. This project also includes a buildspec.yml file that is used when you define your CodeBuild project. It defines the steps to be taken by CodeBuild to create the npm artifact.

If you do not already have a pipeline set up in CodePipeline, you can use this template to create a pipeline with a CodeCommit source action and a CodeBuild build action through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). If you do not want to install the AWS CLI on your local machine, you can use AWS Cloud9, our managed integrated development environment (IDE), to interact with AWS APIs.

In your development environment, open your favorite editor and fill out the template with values appropriate to your project. For information, see the readme in the GitHub repository.

Use this CLI command to create the pipeline from the template:

aws codepipeline create-pipeline --cli-input-json file://source-build-actions-codepipeline.json --region 'us-west-2'

It creates a pipeline that has a CodeCommit source action and a CodeBuild build action.

Integrating JFrog Artifactory

JFrog Artifactory provides default repositories for your project needs. For my NPM package repository, I am using the default virtual npm repository (named npm) that is available in Artifactory Pro. You might want to consider creating a repository per project but for the example used in this post, using the default lets me get started without having to configure a new repository.

I can use the steps in the Set Me Up -> npm section on the landing page to configure my worker to interact with the default NPM repository.

 

 

 

Custom actions in AWS CodePipeline

A custom action in AWS CodePipeline contains:

·      custom action definition

Describes the required values to run the custom action. I will define my custom action in the ‘Deploy’ category, identify the provider as ‘Artifactory’, of version ‘1’, and specify a variety of configurationProperties whose values will be defined when this stage is added to my pipeline.

·      custom action job worker

Polls CodePipeline for a job, scanning for its action-definition properties. In this blog post, after a job has been found, the job worker does the work required to publish the npm artifact to the Artifactory repository.

 

My custom action definition in JSON:

{
    "category": "Deploy",
    "configurationProperties": [{
        "name": "TypeOfArtifact",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
        "secret": false,
        "description": "Package type, ex. npm for node packages",
        "type": "String"
    },
    {   "name": "RepoKey",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Name of the repository in which this artifact should be stored"
    },
    {   "name": "UserName",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Username for authenticating with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "Password",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": true,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Password for authenticating with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "EmailAddress",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Email address used to authenticate with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "ArtifactoryHost",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Public address of Artifactory host, ex: https://myexamplehost.com or http://myexamplehost.com:8080"
    }],
    "provider": "Artifactory",
    "version": "1",
    "settings": {
        "entityUrlTemplate": "{Config:ArtifactoryHost}/artifactory/webapp/#/artifacts/browse/tree/General/{Config:RepoKey}"
    },
    "inputArtifactDetails": {
        "maximumCount": 5,
        "minimumCount": 1
    },
    "outputArtifactDetails": {
        "maximumCount": 5,
        "minimumCount": 0
    }
}

There are seven sections to the custom action definition:

  • category: This is the stage in which you will be creating this action. It can be Source, Build, Deploy, Test, Invoke, Approval. Except for source actions, the category section simply allows us to organize our actions. I am setting the category for my action as ‘Deploy’ because I’m using it to publish my node artifact to my Artifactory instance.
  • configurationProperties: These are the parameters or variables required for your project to authenticate and commit your artifact. In the case of my custom worker, I need:
    • TypeOfArtifact: In this case, npm, because it’s for the Node Package Manager.
    • RepoKey: The name of the repository. In this case, it’s the default npm.
    • UserName and Password for the user to authenticate with the Artifactory repository.
    • EmailAddress used to authenticate with the repository.
    • Artifactory host name or IP address.
  • provider: The name you define for your custom action stage. I have named the provider Artifactory.
  • version: Version number for the custom action. Because this is the first version, I set the version number to 1.
  • entityUrlTemplate: This URL is presented to your users for the deploy stage along with the title you define in your provider. The link takes the user to their artifact repository page in the Artifactory host.
  • inputArtifactDetails: The number of artifacts to expect from the previous stage in the pipeline.
  • outputArtifactDetails: The number of artifacts that should be the result from the custom action stage. Later in this blog post, I define 0 for my output artifacts because I am publishing the artifact to the Artifactory repository as the final action.

After I define the custom action in a JSON file, I use the AWS CLI to create the custom action type in CodePipeline:

aws codepipeline create-custom-action-type --cli-input-json file://artifactory_custom_action_deploy_npm.json --region='us-west-2'

After I create the custom action type in the same region as my pipeline, I edit the pipeline to add a Deploy stage and configure it to use the custom action I created for Artifactory:

 

 

 

 

I have created a custom worker for the actions required to commit the npm artifact to the Artifactory repository. The worker is in Python and it runs in a loop on an Amazon EC2 instance. My custom worker polls for a deploy job and publishes the NPM artifact to the Artifactory repository.

 

The EC2 instance is running Amazon Linux and has an IAM instance role attached that gives the worker permission to access CodePipeline. The worker process is as follows:

  1. Take the configuration properties from the custom worker and poll CodePipeline for a custom action job.
  2. After there is a job in the job queue with the appropriate category, provider, and version, acknowledge the job.
  3. Download the zipped artifact created in the previous Build stage from the provided S3 buckets with the provided temporary credentials.
  4. Unzip the artifact into a temporary directory.
  5. A user-defined Artifactory user name and password is used to receive a temporary API key from Artifactory.
  6. To avoid having to write the password to a file, use that temporary API key and user name to authenticate with the NPM repository.
  7. Publish the Node.js package to the specified repository.

Because I am running my custom worker on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance, I installed npm with the following command:

sudo yum install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel

For my custom worker, I used pip to install the required Python libraries:

pip install boto3 requests

For a full Python package list, see requirements.txt in the GitHub repository.

Let’s take a look at some of the code snippets from the worker.

First, the worker polls for jobs:

def action_type():
    ActionType = {
        'category': 'Deploy',
        'owner': 'Custom',
        'provider': 'Artifactory',
        'version': '1' }
    return(ActionType)

def poll_for_jobs():
    try:
        artifactory_action_type = action_type()
        print(artifactory_action_type)
        jobs = codepipeline.poll_for_jobs(actionTypeId=artifactory_action_type)
        while not jobs['jobs']:
            time.sleep(10)
            jobs = codepipeline.poll_for_jobs(actionTypeId=artifactory_action_type)
            if jobs['jobs']:
                print('Job found')
        return jobs['jobs'][0]
    except ClientError as e:
        print("Received an error: %s" % str(e))
        raise

 

When there is a job in the queue, the poller returns a number of values from the queue such as jobId, the input and output S3 buckets for artifacts, temporary credentials to access the S3 buckets, and other configuration details from the stage in the pipeline.

 

Here is an example of the return response:

{
	'jobs': [
		{
			'nonce': '3',
			'data': {
				'inputArtifacts': [
					{
						'name': 'Output',
						'location': {
							'type': 'S3',
							's3Location': {
								'objectKey': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCo/Output/Key,
							'bucketName': '123456789012-codepipelineartifact-us-west-2'
							}
						}
					}
				],
				'pipelineContext': {
						'action': {
							'name': 'Deploy'
						},
						'pipelineName': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCodeDeploy',
						'stage': {
							'name': 'Deploy'
						}
				},
				'actionTypeId': {
					'category': 'Deploy',
					'owner': 'Custom',
					'version': '1',
					'provider': 'Artifactory'
				},
				'outputArtifacts': [
					{
						'name': 'ArtifactoryOut',
						'location': {
							'type': 'S3',
							's3Location': {
								'objectKey': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCo/Artifactor/Key,
								'bucketName': '123456789012-codepipelineartifact-us-west-2'
							}
						}
					}
				],
				'actionConfiguration': {
					'configuration': {
						'UserName': 'admin',
						'ArtifactoryHost': 'https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com',
						'Password': 'xxx',
						'EmailAddress': '[email protected]',
						'TypeOfArtifact': 'npm',
						'RepoKey': 'npm'
					}
				},
				'artifactCredentials': {
					'secretAccessKey': 'SECRET',
			               'sessionToken':‘FQoDYXdz...XdndMF',
					'accessKeyId': 'ACCESSKEY'
					}
				},
				'id': 'a0eb',
				'accountId': '123456789012
			}
		],
		'ResponseMetadata': {
			'RetryAttempts': 0,
			'HTTPStatusCode': 200,
			'RequestId': a88b-cdbd5d08b9de',
			'HTTPHeaders': {
				'x-amzn-requestid': '77343c2d-eff4’,
				'content-length': '2461',
				'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1'
			}
		}
}

 

After successfully receiving the job details, the worker sends an acknowledgement to CodePipeline to ensure that the work on the job is not duplicated by other workers watching for the same job:

def job_acknowledge(jobId, nonce):
    try:
        print('Acknowledging job')
        result = codepipeline.acknowledge_job(jobId=jobId, nonce=nonce)
        return result
    except Exception as e:
        print("Received an error when trying to acknowledge the job: %s" % str(e))
        raise

With the job now acknowledged, the worker publishes the source code artifact into the desired repository. The worker gets the value of the artifact S3 bucket and objectKey from the inputArtifacts in the response from the poll_for_jobs API request. Next, the worker creates a new directory in /tmp and downloads the S3 object into this directory:

def get_bucket_location(bucketName, init_client):
    region = init_client.get_bucket_location(Bucket=bucketName)['LocationConstraint']
    if not region:
        region = 'us-east-1'
    return region


def get_s3_artifact(bucketName, objectKey, ak, sk, st):
    init_s3 = boto3.client('s3')
    region = get_bucket_location(bucketName, init_s3)
    session = Session(aws_access_key_id=ak,
                      aws_secret_access_key=sk,
                      aws_session_token=st)

    s3 = session.resource('s3',
                          region_name=region,
                          config=botocore.client.Config(signature_version='s3v4'))
    try:
        tempdirname = tempfile.mkdtemp()
    except OSError as e:
        print('Could not write temp directory %s' % tempdirname)
        raise
    bucket = s3.Bucket(bucketName)
    obj = bucket.Object(objectKey)
    filename = tempdirname + '/' + objectKey
    try:
        if os.path.dirname(objectKey):
            directory = os.path.dirname(filename)
            os.makedirs(directory)
        print('Downloading the %s object and writing it to disk in %s location' % (objectKey, tempdirname))
        with open(filename, 'wb') as data:
            obj.download_fileobj(data)
    except ClientError as e:
        print('Downloading the object and writing the file to disk raised this error: ' + str(e))
        raise
    return(filename, tempdirname)

 

 

Because the downloaded artifact from S3 is a zip file, the worker must unzip it first. To have a clean area in which to work, I extract the downloaded zip archive into a new directory:

def unzip_codepipeline_artifact(artifact, origtmpdir):
    # create a new temp directory
    # Unzip artifact into new directory
    try:
        newtempdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
        print('Extracting artifact %s into temporary directory %s' % (artifact, newtempdir))
        zip_ref = zipfile.ZipFile(artifact, 'r')
        zip_ref.extractall(newtempdir)
        zip_ref.close()
        shutil.rmtree(origtmpdir)
        return(os.listdir(newtempdir), newtempdir)
    except OSError as e:
        if e.errno != errno.EEXIST:
            shutil.rmtree(newtempdir)
            raise

The worker now has the npm package that I want to store in my Artifactory NPM repository.

To authenticate with the NPM repository, the worker requests a temporary token from the Artifactory host. After receiving this temporary token, it creates a .npmrc file in the worker user’s home directory that includes a hash of the user name and temporary token. After it has authenticated, the worker runs npm config set registry <URL OF REPOSITORY> to configure the npm registry value to be the Artifactory host.  Next, the worker runs npm publish –registry <URL OF REPOSITORY>, which publishes the node package to the NPM repository in the Artifactory host.

def push_to_npm(configuration, artifact_list, temp_dir, jobId):
    reponame = configuration['RepoKey']
    art_type = configuration['TypeOfArtifact']
    print("Putting artifact into NPM repository " + reponame)
    token, hostname, username = gen_artifactory_auth_token(configuration)
    npmconfigfile = create_npmconfig_file(configuration, username, token)
    url = hostname + '/artifactory/api/' + art_type + '/' + reponame
    print("Changing directory to " + str(temp_dir))
    os.chdir(temp_dir)
    try:
        print("Publishing following files to the repository: %s " % os.listdir(temp_dir))
        print("Sending artifact to Artifactory NPM registry URL: " + url)
        subprocess.call(["npm", "config", "set", "registry", url])
        req = subprocess.call(["npm", "publish", "--registry", url])
        print("Return code from npm publish: " + str(req))
        if req != 0:
            err_msg = "npm ERR! Recieved non OK response while sending response to Artifactory. Return code from npm publish: " + str(req)
            signal_failure(jobId, err_msg)
        else:
            signal_success(jobId)
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
       print("Received an error when trying to commit artifact %s to repository %s: " % (str(art_type), str(configuration['RepoKey']), str(e)))
       raise
    return(req, npmconfigfile)

 

If the return value from publishing to the repository is not 0, the worker signals a failure to CodePipeline. If the value is 0, the worker signals success to CodePipeline to indicate that the stage of the pipeline has been completed successfully.

For the custom worker code, see npm_job_worker.py in the GitHub repository.

I run my custom worker on an EC2 instance using the command python npm_job_worker.py, with an optional --version flag that can be used to specify worker versions other than 1. Then I trigger a release change in my pipeline:

From my custom worker output logs, I have just committed a package named node_example at version 1.0.3:

On artifact: index.js
Committing to the repo: https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm
Sending artifact to Artifactory URL: https:// artifactoryhost.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm
npm config: 0
npm http PUT https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm/node_example
npm http 201 https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm/node_example
+ [email protected]
Return code from npm publish: 0
Signaling success to CodePipeline

After that has been built successfully, I can find my artifact in my Artifactory repository:

To help you automate this process, I have created this AWS CloudFormation template that automates the creation of the CodeBuild project, the custom action, and the CodePipeline pipeline. It also launches the Amazon EC2-based custom job worker in an AWS Auto Scaling group. This template requires you to have a VPC and CodeCommit repository for your Node.js project. If you do not currently have a VPC in which you want to run your custom worker EC2 instances, you can use this AWS QuickStart to create one. If you do not have an existing Node.js project, I’ve provided a sample project in the GitHub repository.

Conclusion

I‘ve shown you the steps to integrate your JFrog Artifactory repository with your CodePipeline workflow. I’ve shown you how to create a custom action in CodePipeline and how to create a custom worker that works in your CI/CD pipeline. To dig deeper into custom actions and see how you can integrate your Artifactory repositories into your AWS CodePipeline projects, check out the full code base on GitHub.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us through the AWS CodePipeline forum.

Erin McGill is a Solutions Architect in the AWS Partner Program with a focus on DevOps and automation tooling.

Pirate IPTV Service Goes Bust After Premier League Deal, Exposing Users

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-iptv-service-goes-bust-after-premier-league-deal-exposing-users-180913/

For those out of the loop, unauthorized IPTV services offering many thousands of unlicensed channels have been gaining in popularity in recent years. They’re relatively cheap, fairly reliable, and offer acceptable levels of service.

They are, however, a huge thorn in the side of rightsholders who are desperate to bring them to their knees. One such organization is the UK’s Premier League, which has been disrupting IPTV services over the past year, hoping they’ll shut down.

Most have simply ridden the wave of blocks but one provider, Ace Hosting in the UK, showed signs of stress last year, revealing that it would no longer sell new subscriptions. There was little doubt in most people’s minds that the Premier League had gotten uncomfortably close to the IPTV provider.

Now, many months later, the amazing story can be told. It’s both incredible and shocking and will leave many shaking their heads in disbelief. First up, some background.

Doing things ‘properly’ – incorporation of a pirate service…

Considering how most operators of questionable services like to stay in the shade, it may come as a surprise to learn that Ace Hosting Limited is a proper company. Incorporated and registered at Companies House on January 3, 2017, Ace has two registered directors – family team Ian and Judith Isaac.

In common with several other IPTV operators in the UK who are also officially registered with the authorities, Ace Hosting has never filed any meaningful accounts. There’s a theory that the corporate structure is basically one of convenience, one that allows for the handling of large volumes of cash while limiting liability. The downside, of course, is that people are often more easily identified, in part due to the comprehensive paper trail.

Thanks to what can only be described as a slow-motion train wreck, the Ace Hosting debacle is revealing a bewildering set of circumstances. Last December, when Ace said it would stop signing up new members due to legal pressure, a serious copyright threat had already been filed against it.

Premier League v Ace Hosting

Documents seen by TorrentFreak reveal that the Premier League sent legal threats to Ace Hosting on December 15, 2017, just days before the subscription closure announcement. Somewhat surprisingly, Ace apparently felt it could pay the Premier League a damages amount and keep on trading.

But early March 2018, with the Premier League threatening Ace with all kinds of bad things, the company made a strange announcement.

“The ISPs in the UK and across Europe have recently become much more aggressive in blocking our service while football games are in progress,” Ace said in a statement.

“In order to get ourselves off of the ISP blacklist we are going to black out the EPL games for all users (including VPN users) starting on Monday. We believe that this will enable us to rebuild the bypass process and successfully provide you with all EPL games.”

It seems doubtful that Ace really intended to thumb its nose at the Premier League but it had continued to sell subscriptions since receiving threats in December, so all things seemed possible. But on March 24 that all changed, when Ace effectively announced its closure.

Premier League 1, Ace Hosting 0

“It is with sorrow that we announce that we are no longer accepting renewals, upgrades to existing subscriptions or the purchase of new credits. We plan to support existing subscriptions until they expire,” the team wrote.

“EPL games including highlights continue to be blocked and are not expected to be reinstated before the end of the season.”

Indeed, just days later the Premier League demanded a six-figure settlement sum from Ace Hosting, presumably to make a lawsuit disappear. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“When the proposed damages amount was received it was clear that the Company would not be able to cover the cost and that there was a very high probability that even with a negotiated settlement that the Company was insolvent,” documents relating to Ace’s liquidation read.

At this point, Ace says it immediately ceased trading but while torrent sites usually shut down and disappear into the night, Ace’s demise is now a matter of record.

Creditors – the good, the bad, and the ugly

On April 11, 2018, Ace’s directors contacted business recovery and insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor (Central) LLP to obtain advice on the company’s financial position. Begbies Traynor was instructed by Ace on April 23 and on May 8, Ace Hosting director Ian Isaac determined that his company could not pay its debts.

First the good news. According to an official report, Ace Hosting has considerable cash in the bank – £255,472.00 to be exact. Now the bad news – Ace has debts of £717,278.84. – the details of which are intriguing to say the least.

First up, Ace has ‘trade creditors’ to whom it owes £104,356. The vast majority of this sum is a settlement Ace agreed to pay to the Premier League.

“The directors entered into a settlement agreement with the Football Association Premier League Limited prior to placing the Company into liquidation as a result of a purported copyright infringement. However, there is a residual claim from the Football Association Premier League Limited which is included within trade creditors totaling £100,000,” Ace’s statement of affairs reads.

Bizarrely (given the nature of the business, at least) Ace also owes £260,000 to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in unpaid VAT and corporation tax, which is effectively the government’s cut of the pirate IPTV business’s labors.

Former Ace Hosting subscriber? Your cash is as good as gone

Finally – and this is where things get a bit sweaty for Joe Public – there are 15,768 “consumer creditors”, split between ‘retail’ and ‘business’ customers of the service. Together they are owed a staggering £353,000.

Although the documentation isn’t explicit, retail customers appear to be people who have purchased an Ace IPTV subscription that still had time to run when the service closed down. Business customers seem likely to be resellers of the service, who purchased ‘credits’ and didn’t get time to sell them before Ace disappeared.

The poison chalice here is that those who are owed money by Ace can actually apply to get some of it back, but that could be extremely risky.

“Creditor claims have not yet been adjudicated but we estimate that the majority of customers who paid for subscription services will receive less than £3 if there is a distribution to unsecured creditors. Furthermore, customer details will be passed to the relevant authorities if there is any suggestion of unlawful conduct,” documentation reads.

We spoke with a former Ace customer who had this to say about the situation.

“It was generally a good service notwithstanding their half-arsed attempts to evade the EPL block. At its heart there were people who seemed to know how to operate a decent service, although the customer-facing side of things was not the greatest,” he said.

“And no, I won’t be claiming a refund. I went into it with my eyes fully open so I don’t hold anyone responsible, except myself. In any case, anyone who wants a refund has to complete a claim form and provide proof of ID (LOL).”

The bad news for former subscribers continues…potentially

While it’s likely that most people will forgo their £3, the bad news isn’t over for subscribers. Begbies Traynor is warning that the liquidators will decide whether to hand over subscribers’ personal details to the Premier League and/or the authorities.

In any event, sometime in the next couple of weeks the names and addresses of all subscribers will be made “available for inspection” at an address in Wiltshire for two days, meaning that any interested parties could potentially gain access to sensitive information.

The bottom line is that Ace Hosting is in the red to the tune of £461,907 and will eventually disappear into the bowels of history. Whether its operators will have to answer for their conduct will remain to be seen but it seems unimaginable at this stage that things will end well.

Subscribers probably won’t get sucked in but in a story as bizarre as this one, anything could yet happen.

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

Welcome Josh — Data Center Technician

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/welcome-josh-datacenter-technician/

The Backblaze production team is growing and that means the data center is increasingly gaining some new faces. One of the newest to join the team is Josh! Lets learn a bit more about Josh shall we?

What is your Backblaze Title?
I’m a Data Center Technician in the Sacramento area.

Where are you originally from?
I lived all over the California central valley growing up.

What attracted you to Backblaze?
Backblaze is the best of a few worlds — cool startup meets professional DIYers meets transparent tech company (a rare thing).

What do you expect to learn while being at Backblaze?
I expect to learn about Data Center operations, and continue to develop the Linux skills that landed me here.

Favorite hobby?
Building and playing with new and useful toys.

Star Trek or Star Wars?
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Coke or Pepsi?
Good Beer.

Favorite food?
Tacos. No, burgers. No, it’s sushi. No, gyros. I can’t choose.

Why do you like certain things?
I like things that I can take apart and rebuild and turn every knob and adjust every piece. It means there’s a lot to learn, and I definitely like that.

Darmok and Jalad on the ocean! Welcome aboard Josh 😀

The post Welcome Josh — Data Center Technician appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Spring 2018 AWS SOC Reports are Now Available with 11 Services Added in Scope

Post Syndicated from Chris Gile original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/spring-2018-aws-soc-reports-are-now-available-with-11-services-added-in-scope/

Since our last System and Organization Control (SOC) audit, our service and compliance teams have been working to increase the number of AWS Services in scope prioritized based on customer requests. Today, we’re happy to report 11 services are newly SOC compliant, which is a 21 percent increase in the last six months.

With the addition of the following 11 new services, you can now select from a total of 62 SOC-compliant services. To see the full list, go to our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page:

• Amazon Athena
• Amazon QuickSight
• Amazon WorkDocs
• AWS Batch
• AWS CodeBuild
• AWS Config
• AWS OpsWorks Stacks
• AWS Snowball
• AWS Snowball Edge
• AWS Snowmobile
• AWS X-Ray

Our latest SOC 1, 2, and 3 reports covering the period from October 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018 are now available. The SOC 1 and 2 reports are available on-demand through AWS Artifact by logging into the AWS Management Console. The SOC 3 report can be downloaded here.

Finally, prospective customers can read our SOC 1 and 2 reports by reaching out to AWS Compliance.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Announcing Local Build Support for AWS CodeBuild

Post Syndicated from Karthik Thirugnanasambandam original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/announcing-local-build-support-for-aws-codebuild/

Today, we’re excited to announce local build support in AWS CodeBuild.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service. There are no servers to provision and scale, or software to install, configure, and operate. You just specify the location of your source code, choose your build settings, and CodeBuild runs build scripts for compiling, testing, and packaging your code.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to set up CodeBuild locally to build and test a sample Java application.

By building an application on a local machine you can:

  • Test the integrity and contents of a buildspec file locally.
  • Test and build an application locally before committing.
  • Identify and fix errors quickly from your local development environment.

Prerequisites

In this post, I am using AWS Cloud9 IDE as my development environment.

If you would like to use AWS Cloud9 as your IDE, follow the express setup steps in the AWS Cloud9 User Guide.

The AWS Cloud9 IDE comes with Docker and Git already installed. If you are going to use your laptop or desktop machine as your development environment, install Docker and Git before you start.

Steps to build CodeBuild image locally

Run git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images.git to download this repository to your local machine.

$ git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images.git

Lets build a local CodeBuild image for JDK 8 environment. The Dockerfile for JDK 8 is present in /aws-codebuild-docker-images/ubuntu/java/openjdk-8.

Edit the Dockerfile to remove the last line ENTRYPOINT [“dockerd-entrypoint.sh”] and save the file.

Run cd ubuntu/java/openjdk-8 to change the directory in your local workspace.

Run docker build -t aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8 . to build the Docker image locally. This command will take few minutes to complete.

$ cd aws-codebuild-docker-images
$ cd ubuntu/java/openjdk-8
$ docker build -t aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8 .

Steps to setup CodeBuild local agent

Run the following Docker pull command to download the local CodeBuild agent.

$ docker pull amazon/aws-codebuild-local:latest --disable-content-trust=false

Now you have the local agent image on your machine and can run a local build.

Run the following git command to download a sample Java project.

$ git clone https://github.com/karthiksambandam/sample-web-app.git

Steps to use the local agent to build a sample project

Let’s build the sample Java project using the local agent.

Execute the following Docker command to run the local agent and build the sample web app repository you cloned earlier.

$ docker run -it -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -e "IMAGE_NAME=aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8" -e "ARTIFACTS=/home/ec2-user/environment/artifacts" -e "SOURCE=/home/ec2-user/environment/sample-web-app" amazon/aws-codebuild-local

Note: We need to provide three environment variables namely  IMAGE_NAME, SOURCE and ARTIFACTS.

IMAGE_NAME: The name of your build environment image.

SOURCE: The absolute path to your source code directory.

ARTIFACTS: The absolute path to your artifact output folder.

When you run the sample project, you get a runtime error that says the YAML file does not exist. This is because a buildspec.yml file is not included in the sample web project. AWS CodeBuild requires a buildspec.yml to run a build. For more information about buildspec.yml, see Build Spec Example in the AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

Let’s add a buildspec.yml file with the following content to the sample-web-app folder and then rebuild the project.

version: 0.2

phases:
  build:
    commands:
      - echo Build started on `date`
      - mvn install

artifacts:
  files:
    - target/javawebdemo.war


$ docker run -it -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -e "IMAGE_NAME=aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8" -e "ARTIFACTS=/home/ec2-user/environment/artifacts" -e "SOURCE=/home/ec2-user/environment/sample-web-app" amazon/aws-codebuild-local

This time your build should be successful. Upon successful execution, look in the /artifacts folder for the final built artifacts.zip file to validate.

Conclusion:

In this blog post, I showed you how to quickly set up the CodeBuild local agent to build projects right from your local desktop machine or laptop. As you see, local builds can improve developer productivity by helping you identify and fix errors quickly.

I hope you found this post useful. Feel free to leave your feedback or suggestions in the comments.

CI/CD with Data: Enabling Data Portability in a Software Delivery Pipeline with AWS Developer Tools, Kubernetes, and Portworx

Post Syndicated from Kausalya Rani Krishna Samy original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/cicd-with-data-enabling-data-portability-in-a-software-delivery-pipeline-with-aws-developer-tools-kubernetes-and-portworx/

This post is written by Eric Han – Vice President of Product Management Portworx and Asif Khan – Solutions Architect

Data is the soul of an application. As containers make it easier to package and deploy applications faster, testing plays an even more important role in the reliable delivery of software. Given that all applications have data, development teams want a way to reliably control, move, and test using real application data or, at times, obfuscated data.

For many teams, moving application data through a CI/CD pipeline, while honoring compliance and maintaining separation of concerns, has been a manual task that doesn’t scale. At best, it is limited to a few applications, and is not portable across environments. The goal should be to make running and testing stateful containers (think databases and message buses where operations are tracked) as easy as with stateless (such as with web front ends where they are often not).

Why is state important in testing scenarios? One reason is that many bugs manifest only when code is tested against real data. For example, we might simply want to test a database schema upgrade but a small synthetic dataset does not exercise the critical, finer corner cases in complex business logic. If we want true end-to-end testing, we need to be able to easily manage our data or state.

In this blog post, we define a CI/CD pipeline reference architecture that can automate data movement between applications. We also provide the steps to follow to configure the CI/CD pipeline.

 

Stateful Pipelines: Need for Portable Volumes

As part of continuous integration, testing, and deployment, a team may need to reproduce a bug found in production against a staging setup. Here, the hosting environment is comprised of a cluster with Kubernetes as the scheduler and Portworx for persistent volumes. The testing workflow is then automated by AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeBuild.

Portworx offers Kubernetes storage that can be used to make persistent volumes portable between AWS environments and pipelines. The addition of Portworx to the AWS Developer Tools continuous deployment for Kubernetes reference architecture adds persistent storage and storage orchestration to a Kubernetes cluster. The example uses MongoDB as the demonstration of a stateful application. In practice, the workflow applies to any containerized application such as Cassandra, MySQL, Kafka, and Elasticsearch.

Using the reference architecture, a developer calls CodePipeline to trigger a snapshot of the running production MongoDB database. Portworx then creates a block-based, writable snapshot of the MongoDB volume. Meanwhile, the production MongoDB database continues serving end users and is uninterrupted.

Without the Portworx integrations, a manual process would require an application-level backup of the database instance that is outside of the CI/CD process. For larger databases, this could take hours and impact production. The use of block-based snapshots follows best practices for resilient and non-disruptive backups.

As part of the workflow, CodePipeline deploys a new MongoDB instance for staging onto the Kubernetes cluster and mounts the second Portworx volume that has the data from production. CodePipeline triggers the snapshot of a Portworx volume through an AWS Lambda function, as shown here

 

 

 

AWS Developer Tools with Kubernetes: Integrated Workflow with Portworx

In the following workflow, a developer is testing changes to a containerized application that calls on MongoDB. The tests are performed against a staging instance of MongoDB. The same workflow applies if changes were on the server side. The original production deployment is scheduled as a Kubernetes deployment object and uses Portworx as the storage for the persistent volume.

The continuous deployment pipeline runs as follows:

  • Developers integrate bug fix changes into a main development branch that gets merged into a CodeCommit master branch.
  • Amazon CloudWatch triggers the pipeline when code is merged into a master branch of an AWS CodeCommit repository.
  • AWS CodePipeline sends the new revision to AWS CodeBuild, which builds a Docker container image with the build ID.
  • AWS CodeBuild pushes the new Docker container image tagged with the build ID to an Amazon ECR registry.
  • Kubernetes downloads the new container (for the database client) from Amazon ECR and deploys the application (as a pod) and staging MongoDB instance (as a deployment object).
  • AWS CodePipeline, through a Lambda function, calls Portworx to snapshot the production MongoDB and deploy a staging instance of MongoDB• Portworx provides a snapshot of the production instance as the persistent storage of the staging MongoDB
    • The MongoDB instance mounts the snapshot.

At this point, the staging setup mimics a production environment. Teams can run integration and full end-to-end tests, using partner tooling, without impacting production workloads. The full pipeline is shown here.

 

Summary

This reference architecture showcases how development teams can easily move data between production and staging for the purposes of testing. Instead of taking application-specific manual steps, all operations in this CodePipeline architecture are automated and tracked as part of the CI/CD process.

This integrated experience is part of making stateful containers as easy as stateless. With AWS CodePipeline for CI/CD process, developers can easily deploy stateful containers onto a Kubernetes cluster with Portworx storage and automate data movement within their process.

The reference architecture and code are available on GitHub:

● Reference architecture: https://github.com/portworx/aws-kube-codesuite
● Lambda function source code for Portworx additions: https://github.com/portworx/aws-kube-codesuite/blob/master/src/kube-lambda.py

For more information about persistent storage for containers, visit the Portworx website. For more information about Code Pipeline, see the AWS CodePipeline User Guide.

Secure Build with AWS CodeBuild and LayeredInsight

Post Syndicated from Asif Khan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/secure-build-with-aws-codebuild-and-layeredinsight/

This post is written by Asif Awan, Chief Technology Officer of Layered Insight, Subin Mathew – Software Development Manager for AWS CodeBuild, and Asif Khan – Solutions Architect

Enterprises adopt containers because they recognize the benefits: speed, agility, portability, and high compute density. They understand how accelerating application delivery and deployment pipelines makes it possible to rapidly slipstream new features to customers. Although the benefits are indisputable, this acceleration raises concerns about security and corporate compliance with software governance. In this blog post, I provide a solution that shows how Layered Insight, the pioneer and global leader in container-native application protection, can be used with seamless application build and delivery pipelines like those available in AWS CodeBuild to address these concerns.

Layered Insight solutions

Layered Insight enables organizations to unify DevOps and SecOps by providing complete visibility and control of containerized applications. Using the industry’s first embedded security approach, Layered Insight solves the challenges of container performance and protection by providing accurate insight into container images, adaptive analysis of running containers, and automated enforcement of container behavior.

 

AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools.

 

Problem Definition

Security and compliance concerns span the lifecycle of application containers. Common concerns include:

Visibility into the container images. You need to verify the software composition information of the container image to determine whether known vulnerabilities associated with any of the software packages and libraries are included in the container image.

Governance of container images is critical because only certain open source packages/libraries, of specific versions, should be included in the container images. You need support for mechanisms for blacklisting all container images that include a certain version of a software package/library, or only allowing open source software that come with a specific type of license (such as Apache, MIT, GPL, and so on). You need to be able to address challenges such as:

·       Defining the process for image compliance policies at the enterprise, department, and group levels.

·       Preventing the images that fail the compliance checks from being deployed in critical environments, such as staging, pre-prod, and production.

Visibility into running container instances is critical, including:

·       CPU and memory utilization.

·       Security of the build environment.

·       All activities (system, network, storage, and application layer) of the application code running in each container instance.

Protection of running container instances that is:

·       Zero-touch to the developers (not an SDK-based approach).

·       Zero touch to the DevOps team and doesn’t limit the portability of the containerized application.

·       This protection must retain the option to switch to a different container stack or orchestration layer, or even to a different Container as a Service (CaaS ).

·       And it must be a fully automated solution to SecOps, so that the SecOps team doesn’t have to manually analyze and define detailed blacklist and whitelist policies.

 

Solution Details

In AWS CodeCommit, we have three projects:
●     “Democode” is a simple Java application, with one buildspec to build the app into a Docker container (run by build-demo-image CodeBuild project), and another to instrument said container (instrument-image CodeBuild project). The resulting container is stored in ECR repo javatestasjavatest:20180415-layered. This instrumented container is running in AWS Fargate cluster demo-java-appand can be seen in the Layered Insight runtime console as the javatestapplication in us-east-1.
●     aws-codebuild-docker-imagesis a clone of the official aws-codebuild-docker-images repo on GitHub . This CodeCommit project is used by the build-python-builder CodeBuild project to build the python 3.3.6 codebuild image and is stored at the codebuild-python ECR repo. We then manually instructed the Layered Insight console to instrument the image.
●     scan-java-imagecontains just a buildspec.yml file. This file is used by the scan-java-image CodeBuild project to instruct Layered Assessment to perform a vulnerability scan of the javatest container image built previously, and then run the scan results through a compliance policy that states there should be no medium vulnerabilities. This build fails — but in this case that is a success: the scan completes successfully, but compliance fails as there are medium-level issues found in the scan.

This build is performed using the instrumented version of the Python 3.3.6 CodeBuild image, so the activity of the processes running within the build are recorded each time within the LI console.

Build container image

Create or use a CodeCommit project with your application. To build this image and store it in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), add a buildspec file to the project and build a container image and create a CodeBuild project.

Scan container image

Once the image is built, create a new buildspec in the same project or a new one that looks similar to below (update ECR URL as necessary):

version: 0.2
phases:
  pre_build:
    commands:
      - echo Pulling down LI Scan API client scripts
      - git clone https://github.com/LayeredInsight/scan-api-example-python.git
      - echo Setting up LI Scan API client
      - cd scan-api-example-python
      - pip install layint_scan_api
      - pip install -r requirements.txt
  build:
    commands:
      - echo Scanning container started on `date`
      - IMAGEID=$(./li_add_image --name <aws-region>.amazonaws.com/javatest:20180415)
      - ./li_wait_for_scan -v --imageid $IMAGEID
      - ./li_run_image_compliance -v --imageid $IMAGEID --policyid PB15260f1acb6b2aa5b597e9d22feffb538256a01fbb4e5a95

Add the buildspec file to the git repo, push it, and then build a CodeBuild project using with the instrumented Python 3.3.6 CodeBuild image at <aws-region>.amazonaws.com/codebuild-python:3.3.6-layered. Set the following environment variables in the CodeBuild project:
●     LI_APPLICATIONNAME – name of the build to display
●     LI_LOCATION – location of the build project to display
●     LI_API_KEY – ApiKey:<key-name>:<api-key>
●     LI_API_HOST – location of the Layered Insight API service

Instrument container image

Next, to instrument the new container image:

  1. In the Layered Insight runtime console, ensure that the ECR registry and credentials are defined (click the Setup icon and the ‘+’ sign on the top right of the screen to add a new container registry). Note the name given to the registry in the console, as this needs to be referenced in the li_add_imagecommand in the script, below.
  2. Next, add a new buildspec (with a new name) to the CodeCommit project, such as the one shown below. This code will download the Layered Insight runtime client, and use it to instruct the Layered Insight service to instrument the image that was just built: 
    version: 0.2
phases:
pre_build:
commands:
echo Pulling down LI API Runtime client scripts
git clone https://github.com/LayeredInsight/runtime-api-example-python
echo Setting up LI API client
cd runtime-api-example-python
pip install layint-runtime-api
pip install -r requirements.txt
build:
commands:
echo Instrumentation started on `date`
./li_add_image --registry "Javatest ECR" --name IMAGE_NAME:TAG --description "IMAGE DESCRIPTION" --policy "Default Policy" --instrument --wait --verbose
  3. Commit and push the new buildspec file.
  4. Going back to CodeBuild, create a new project, with the same CodeCommit repo, but this time select the new buildspec file. Use a Python 3.3.6 builder – either the AWS or LI Instrumented version.
  5. Click Continue
  6. Click Save
  7. Run the build, again on the master branch.
  8. If everything runs successfully, a new image should appear in the ECR registry with a -layered suffix. This is the instrumented image.

Run instrumented container image

When the instrumented container is now run — in ECS, Fargate, or elsewhere — it will log data back to the Layered Insight runtime console. It’s appearance in the console can be modified by setting the LI_APPLICATIONNAME and LI_LOCATION environment variables when running the container.

Conclusion

In the above blog we have provided you steps needed to embed governance and runtime security in your build pipelines running on AWS CodeBuild using Layered Insight.

 

 

 

Implement continuous integration and delivery of serverless AWS Glue ETL applications using AWS Developer Tools

Post Syndicated from Prasad Alle original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/implement-continuous-integration-and-delivery-of-serverless-aws-glue-etl-applications-using-aws-developer-tools/

AWS Glue is an increasingly popular way to develop serverless ETL (extract, transform, and load) applications for big data and data lake workloads. Organizations that transform their ETL applications to cloud-based, serverless ETL architectures need a seamless, end-to-end continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline: from source code, to build, to deployment, to product delivery. Having a good CI/CD pipeline can help your organization discover bugs before they reach production and deliver updates more frequently. It can also help developers write quality code and automate the ETL job release management process, mitigate risk, and more.

AWS Glue is a fully managed data catalog and ETL service. It simplifies and automates the difficult and time-consuming tasks of data discovery, conversion, and job scheduling. AWS Glue crawls your data sources and constructs a data catalog using pre-built classifiers for popular data formats and data types, including CSV, Apache Parquet, JSON, and more.

When you are developing ETL applications using AWS Glue, you might come across some of the following CI/CD challenges:

  • Iterative development with unit tests
  • Continuous integration and build
  • Pushing the ETL pipeline to a test environment
  • Pushing the ETL pipeline to a production environment
  • Testing ETL applications using real data (live test)
  • Exploring and validating data

In this post, I walk you through a solution that implements a CI/CD pipeline for serverless AWS Glue ETL applications supported by AWS Developer Tools (including AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodeBuild) and AWS CloudFormation.

Solution overview

The following diagram shows the pipeline workflow:

This solution uses AWS CodePipeline, which lets you orchestrate and automate the test and deploy stages for ETL application source code. The solution consists of a pipeline that contains the following stages:

1.) Source Control: In this stage, the AWS Glue ETL job source code and the AWS CloudFormation template file for deploying the ETL jobs are both committed to version control. I chose to use AWS CodeCommit for version control.

To get the ETL job source code and AWS CloudFormation template, download the gluedemoetl.zip file. This solution is developed based on a previous post, Build a Data Lake Foundation with AWS Glue and Amazon S3.

2.) LiveTest: In this stage, all resources—including AWS Glue crawlers, jobs, S3 buckets, roles, and other resources that are required for the solution—are provisioned, deployed, live tested, and cleaned up.

The LiveTest stage includes the following actions:

  • Deploy: In this action, all the resources that are required for this solution (crawlers, jobs, buckets, roles, and so on) are provisioned and deployed using an AWS CloudFormation template.
  • AutomatedLiveTest: In this action, all the AWS Glue crawlers and jobs are executed and data exploration and validation tests are performed. These validation tests include, but are not limited to, record counts in both raw tables and transformed tables in the data lake and any other business validations. I used AWS CodeBuild for this action.
  • LiveTestApproval: This action is included for the cases in which a pipeline administrator approval is required to deploy/promote the ETL applications to the next stage. The pipeline pauses in this action until an administrator manually approves the release.
  • LiveTestCleanup: In this action, all the LiveTest stage resources, including test crawlers, jobs, roles, and so on, are deleted using the AWS CloudFormation template. This action helps minimize cost by ensuring that the test resources exist only for the duration of the AutomatedLiveTest and LiveTestApproval

3.) DeployToProduction: In this stage, all the resources are deployed using the AWS CloudFormation template to the production environment.

Try it out

This code pipeline takes approximately 20 minutes to complete the LiveTest test stage (up to the LiveTest approval stage, in which manual approval is required).

To get started with this solution, choose Launch Stack:

This creates the CI/CD pipeline with all of its stages, as described earlier. It performs an initial commit of the sample AWS Glue ETL job source code to trigger the first release change.

In the AWS CloudFormation console, choose Create. After the template finishes creating resources, you see the pipeline name on the stack Outputs tab.

After that, open the CodePipeline console and select the newly created pipeline. Initially, your pipeline’s CodeCommit stage shows that the source action failed.

Allow a few minutes for your new pipeline to detect the initial commit applied by the CloudFormation stack creation. As soon as the commit is detected, your pipeline starts. You will see the successful stage completion status as soon as the CodeCommit source stage runs.

In the CodeCommit console, choose Code in the navigation pane to view the solution files.

Next, you can watch how the pipeline goes through the LiveTest stage of the deploy and AutomatedLiveTest actions, until it finally reaches the LiveTestApproval action.

At this point, if you check the AWS CloudFormation console, you can see that a new template has been deployed as part of the LiveTest deploy action.

At this point, make sure that the AWS Glue crawlers and the AWS Glue job ran successfully. Also check whether the corresponding databases and external tables have been created in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Then verify that the data is validated using Amazon Athena, as shown following.

Open the AWS Glue console, and choose Databases in the navigation pane. You will see the following databases in the Data Catalog:

Open the Amazon Athena console, and run the following queries. Verify that the record counts are matching.

SELECT count(*) FROM "nycitytaxi_gluedemocicdtest"."data";
SELECT count(*) FROM "nytaxiparquet_gluedemocicdtest"."datalake";

The following shows the raw data:

The following shows the transformed data:

The pipeline pauses the action until the release is approved. After validating the data, manually approve the revision on the LiveTestApproval action on the CodePipeline console.

Add comments as needed, and choose Approve.

The LiveTestApproval stage now appears as Approved on the console.

After the revision is approved, the pipeline proceeds to use the AWS CloudFormation template to destroy the resources that were deployed in the LiveTest deploy action. This helps reduce cost and ensures a clean test environment on every deployment.

Production deployment is the final stage. In this stage, all the resources—AWS Glue crawlers, AWS Glue jobs, Amazon S3 buckets, roles, and so on—are provisioned and deployed to the production environment using the AWS CloudFormation template.

After successfully running the whole pipeline, feel free to experiment with it by changing the source code stored on AWS CodeCommit. For example, if you modify the AWS Glue ETL job to generate an error, it should make the AutomatedLiveTest action fail. Or if you change the AWS CloudFormation template to make its creation fail, it should affect the LiveTest deploy action. The objective of the pipeline is to guarantee that all changes that are deployed to production are guaranteed to work as expected.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how easy it is to implement CI/CD for serverless AWS Glue ETL solutions with AWS developer tools like AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild at scale. Implementing such solutions can help you accelerate ETL development and testing at your organization.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

 

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Implement Continuous Integration and Delivery of Apache Spark Applications using AWS and Build a Data Lake Foundation with AWS Glue and Amazon S3.

 

About the Authors

Prasad Alle is a Senior Big Data Consultant with AWS Professional Services. He spends his time leading and building scalable, reliable Big data, Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence and IoT solutions for AWS Enterprise and Strategic customers. His interests extend to various technologies such as Advanced Edge Computing, Machine learning at Edge. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family.

 
Luis Caro is a Big Data Consultant for AWS Professional Services. He works with our customers to provide guidance and technical assistance on big data projects, helping them improving the value of their solutions when using AWS.

 

 

 

UK IPTV Provider ACE Calls it Quits, Cites Mounting Legal Pressure

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/uk-iptv-provider-ace-calls-it-quits-cites-mounting-legal-pressure-180402/

Terms including “Kodi box” are now in common usage in the UK and thanks to continuing coverage in the tabloid media, more and more people are learning that free content is just a few clicks away.

In parallel, premium IPTV services are also on the up. In basic terms, these provide live TV and sports through an Internet connection in a consumer-friendly way. When bundled with beautiful interfaces and fully functional Electronic Program Guides (EPG), they’re almost indistinguishable from services offered by Sky and BTSport, for example.

These come at a price, typically up to £10 per month or £20 for a three-month package, but for the customer this represents good value for money. Many providers offer several thousand channels in decent quality and reliability is much better than free streams. This kind of service was offered by prominent UK provider ACE TV but an announcement last December set alarm bells ringing.

“It saddens me to announce this, but due to pressure from the authorities in the UK, we are no longer selling new subscriptions. This obviously includes trials,” ACE said in a statement.

ACE insisted that it would continue as a going concern, servicing existing customers. However, it did keep its order books open for a while longer, giving people one last chance to subscribe to the service for anything up to a year. And with that ACE continued more quietly in the background, albeit with a disabled Facebook page.

But things were not well in ACE land. Like all major IPTV providers delivering services to the UK, ACE was subjected to blocking action by the English Premier League and UEFA. High Court injunctions allow ISPs in the UK to block their pirate streams in real-time, meaning that matches were often rendered inaccessible to ACE’s customers.

While this blocking can be mitigated when the customer uses a VPN, most don’t want to go to the trouble. Some IPTV providers have engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with the blocking efforts, some with an impressive level of success. However, it appears that the nuisance eventually took its toll on ACE.

“The ISPs in the UK and across Europe have recently become much more aggressive in blocking our service while football games are in progress,” ACE said in a statement last month.

“In order to get ourselves off of the ISP blacklist we are going to black out the EPL games for all users (including VPN users) starting on Monday. We believe that this will enable us to rebuild the bypass process and successfully provide you with all EPL games.”

People familiar with the blocking process inform TF that this is unlikely to have worked.

Although nobody outside the EPL’s partners knows exactly how the system works, it appears that anti-piracy companies simply subscribe to IPTV services themselves and extract the IP addresses serving the content. ISPs then block them. No pause would’ve helped the situation.

Then, on March 24, another announcement indicated that ACE probably wouldn’t make it very far into 2019.

“It is with sorrow that we announce that we are no longer accepting renewals, upgrades to existing subscriptions or the purchase of new credits. We plan to support existing subscriptions until they expire,” the team wrote.

“EPL games including highlights continue to be blocked and are not expected to be reinstated before the end of the season.”

The suggestion was that ACE would keep going, at least for a while, but chat transcripts with the company obtained by TF last month indicated that ACE would probably shut down, sooner rather than later. Less than a week on, that proved to be the case.

On or around March 29, ACE began sending emails out to customers, announcing the end of the company.

“We recently announced that Ace was no longer accepting renewals or offering new reseller credits but planned to support existing subscription. Due to mounting legal pressure in the UK we have been forced to change our plans and we are now announcing that Ace will close down at the end of March,” the email read.

“This means that from April 1st onwards the Ace service will no longer work.”

April 1 was yesterday and it turns out it wasn’t a joke. Customers who paid in advance no longer have a service and those who paid a year up front are particularly annoyed. So-called ‘re-sellers’ of ACE are fuming more than most.

Re-sellers effectively act as sales agents for IPTV providers, buying access to the service at a reduced rate and making a small profit on each subscriber they sign up. They get a nice web interface to carry out the transactions and it’s something that anyone can do.

However, this generally requires investment from the re-seller in order to buy ‘credits’ up front, which are used to sell services to new customers. Those who invested money in this way with ACE are now in trouble.

“If anyone from ACE is reading here, yer a bunch of fuckin arseholes. I hope your next shite is a hedgehog!!” one shouted on Reddit. “Being a reseller for them and losing hundreds a pounds is bad enough!!”

While the loss of a service is probably a shock to more recent converts to the world of IPTV, those with experience of any kind of pirate TV product should already be well aware that this is nothing out of the ordinary.

For those who bought hacked or cloned satellite cards in the 1990s, to those who used ‘chipped’ cable boxes a little later on, the free rides all come to an end at some point. It’s just a question of riding the wave when it arrives and paying attention to the next big thing, without investing too much money at the wrong time.

For ACE’s former customers, it’s simply a case of looking for a new provider. There are plenty of them, some with zero intent of shutting down. There are rumors that ACE might ‘phoenix’ themselves under another name but that’s also par for the course when people feel they’re owed money and suspicions are riding high.

“Please do not ask if we are rebranding/setting up a new service, the answer is no,” ACE said in a statement.

And so the rollercoaster continues…

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

Performing Unit Testing in an AWS CodeStar Project

Post Syndicated from Jerry Mathen Jacob original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/performing-unit-testing-in-an-aws-codestar-project/

In this blog post, I will show how you can perform unit testing as a part of your AWS CodeStar project. AWS CodeStar helps you quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS. With AWS CodeStar, you can set up your continuous delivery (CD) toolchain and manage your software development from one place.

Because unit testing tests individual units of application code, it is helpful for quickly identifying and isolating issues. As a part of an automated CI/CD process, it can also be used to prevent bad code from being deployed into production.

Many of the AWS CodeStar project templates come preconfigured with a unit testing framework so that you can start deploying your code with more confidence. The unit testing is configured to run in the provided build stage so that, if the unit tests do not pass, the code is not deployed. For a list of AWS CodeStar project templates that include unit testing, see AWS CodeStar Project Templates in the AWS CodeStar User Guide.

The scenario

As a big fan of superhero movies, I decided to list my favorites and ask my friends to vote on theirs by using a WebService endpoint I created. The example I use is a Python web service running on AWS Lambda with AWS CodeCommit as the code repository. CodeCommit is a fully managed source control system that hosts Git repositories and works with all Git-based tools.

Here’s how you can create the WebService endpoint:

Sign in to the AWS CodeStar console. Choose Start a project, which will take you to the list of project templates.

create project

For code edits I will choose AWS Cloud9, which is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that you use to write, run, and debug code.

choose cloud9

Here are the other tasks required by my scenario:

  • Create a database table where the votes can be stored and retrieved as needed.
  • Update the logic in the Lambda function that was created for posting and getting the votes.
  • Update the unit tests (of course!) to verify that the logic works as expected.

For a database table, I’ve chosen Amazon DynamoDB, which offers a fast and flexible NoSQL database.

Getting set up on AWS Cloud9

From the AWS CodeStar console, go to the AWS Cloud9 console, which should take you to your project code. I will open up a terminal at the top-level folder under which I will set up my environment and required libraries.

Use the following command to set the PYTHONPATH environment variable on the terminal.

export PYTHONPATH=/home/ec2-user/environment/vote-your-movie

You should now be able to use the following command to execute the unit tests in your project.

python -m unittest discover vote-your-movie/tests

cloud9 setup

Start coding

Now that you have set up your local environment and have a copy of your code, add a DynamoDB table to the project by defining it through a template file. Open template.yml, which is the Serverless Application Model (SAM) template file. This template extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables required by your serverless application.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: 2010-09-09
Transform:
- AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
- AWS::CodeStar

Parameters:
  ProjectId:
    Type: String
    Description: CodeStar projectId used to associate new resources to team members

Resources:
  # The DB table to store the votes.
  MovieVoteTable:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable
    Properties:
      PrimaryKey:
        # Name of the "Candidate" is the partition key of the table.
        Name: Candidate
        Type: String
  # Creating a new lambda function for retrieving and storing votes.
  MovieVoteLambda:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: index.handler
      Runtime: python3.6
      Environment:
        # Setting environment variables for your lambda function.
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref "MovieVoteTable"
          TABLE_REGION: !Ref "AWS::Region"
      Role:
        Fn::ImportValue:
          !Join ['-', [!Ref 'ProjectId', !Ref 'AWS::Region', 'LambdaTrustRole']]
      Events:
        GetEvent:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /
            Method: get
        PostEvent:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /
            Method: post

We’ll use Python’s boto3 library to connect to AWS services. And we’ll use Python’s mock library to mock AWS service calls for our unit tests.
Use the following command to install these libraries:

pip install --upgrade boto3 mock -t .

install dependencies

Add these libraries to the buildspec.yml, which is the YAML file that is required for CodeBuild to execute.

version: 0.2

phases:
  install:
    commands:

      # Upgrade AWS CLI to the latest version
      - pip install --upgrade awscli boto3 mock

  pre_build:
    commands:

      # Discover and run unit tests in the 'tests' directory. For more information, see <https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html#test-discovery>
      - python -m unittest discover tests

  build:
    commands:

      # Use AWS SAM to package the application by using AWS CloudFormation
      - aws cloudformation package --template template.yml --s3-bucket $S3_BUCKET --output-template template-export.yml

artifacts:
  type: zip
  files:
    - template-export.yml

Open the index.py where we can write the simple voting logic for our Lambda function.

import json
import datetime
import boto3
import os

table_name = os.environ['TABLE_NAME']
table_region = os.environ['TABLE_REGION']

VOTES_TABLE = boto3.resource('dynamodb', region_name=table_region).Table(table_name)
CANDIDATES = {"A": "Black Panther", "B": "Captain America: Civil War", "C": "Guardians of the Galaxy", "D": "Thor: Ragnarok"}

def handler(event, context):
    if event['httpMethod'] == 'GET':
        resp = VOTES_TABLE.scan()
        return {'statusCode': 200,
                'body': json.dumps({item['Candidate']: int(item['Votes']) for item in resp['Items']}),
                'headers': {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}}

    elif event['httpMethod'] == 'POST':
        try:
            body = json.loads(event['body'])
        except:
            return {'statusCode': 400,
                    'body': 'Invalid input! Expecting a JSON.',
                    'headers': {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}}
        if 'candidate' not in body:
            return {'statusCode': 400,
                    'body': 'Missing "candidate" in request.',
                    'headers': {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}}
        if body['candidate'] not in CANDIDATES.keys():
            return {'statusCode': 400,
                    'body': 'You must vote for one of the following candidates - {}.'.format(get_allowed_candidates()),
                    'headers': {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}}

        resp = VOTES_TABLE.update_item(
            Key={'Candidate': CANDIDATES.get(body['candidate'])},
            UpdateExpression='ADD Votes :incr',
            ExpressionAttributeValues={':incr': 1},
            ReturnValues='ALL_NEW'
        )
        return {'statusCode': 200,
                'body': "{} now has {} votes".format(CANDIDATES.get(body['candidate']), resp['Attributes']['Votes']),
                'headers': {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}}

def get_allowed_candidates():
    l = []
    for key in CANDIDATES:
        l.append("'{}' for '{}'".format(key, CANDIDATES.get(key)))
    return ", ".join(l)

What our code basically does is take in the HTTPS request call as an event. If it is an HTTP GET request, it gets the votes result from the table. If it is an HTTP POST request, it sets a vote for the candidate of choice. We also validate the inputs in the POST request to filter out requests that seem malicious. That way, only valid calls are stored in the table.

In the example code provided, we use a CANDIDATES variable to store our candidates, but you can store the candidates in a JSON file and use Python’s json library instead.

Let’s update the tests now. Under the tests folder, open the test_handler.py and modify it to verify the logic.

import os
# Some mock environment variables that would be used by the mock for DynamoDB
os.environ['TABLE_NAME'] = "MockHelloWorldTable"
os.environ['TABLE_REGION'] = "us-east-1"

# The library containing our logic.
import index

# Boto3's core library
import botocore
# For handling JSON.
import json
# Unit test library
import unittest
## Getting StringIO based on your setup.
try:
    from StringIO import StringIO
except ImportError:
    from io import StringIO
## Python mock library
from mock import patch, call
from decimal import Decimal

@patch('botocore.client.BaseClient._make_api_call')
class TestCandidateVotes(unittest.TestCase):

    ## Test the HTTP GET request flow. 
    ## We expect to get back a successful response with results of votes from the table (mocked).
    def test_get_votes(self, boto_mock):
        # Input event to our method to test.
        expected_event = {'httpMethod': 'GET'}
        # The mocked values in our DynamoDB table.
        items_in_db = [{'Candidate': 'Black Panther', 'Votes': Decimal('3')},
                        {'Candidate': 'Captain America: Civil War', 'Votes': Decimal('8')},
                        {'Candidate': 'Guardians of the Galaxy', 'Votes': Decimal('8')},
                        {'Candidate': "Thor: Ragnarok", 'Votes': Decimal('1')}
                    ]
        # The mocked DynamoDB response.
        expected_ddb_response = {'Items': items_in_db}
        # The mocked response we expect back by calling DynamoDB through boto.
        response_body = botocore.response.StreamingBody(StringIO(str(expected_ddb_response)),
                                                        len(str(expected_ddb_response)))
        # Setting the expected value in the mock.
        boto_mock.side_effect = [expected_ddb_response]
        # Expecting that there would be a call to DynamoDB Scan function during execution with these parameters.
        expected_calls = [call('Scan', {'TableName': os.environ['TABLE_NAME']})]

        # Call the function to test.
        result = index.handler(expected_event, {})

        # Run unit test assertions to verify the expected calls to mock have occurred and verify the response.
        assert result.get('headers').get('Content-Type') == 'application/json'
        assert result.get('statusCode') == 200

        result_body = json.loads(result.get('body'))
        # Verifying that the results match to that from the table.
        assert len(result_body) == len(items_in_db)
        for i in range(len(result_body)):
            assert result_body.get(items_in_db[i].get("Candidate")) == int(items_in_db[i].get("Votes"))

        assert boto_mock.call_count == 1
        boto_mock.assert_has_calls(expected_calls)

    ## Test the HTTP POST request flow that places a vote for a selected candidate.
    ## We expect to get back a successful response with a confirmation message.
    def test_place_valid_candidate_vote(self, boto_mock):
        # Input event to our method to test.
        expected_event = {'httpMethod': 'POST', 'body': "{\"candidate\": \"D\"}"}
        # The mocked response in our DynamoDB table.
        expected_ddb_response = {'Attributes': {'Candidate': "Thor: Ragnarok", 'Votes': Decimal('2')}}
        # The mocked response we expect back by calling DynamoDB through boto.
        response_body = botocore.response.StreamingBody(StringIO(str(expected_ddb_response)),
                                                        len(str(expected_ddb_response)))
        # Setting the expected value in the mock.
        boto_mock.side_effect = [expected_ddb_response]
        # Expecting that there would be a call to DynamoDB UpdateItem function during execution with these parameters.
        expected_calls = [call('UpdateItem', {
                                                'TableName': os.environ['TABLE_NAME'], 
                                                'Key': {'Candidate': 'Thor: Ragnarok'},
                                                'UpdateExpression': 'ADD Votes :incr',
                                                'ExpressionAttributeValues': {':incr': 1},
                                                'ReturnValues': 'ALL_NEW'
                                            })]
        # Call the function to test.
        result = index.handler(expected_event, {})
        # Run unit test assertions to verify the expected calls to mock have occurred and verify the response.
        assert result.get('headers').get('Content-Type') == 'application/json'
        assert result.get('statusCode') == 200

        assert result.get('body') == "{} now has {} votes".format(
            expected_ddb_response['Attributes']['Candidate'], 
            expected_ddb_response['Attributes']['Votes'])

        assert boto_mock.call_count == 1
        boto_mock.assert_has_calls(expected_calls)

    ## Test the HTTP POST request flow that places a vote for an non-existant candidate.
    ## We expect to get back a successful response with a confirmation message.
    def test_place_invalid_candidate_vote(self, boto_mock):
        # Input event to our method to test.
        # The valid IDs for the candidates are A, B, C, and D
        expected_event = {'httpMethod': 'POST', 'body': "{\"candidate\": \"E\"}"}
        # Call the function to test.
        result = index.handler(expected_event, {})
        # Run unit test assertions to verify the expected calls to mock have occurred and verify the response.
        assert result.get('headers').get('Content-Type') == 'application/json'
        assert result.get('statusCode') == 400
        assert result.get('body') == 'You must vote for one of the following candidates - {}.'.format(index.get_allowed_candidates())

    ## Test the HTTP POST request flow that places a vote for a selected candidate but associated with an invalid key in the POST body.
    ## We expect to get back a failed (400) response with an appropriate error message.
    def test_place_invalid_data_vote(self, boto_mock):
        # Input event to our method to test.
        # "name" is not the expected input key.
        expected_event = {'httpMethod': 'POST', 'body': "{\"name\": \"D\"}"}
        # Call the function to test.
        result = index.handler(expected_event, {})
        # Run unit test assertions to verify the expected calls to mock have occurred and verify the response.
        assert result.get('headers').get('Content-Type') == 'application/json'
        assert result.get('statusCode') == 400
        assert result.get('body') == 'Missing "candidate" in request.'

    ## Test the HTTP POST request flow that places a vote for a selected candidate but not as a JSON string which the body of the request expects.
    ## We expect to get back a failed (400) response with an appropriate error message.
    def test_place_malformed_json_vote(self, boto_mock):
        # Input event to our method to test.
        # "body" receives a string rather than a JSON string.
        expected_event = {'httpMethod': 'POST', 'body': "Thor: Ragnarok"}
        # Call the function to test.
        result = index.handler(expected_event, {})
        # Run unit test assertions to verify the expected calls to mock have occurred and verify the response.
        assert result.get('headers').get('Content-Type') == 'application/json'
        assert result.get('statusCode') == 400
        assert result.get('body') == 'Invalid input! Expecting a JSON.'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

I am keeping the code samples well commented so that it’s clear what each unit test accomplishes. It tests the success conditions and the failure paths that are handled in the logic.

In my unit tests I use the patch decorator (@patch) in the mock library. @patch helps mock the function you want to call (in this case, the botocore library’s _make_api_call function in the BaseClient class).
Before we commit our changes, let’s run the tests locally. On the terminal, run the tests again. If all the unit tests pass, you should expect to see a result like this:

You:~/environment $ python -m unittest discover vote-your-movie/tests
.....
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 5 tests in 0.003s

OK
You:~/environment $

Upload to AWS

Now that the tests have passed, it’s time to commit and push the code to source repository!

Add your changes

From the terminal, go to the project’s folder and use the following command to verify the changes you are about to push.

git status

To add the modified files only, use the following command:

git add -u

Commit your changes

To commit the changes (with a message), use the following command:

git commit -m "Logic and tests for the voting webservice."

Push your changes to AWS CodeCommit

To push your committed changes to CodeCommit, use the following command:

git push

In the AWS CodeStar console, you can see your changes flowing through the pipeline and being deployed. There are also links in the AWS CodeStar console that take you to this project’s build runs so you can see your tests running on AWS CodeBuild. The latest link under the Build Runs table takes you to the logs.

unit tests at codebuild

After the deployment is complete, AWS CodeStar should now display the AWS Lambda function and DynamoDB table created and synced with this project. The Project link in the AWS CodeStar project’s navigation bar displays the AWS resources linked to this project.

codestar resources

Because this is a new database table, there should be no data in it. So, let’s put in some votes. You can download Postman to test your application endpoint for POST and GET calls. The endpoint you want to test is the URL displayed under Application endpoints in the AWS CodeStar console.

Now let’s open Postman and look at the results. Let’s create some votes through POST requests. Based on this example, a valid vote has a value of A, B, C, or D.
Here’s what a successful POST request looks like:

POST success

Here’s what it looks like if I use some value other than A, B, C, or D:

 

POST Fail

Now I am going to use a GET request to fetch the results of the votes from the database.

GET success

And that’s it! You have now created a simple voting web service using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and DynamoDB and used unit tests to verify your logic so that you ship good code.
Happy coding!

AWS Quest- a puzzling situation

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-quest-a-puzzling-situation/

Ain't nobody here but us chickens. No clues hidden here this time!Starting on March 8th you might have seen AWS Quest popping up in different places. Now that we are a bit over halfway through the game, we thought it would be a great time give everyone a peek behind the curtain.

The whole idea started about a year ago during an casual conversation with Jeff when I first joined AWS. While we’re usually pretty good at staying focused in our meetings, he brought up that he had just finished a book he really enjoyed and asked me if I had read it. (A book that has since been made into a movie.) I don’t think there was a way for him to even imagine that as a huge fan of games, both table top and video games, how stoked I would be about the idea of bringing a game to our readers.

We got to talking about how great it would be to attempt a game that would involve the entire suite of AWS products and our various platforms. This idea might appear to be easy, but it has kept us busy with Lone Shark for about a year and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what we would like to do. Being able to finally share this first game with our customers has been an absolute delight.

From March 8-27th, each day we have been and will be releasing a new puzzle. The clues for the puzzles are hidden somewhere all over AWS, and once customers have found the clues they can figure out the puzzle which results in a word. That word is the name of a component to rebuild Ozz, Jeff’s robot buddy.

We wanted to try make sure that anyone could play and we tried to surround each puzzle with interesting Easter eggs. So far, it seems to be working and we are seeing some really cool collaborative effort between customers to solve the puzzles. From tech talks to women who code, posts both recent and well in the past, and to Twitter and podcasts, we wanted to hide the puzzles in places our customers might not have had a chance to really explore before. Given how much Jeff enjoyed doing a live Twitch stream so much I won’t be surprised when he tells me he wants to do a TV show next.

So far players have solved 8 of 13 puzzles!

09 Mar 10 Mar 11 Mar 12 Mar 13 Mar 14 Mar 15 Mar 16 Mar 17 Mar 18 Mar 19 Mar 20 Mar

The learnings we have already gathered as we are just a little past halfway in the quest are mind boggling. We have learned that there will be a guy who figures out how to build a chicken coop in 3D to solve a puzzle, or build a script to crawl a site looking for any reply to a blog post that might be a clue. There were puzzles we completely expected people to get stuck on that they have solved in a snap. They have really kept us on our toes, which isn’t a bad thing. It really doesn’t hurt that the players are incredibly adept at thinking outside the box, and we can’t wait to tell you how the puzzles were solved at the end.

We still have a little under a week of puzzles to go, before you can all join Jeff and special guests on a live Twitch stream to reassemble Ozz 2.0! And you don’t have to hold off for the next time we play, as there are still many puzzles to be solved and every player matters! Just keep an eye out for new puzzles to appear everyday until March 27th, join the Reddit, come to the AMA, or take a peek into the chat and get solving!

Time to wipe off your brow, and get back into solving the last of the puzzles! I am going to try to go explain to my mother and father what exactly I am doing with those two masters degrees and how much fun it really is…

 

Getting Ready for the AWS Quest Finale on Twitch

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/getting-ready-for-the-aws-quest-finale-on-twitch/

Whew! March has been one crazy month for me and it is only half over. After a week with my wife in the Caribbean, we hopped on a non-stop Seattle to Tokyo flight so that I could speak at JAWS Days, Startup Day, and some internal events. We arrived home last Wednesday and I am now sufficiently clear-headed and recovered from jet lag to do anything more intellectually demanding than respond to emails. The AWS Blogging Team and the great folks at Lone Shark Games have been working on AWS Quest for quite some time and it has been great to see all of the progress made toward solving the puzzles in order to find the orangeprints that I will use to rebuild Ozz.

The community effort has been impressive! There’s a shared spreadsheet with tabs for puzzles and clues, a busy Slack channel, and a leaderboard, all organized and built by a team that spans the globe.

I’ve been checking out the orangeprints as they are uncovered and have been doing a bit of planning and preparation to make sure that I am ready for the live-streamed rebuild on Twitch later this month. Yesterday I labeled a bunch of containers, one per puzzle, and stocked each one with the parts that I will use to rebuild the corresponding component of Ozz. Fortunately, I have at least (my last count may have skipped a few) 119,807 bricks and other parts at hand so this was easy. Here’s what I have set up so far:

The Twitch session will take place on Tuesday, March 27 at Noon PT. In the meantime, you should check out the #awsquest tweets and see what you can do to help me to rebuild Ozz.

— Jeff;

Wanted: Vault Storage Engineer

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wanted-vault-storage-engineer/

Want to work at a company that helps customers in 156 countries around the world protect the memories they hold dear? A company that stores over 500 petabytes of customers’ photos, music, documents and work files in a purpose-built cloud storage system?

Well here’s your chance. Backblaze is looking for a Vault Storage Engineer!

Company Description:

Founded in 2007, Backblaze started with a mission to make backup software elegant and provide complete peace of mind. Over the course of almost a decade, we have become a pioneer in robust, scalable low cost cloud backup. Recently, we launched B2 — robust and reliable object storage at just $0.005/gb/mo. Part of our differentiation is being able to offer the lowest price of any of the big players while still being profitable.

We’ve managed to nurture a team oriented culture with amazingly low turnover. We value our people and their families. Don’t forget to check out our “About Us” page to learn more about the people and some of our perks.

We have built a profitable, high growth business. While we love our investors, we have maintained control over the business. That means our corporate goals are simple – grow sustainably and profitably.

Some Backblaze Perks:

  • Competitive healthcare plans
  • Competitive compensation and 401k
  • All employees receive Option grants
  • Unlimited vacation days
  • Strong coffee
  • Fully stocked Micro kitchen
  • Catered breakfast and lunches
  • Awesome people who work on awesome projects
  • New Parent Childcare bonus
  • Normal work hours
  • Get to bring your pets into the office
  • San Mateo Office – located near Caltrain and Highways 101 & 280.

Want to know what you’ll be doing?

You will work on the core of the Backblaze: the vault cloud storage system (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/). The system accepts files uploaded from customers, stores them durably by distributing them across the data center, automatically handles drive failures, rebuilds data when drives are replaced, and maintains high availability for customers to download their files. There are significant enhancements in the works, and you’ll be a part of making them happen.

Must have a strong background in:

  • Computer Science
  • Multi-threaded programming
  • Distributed Systems
  • Java
  • Math (such as matrix algebra and statistics)
  • Building reliable, testable systems

Bonus points for:

  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Cassandra
  • SQL

Looking for an attitude of:

  • Passionate about building reliable clean interfaces and systems.
  • Likes to work closely with other engineers, support, and sales to help customers.
  • Customer Focused (!!) — always focus on the customer’s point of view and how to solve their problem!

Required for all Backblaze Employees:

  • Good attitude and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done
  • Strong desire to work for a small fast-paced company
  • Desire to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technologies and work environment
  • Rigorous adherence to best practices
  • Relentless attention to detail
  • Excellent interpersonal skills and good oral/written communication
  • Excellent troubleshooting and problem solving skills

This position is located in San Mateo, California but will also consider remote work as long as you’re no more than three time zones away and can come to San Mateo now and then.

Backblaze is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Contact Us:
If this sounds like you, follow these steps:

  1. Send an email to jobscontact@backblaze.com with the position in the subject line.
  2. Include your resume.
  3. Tell us a bit about your programming experience.

The post Wanted: Vault Storage Engineer appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Join the AWS Quest – Help me to Rebuild Ozz!

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-the-aws-quest-help-me-to-rebuild-ozz/

If you have been watching my weekly videos, you may have noticed an orange robot in the background from time to time. That’s Ozz, my robot friend and helper. Built from the ground up in my home laboratory, Ozz is an invaluable part of the AWS blogging process!

Sadly, when we announced we are adding the AWS Podcast to the blog, Ozz literally went to pieces and all I have left is a large pile of bricks and some great memories of our time together. From what I can tell, Ozz went haywire over this new development due to excessive enthusiasm!

Ozz, perhaps anticipating that this could happen at some point, buried a set of clues (each pointing to carefully protected plans) in this blog, in the AWS Podcast, and in other parts of the AWS site. If we can find and decode these plans, we can rebuild Ozz, better, stronger, and faster. Unfortunately, due to concerns about the ultra-competitive robot friend market, Ozz concealed each of the plans inside a set of devious, brain-twisting puzzles. You are going to need to look high, low, inside, outside, around, and through the clues in order to figure this one out. You may even need to phone a friend or two.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find these clues, decode the plans, and help me to rebuild Ozz. The information that I have is a bit fuzzy, but I think there are 20 or so puzzles, each one describing one part of Ozz. If we can solve them all, we’ll get together on Twitch later this month and put Ozz back together.

Are you with me on this? Let’s do it!

— Jeff;