SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The 50 or so people in the room include psychologists, economists, computer security researchers, sociologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, designers, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, business school professors, and a smattering of others. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.
The goal is to maximize discussion and interaction. We do that by putting everyone on panels, and limiting talks to 7-10 minutes. The rest of the time is left to open discussion. Four hour-and-a-half panels per day over two days equals eight panels; six people per panel means that 48 people get to speak. We also have lunches, dinners, and receptions — all designed so people from different disciplines talk to each other.
I invariably find this to be the most intellectually stimulating conference of my year. It influences my thinking in many different, and sometimes surprising, ways.
Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and occasionally audio recordings of the various workshops.
PyCon UK 2018 will take place on Saturday 15 September to Wednesday 19 September in the splendid Cardiff City Hall, just a few miles from the Sony Technology Centre where the vast majority of Raspberry Pis is made. We’re pleased to announce that we’re curating this year’s Education Summit at the conference, where we’ll offer opportunities for young people to learn programming skills, and for educators to undertake professional development!
PyCon UK 2018 is your chance to be welcomed into the wonderful Python community. At the Education Summit, we’ll put on a young coders’ day on the Saturday, and an educators’ day on the Sunday.
Saturday — young coders’ day
On Saturday we’ll be running a CoderDojo full of workshops on Raspberry Pi and micro:bits for young people aged 7 to 17. If they wish, participants will get to make a project and present it to the conference on the main stage, and everyone will be given a free micro:bit to take home!
PyCon UK has been bringing developers and educators together ever since it first started its education track in 2011. This year’s Sunday will be a day of professional development: we’ll give teachers, educators, parents, and coding club leaders the chance to learn from us and from each other to build their programming, computing, and digital making skills.
Professional development for educators
Educators get a special entrance rate for the conference, starting at £48 — get your tickets now. Financial assistance is also available.
Call for proposals
We invite you to send in your proposal for a talk and workshop at the Education Summit! We’re looking for:
25-minute talks for the educators’ day
50-minute workshops for either the young coders’ or the educators’ day
If you have something you’d like to share, such as a professional development session for educators, advice on best practice for teaching programming, a workshop for up-skilling in Python, or a fun physical computing activity for the CoderDojo, then we’d love to hear about it! Please submit your proposalby 15 June.
After the Education Summit, the conference will continue for two days of talks and a final day of development sprints. Feel free to submit your education-related talk to the main conference too if you want to share it with a wider audience! Check out the PyCon UK 2018 website for more information.
Earlier this spring, an excited group of STEM educators came together to participate in the first ever Raspberry Pi and Arduino workshop in Puerto Rico.
Their three-day digital making adventure was led by MakerTechPR’s José Rullán and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Alex Martínez. They ran the event as part of the Robot Makers challenge organized by Yees! and sponsored by Puerto Rico’s Department of Economic Development and Trade to promote entrepreneurial skills within Puerto Rico’s education system.
Over 30 educators attended the workshop, which covered the use of the Raspberry Pi 3 as a computer and digital making resource. The educators received a kit consisting of a Raspberry Pi 3 with an Explorer HAT Pro and an Arduino Uno. At the end of the workshop, the educators were able to keep the kit as a demonstration unit for their classrooms. They were enthusiastic to learn new concepts and immerse themselves in the world of physical computing.
In their first session, the educators were introduced to the Raspberry Pi as an affordable technology for robotic clubs. In their second session, they explored physical computing and the coding languages needed to control the Explorer HAT Pro. They started off coding with Scratch, with which some educators had experience, and ended with controlling the GPIO pins with Python. In the final session, they learned how to develop applications using the powerful combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi for robotics projects. This gave them a better understanding of how they could engage their students in physical computing.
“The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is the perfect solution in the classroom because to us it is very resourceful and accessible.” – Alex Martínez
Computer science and robotics courses are important for many schools and teachers in Puerto Rico. The simple idea of programming a microcontroller from a $35 computer increases the chances of more students having access to more technology to create things.
Puerto Rico’s education system has faced enormous challenges after Hurricane Maria, including economic collapse and the government’s closure of many schools due to the exodus of families from the island. By attending training like this workshop, educators in Puerto Rico are becoming more experienced in fields like robotics in particular, which are key for 21st-century skills and learning. This, in turn, can lead to more educational opportunities, and hopefully the reopening of more schools on the island.
“We find it imperative that our children be taught STEM disciplines and skills. Our goal is to continue this work of spreading digital making and computer science using the Raspberry Pi around Puerto Rico. We want our children to have the best education possible.” – Alex Martínez
After attending Picademy in 2016, Alex has integrated the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s online resources into his classroom. He has also taught small workshops around the island and in the local Puerto Rican makerspace community. José is an electrical engineer, entrepreneur, educator and hobbyist who enjoys learning to use technology and sharing his knowledge through projects and challenges.
For some organizations, the idea of “going serverless” can be daunting. But with an understanding of best practices – and the right tools — many serverless applications can be fully functional with only a few lines of code and little else.
Examples of fully-serverless-application use cases include:
Web or mobile backends – Create fully-serverless, mobile applications or websites by creating user-facing content in a native mobile application or static web content in an S3 bucket. Then have your front-end content integrate with Amazon API Gateway as a backend service API. Lambda functions will then execute the business logic you’ve written for each of the API Gateway methods in your backend API.
Chatbots and virtual assistants – Build new serverless ways to interact with your customers, like customer support assistants and bots ready to engage customers on your company-run social media pages. The Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Amazon Lex have the ability to apply natural-language understanding to user-voice and freeform-text input so that a Lambda function you write can intelligently respond and engage with them.
Internet of Things (IoT) backends – AWS IoT has direct-integration for device messages to be routed to and processed by Lambda functions. That means you can implement serverless backends for highly secure, scalable IoT applications for uses like connected consumer appliances and intelligent manufacturing facilities.
Using AWS Lambda as the logic layer of a serverless application can enable faster development speed and greater experimentation – and innovation — than in a traditional, server-based environment.
Once you’ve finished reading the whitepaper, below are a couple additional resources I recommend as your next step:
If you would like to better understand some of the architecture pattern possibilities for serverless applications: Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes (re:Invent 2017 video)
If you’re ready to get hands-on and build a sample serverless application: AWS Serverless Workshops (GitHub Repository)
Andrew Baird is a Sr. Solutions Architect for AWS. Prior to becoming a Solutions Architect, Andrew was a developer, including time as an SDE with Amazon.com. He has worked on large-scale distributed systems, public-facing APIs, and operations automation.
This post courtesy of Paul Johnston, AWS Senior Developer Advocate – Serverless
Welcome to the first edition of the AWS Serverless ICYMI (In case you missed it) quarterly recap! Every quarter we’ll share all of the most recent product launches, feature enhancements, blog posts, webinars, Twitch live streams, and other interesting things that you might have missed!
Alexa Random Restaurant – Python-based backend for an Alexa skill that returns an open restaurant in a specified city using the Yelp API. Published by: Harsha Warrdhan Sharma
Podless – A serverless application that downloads podcasts to an S3 bucket. Published by: Stilvoid
Crypto-monitor – Collect and store crypto currency prices and send yourself an alert if one changes significantly. Published by: Drew Dresser
DailyDoggo – Send a daily link to a random dog picture to a phone number, via AWS Lambda and SNS. Published by: Kevin McCandless
These runtimes give Lambda developers and development teams even greater options for coding serverless, on-demand, compute solutions.
The AWS SAM 1.4.0 release was one of its biggest. The release added features for configuring many aspects of Amazon API Gateway, including CORS support, regional endpoints, binary media types, and stage settings. It also included per function concurrency support, tags and TableName for SimpleTable, and many documentation updates. Check out the release notes for the full list!
AppSync came out of the whitelisted preview and added a whole bunch of new features:
Here are the three webinars we delivered in Q1. We hold several Serverless webinars throughout the year, so look out for them in the Serverless section of the AWS Online Tech Talks page:
Keep an eye on AWS on Twitch for more Serverless videos and on the Join us on the Twitch AWS page for information about upcoming broadcasts and recent live streams.
Case studies
We’ve published several new case studies this quarter to help you with understanding how other organizations are using serverless technologies:
If you haven’t read the AWS Well Architected Framework Serverless Application Lens document, then it’s worth taking the time to do so. The document covers common serverless applications scenarios and identifies key elements to ensure that your workloads are architected according to best practices.
From now on, if you find issues with documentation we have open-sourced, you can tell us via a Pull Request rather than tweeting or emailing us. The current available serverless repositories are here:
We’re always looking to help people start learning how to build serverless applications. Our serverless web application workshops are online and you can do the hands-on labs yourself: Build a Serverless web application
Still looking for more?
The Serverless landing page has lots of information including a resources page containing case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials. Check it out!
The AWS Community Heroes program helps shine a spotlight on some of the innovative work being done by rockstar AWS developers around the globe. Marrying cloud expertise with a passion for community building and education, these Heroes share their time and knowledge across social media and in-person events. Heroes also actively help drive content at Meetups, workshops, and conferences.
This March, we have five Heroes that we’re happy to welcome to our network of cloud innovators:
Peter Sbarski is VP of Engineering at A Cloud Guru and the organizer of Serverlessconf, the world’s first conference dedicated entirely to serverless architectures and technologies. His work at A Cloud Guru allows him to work with, talk and write about serverless architectures, cloud computing, and AWS. He has written a book called Serverless Architectures on AWS and is currently collaborating on another book called Serverless Design Patterns with Tim Wagner and Yochay Kiriaty.
Peter is always happy to talk about cloud computing and AWS, and can be found at conferences and meetups throughout the year. He helps to organize Serverless Meetups in Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, and is always keen to share his experience working on interesting and innovative cloud projects.
Peter’s passions include serverless technologies, event-driven programming, back end architecture, microservices, and orchestration of systems. Peter holds a PhD in Computer Science from Monash University, Australia and can be followed on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and GitHub.
In close collaboration with his brother Andreas Wittig, the Wittig brothers are actively creating AWS related content. Their book Amazon Web Services in Action (Manning) introduces AWS with a strong focus on automation. Andreas and Michael run the blog cloudonaut.io where they share their knowledge about AWS with the community. The Wittig brothers also published a bunch of video courses with O’Reilly, Manning, Pluralsight, and A Cloud Guru. You can also find them speaking at conferences and user groups in Europe. Both brothers are co-organizing the AWS user group in Stuttgart.
Fernando is an experienced Infrastructure Solutions Leader, holding 5 AWS Certifications, with extensive IT Architecture and Management experience in a variety of market sectors. Working as a Cloud Architect Consultant in United Kingdom since 2014, Fernando built an online community for Hispanic speakers worldwide.
Fernando founded a LinkedIn Group, a Slack Community and a YouTube channel all of them named “AWS en Español”, and started to run a monthly webinar via YouTube streaming where different leaders discuss aspects and challenges around AWS Cloud.
During the last 18 months he’s been helping to run and coach AWS User Group leaders across LATAM and Spain, and 10 new User Groups were founded during this time.
Feel free to follow Fernando on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, or join the ever-growing Hispanic Community via Slack, LinkedIn or YouTube.
Anders is a consultant and cloud evangelist at Webstep AS in Norway. He finished his degree in Computer Science at the Norwegian Institute of Technology at about the same time the Internet emerged as a public service. Since then he has been an IT consultant and a passionate advocate of knowledge-sharing.
He architected and implemented his first customer solution on AWS back in 2010, and is essential in building Webstep’s core cloud team. Anders applies his broad expert knowledge across all layers of the organizational stack. He engages with developers on technology and architectures and with top management where he advises about cloud strategies and new business models.
Anders enjoys helping people increase their understanding of AWS and cloud in general, and holds several AWS certifications. He co-founded and co-organizes the AWS User Groups in the largest cities in Norway (Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger), and also uses any opportunity to engage in events related to AWS and cloud wherever he is.
You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.
To learn more about the AWS Community Heroes Program and how to get involved with your local AWS community, click here.
A couple of weekends ago, we celebrated our sixth birthday by coordinating more than 100 simultaneous Raspberry Jam events around the world. The Big Birthday Weekend was a huge success: our fantastic community organised Jams in 40 countries, covering six continents!
We sent the Jams special birthday kits to help them celebrate in style, and a video message featuring a thank you from Philip and Eben:
To celebrate the Raspberry Pi’s sixth birthday, we coordinated Raspberry Jams all over the world to take place over the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend, 3-4 March 2018. A massive thank you to everyone who ran an event and attended.
The Raspberry Jam photo booth
I put together code for a Pi-powered photo booth which overlaid the Big Birthday Weekend logo onto photos and (optionally) tweeted them. We included an arcade button in the Jam kits so they could build one — and it seemed to be quite popular. Some Jams put great effort into housing their photo booth:
If you want to try out the photo booth software yourself, find the code on GitHub.
The great Raspberry Jam bake-off
Traditionally, in the UK, people have a cake on their birthday. And we had a few! We saw (and tasted) a great selection of Pi-themed cakes and other baked goods throughout the weekend:
Raspberry Jams everywhere
We always say that every Jam is different, but there’s a common and recognisable theme amongst them. It was great to see so many different venues around the world filling up with like-minded Pi enthusiasts, Raspberry Jam–branded banners, and Raspberry Pi balloons!
Thank you so much to all the attendees of the Ikana Jam in Krakow past Saturday! We shared fun experiences, some of them… also painful 😉 A big thank you to @Raspberry_Pi for these global celebrations! And a big thank you to @hubraum for their hospitality! #PiParty #rjam
We also had a super successful set of wearables workshops using @adafruit Circuit Playground Express boards and conductive thread at today’s @Raspberry_Pi Jam! Very popular! #PiParty
Learning how to scare the zombies in case of an apocalypse- it worked on our young learners #PiParty @worksopcollege @Raspberry_Pi https://t.co/pntEm57TJl
Being one of the two places in Kenya where the #PiParty took place, it was an amazing time spending the day with this team and getting to learn and have fun. @TaitaTavetaUni and @Raspberry_Pi thank you for your support. @TTUTechlady @mictecttu ch
The Philly & Pi #PiParty event with @Bresslergroup and @TechGirlzorg was awesome! The Scratch and Pi workshop was amazing! It was overall a great day of fun and tech!!! Thank you everyone who came out!
Thanks everyone who came out to the @Raspberry_Pi Big Birthday Jam! Special thanks to @PBFerrell @estefanniegg @pcsforme @pandafulmanda @colnels @bquentin3 couldn’t’ve put on this amazing community event without you guys!
Así terminamos el #Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend #Bogota 2018 #PiParty de #RaspberryJamBogota 2018 @Raspberry_Pi Nos vemos el 7 de marzo en #ArduinoDayBogota 2018 y #RaspberryJamBogota 2018
Happy 6th birthday, @Raspberry_Pi! Greetings all the way from CEBU,PH! #PiParty #IoTCebu Thanks @CebuXGeeks X Ramos for these awesome pics. #Fablab #UPCebu
ラズパイ、6才のお誕生日会スタート in Tokyo PCNブースで、いろいろ展示とhttps://t.co/L6E7KgyNHFとIchigoJamつないだ、こどもIoTハッカソンmini体験やってます at 東京蒲田駅近 https://t.co/yHEuqXHvqe #piparty #pipartytokyo #rjam #opendataday
Personally, I managed to get to three Jams over the weekend: two run by the same people who put on the first two Jams to ever take place, and also one brand-new one! The Preston Raspberry Jam team, who usually run their event on a Monday evening, wanted to do something extra special for the birthday, so they came up with the idea of putting on a Raspberry Jam Sandwich — on the Friday and Monday around the weekend! This meant I was able to visit them on Friday, then attend the Manchester Raspberry Jam on Saturday, and finally drop by the new Jam at Worksop College on my way home on Sunday.
I’m at my first Raspberry Jam #PiParty event of the big birthday weekend! @PrestonRJam has been running for nearly 6 years and is a great place to start the celebrations!
Thanks to everyone who came to our Jam and everyone who helped out. @phoenixtogether thanks for amazing cake & hosting. Ademir you’re so cool. It was awesome to meet Craig Morley from @Raspberry_Pi too. #PiParty
Great #PiParty today at the @cotswoldjam with bloody delicious cake and lots of raspberry goodness. Great to see @ClareSutcliffe @martinohanlon playing on my new pi powered arcade build:-)
It’s @Raspberry_Pi 6th birthday and we’re celebrating by taking part in @amsterjam__! Happy Birthday Raspberry Pi, we’re so happy to be a part of the family! #PiParty
For more Jammy birthday goodness, check out the PiParty hashtag on Twitter!
The Jam makers!
A lot of preparation went into each Jam, and we really appreciate all the hard work the Jam makers put in to making these events happen, on the Big Birthday Weekend and all year round. Thanks also to all the teams that sent us a group photo:
Lots of the Jams that took place were brand-new events, so we hope to see them continue throughout 2018 and beyond, growing the Raspberry Pi community around the world and giving more people, particularly youths, the opportunity to learn digital making skills.
So many wonderful people in the @Raspberry_Pi community. Thanks to everyone at #PottonPiAndPints for a great afternoon and for everything you do to help young people learn digital making. #PiParty
Special thanks to ModMyPi for shipping the special Raspberry Jam kits all over the world!
Don’t forget to check out our Jam page to find an event near you! This is also where you can find free resources to help you get a new Jam started, and download free starter projects made especially for Jam activities. These projects are available in English, Français, Français Canadien, Nederlands, Deutsch, Italiano, and 日本語. If you’d like to help us translate more content into these and other languages, please get in touch!
PS Some of the UK Jams were postponed due to heavy snowfall, so you may find there’s a belated sixth-birthday Jam coming up where you live!
I’m writing this post from my hotel room in Tokyo while doing my best to fight jet lag! I’m here to speak at JAWS Days and Startup Day, and to meet with some local customers.
The Summits are offered at no charge and are an excellent way for you to learn more about AWS. You’ll get to hear from our leaders and tech teams, our partners, and from other customers. You can also participate in hands-on workshops, labs, and team challenges.
Because the events are multi-track, you may want to bring a colleague or two in order to make sure that you don’t miss something of interest to your organization.
Less than four years ago, Magda Jadach was convinced that programming wasn’t for girls. On International Women’s Day, she tells us how she discovered that it definitely is, and how she embarked on the new career that has brought her to Raspberry Pi as a software developer.
“Coding is for boys”, “in order to be a developer you have to be some kind of super-human”, and “it’s too late to learn how to code” – none of these three things is true, and I am going to prove that to you in this post. By doing this I hope to help some people to get involved in the tech industry and digital making. Programming is for anyone who loves to create and loves to improve themselves.
In the summer of 2014, I started the journey towards learning how to code. I attended my first coding workshop at the recommendation of my boyfriend, who had constantly told me about the skill and how great it was to learn. I was convinced that, at 28 years old, I was already too old to learn. I didn’t have a technical background, I was under the impression that “coding is for boys”, and I lacked the superpowers I was sure I needed. I decided to go to the workshop only to prove him wrong.
Later on, I realised that coding is a skill like any other. You can compare it to learning any language: there’s grammar, vocabulary, and other rules to acquire.
To my surprise, the workshop was completely inspiring. Within six hours I was able to create my first web page. It was a really simple page with a few cats, some colours, and ‘Hello world’ text. This was a few years ago, but I still remember when I first clicked “view source” to inspect the page. It looked like some strange alien message, as if I’d somehow broken the computer.
I wanted to learn more, but with so many options, I found myself a little overwhelmed. I’d never taught myself any technical skill before, and there was a lot of confusing jargon and new terms to get used to. What was HTML? CSS and JavaScript? What were databases, and how could I connect together all the dots and choose what I wanted to learn? Luckily I had support and was able to keep going.
At times, I felt very isolated. Was I the only girl learning to code? I wasn’t aware of many female role models until I started going to more workshops. I met a lot of great female developers, and thanks to their support and help, I kept coding.
Another struggle I faced was the language barrier. I am not a native speaker of English, and diving into English technical documentation wasn’t easy. The learning curve is daunting in the beginning, but it’s completely normal to feel uncomfortable and to think that you’re really bad at coding. Don’t let this bring you down. Everyone thinks this from time to time.
Play with Raspberry Pi and quit your job
I kept on improving my skills, and my interest in developing grew. However, I had no idea that I could do this for a living; I simply enjoyed coding. Since I had a day job as a journalist, I was learning in the evenings and during the weekends.
I spent long hours playing with a Raspberry Pi and setting up so many different projects to help me understand how the internet and computers work, and get to grips with the basics of electronics. I built my first ever robot buggy, retro game console, and light switch. For the first time in my life, I had a soldering iron in my hand. Day after day I become more obsessed with digital making.
solderingiron Where have you been all my life? Weekend with #raspberrypi + @pimoroni + @Pololu + #solder = best time! #electricity
One day I realised that I couldn’t wait to finish my job and go home to finish some project that I was working on at the time. It was then that I decided to hand over my resignation letter and dive deep into coding.
For the next few months I completely devoted my time to learning new skills and preparing myself for my new career path.
I went for an interview and got my first ever coding internship. Two years, hundreds of lines of code, and thousands of hours spent in front of my computer later, I have landed my dream job at the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a software developer, which proves that dreams come true.
Discover & share this Animated GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.
Where to start?
I recommend starting with HTML & CSS – the same path that I chose. It is a relatively straightforward introduction to web development. You can follow my advice or choose a different approach. There is no “right” or “best” way to learn.
Below is a collection of free coding resources, both from Raspberry Pi and from elsewhere, that I think are useful for beginners to know about. There are other tools that you are going to want in your developer toolbox aside from HTML.
HTML and CSS are languages for describing, structuring, and styling web pages
Scratch is a graphical programming language that lets you drag and combine code blocks to make a range of programs. It’s a good starting point
Git is version control software that helps you to work on your own projects and collaborate with other developers
Once you’ve got started, you will need a code editor. Sublime Text or Atom are great options for starting out
Coding gives you so much new inspiration, you learn new stuff constantly, and you meet so many amazing people who are willing to help you develop your skills. You can volunteer to help at a Code Club or Coder Dojo to increase your exposure to code, or attend a Raspberry Jam to meet other like-minded makers and start your own journey towards becoming a developer.
Bug bounties end up in the news with some regularity, usually for the wrong reasons. I’ve been itching to write about that for a while – but instead of dwelling on the mistakes of the bygone days, I figured it may be better to talk about some of the ways to get vulnerability rewards right.
What do you get out of bug bounties?
There’s plenty of differing views, but I like to think of such programs simply as a bid on researchers’ time. In the most basic sense, you get three benefits:
Improved ability to detect bugs in production before they become major incidents.
A comparatively unbiased feedback loop to help you prioritize and measure other security work.
A robust talent pipeline for when you need to hire.
What bug bounties don’t offer?
You don’t get anything resembling a comprehensive security program or a systematic assessment of your platforms. Researchers end up looking for bugs that offer favorable effort-to-payoff ratios for their skills and given the very imperfect information they have about your enterprise. In other words, you may end up with a hundred people looking for XSS and just one person looking for RCE.
Your reward structure can steer them toward the targets and bugs you care about, but it’s difficult to fully eliminate this inherent skew. There’s only so far you can jack up your top-tier rewards, and only so far you can go lowering the bottom-tier ones.
Don’t you have to outcompete the black market to get all the “good” bugs?
There is a free market price discovery component to it all: if you’re not getting the engagement you were hoping for, you should probably consider paying more.
That said, there are going to be researchers who’d rather hurt you than work for you, no matter how much you pay; you don’t have to win them over, and you don’t have to outspend every authoritarian government or every crime syndicate. A bug bounty is effective simply if it attracts enough eyeballs to make bugs statistically harder to find, and reduces the useful lifespan of any zero-days in black market trade. Plus, most researchers don’t want their work to be used to crack down on dissidents in Egypt or Vietnam.
Another factor is that you’re paying for different things: a black market buyer probably wants a reliable exploit capable of delivering payloads, and then demands silence for months or years to come; a vendor-run bug bounty program is usually perfectly happy with a reproducible crash and doesn’t mind a researcher blogging about their work.
In fact, while money is important, you will probably find out that it’s not enough to retain your top talent; many folks want bug bounties to be more than a business transaction, and find a lot of value in having a close relationship with your security team, comparing notes, and growing together. Fostering that partnership can be more important than adding another $10,000 to your top reward.
How do I prevent it all from going horribly wrong?
Bug bounties are an unfamiliar beast to most lawyers and PR folks, so it’s a natural to be wary and try to plan for every eventuality with pages and pages of impenetrable rules and fine-print legalese.
This is generally unnecessary: there is a strong self-selection bias, and almost every participant in a vulnerability reward program will be coming to you in good faith. The more friendly, forthcoming, and approachable you seem, and the more you treat them like peers, the more likely it is for your relationship to stay positive. On the flip side, there is no faster way to make enemies than to make a security researcher feel that they are now talking to a lawyer or to the PR dept.
Most people have strong opinions on disclosure policies; instead of imposing your own views, strive to patch reported bugs reasonably quickly, and almost every reporter will play along. Demand researchers to cancel conference appearances, take down blog posts, or sign NDAs, and you will sooner or later end up in the news.
But what if that’s not enough?
As with any business endeavor, mistakes will happen; total risk avoidance is seldom the answer. Learn to sincerely apologize for mishaps; it’s not a sign of weakness to say “sorry, we messed up”. And you will almost certainly not end up in the courtroom for doing so.
It’s good to foster a healthy and productive relationship with the community, so that they come to your defense when something goes wrong. Encouraging people to disclose bugs and talk about their experiences is one way of accomplishing that.
What about extortion?
You should structure your program to naturally discourage bad behavior and make it stand out like a sore thumb. Require bona fide reports with complete technical details before any reward decision is made by a panel of named peers; and make it clear that you never demand non-disclosure as a condition of getting a reward.
To avoid researchers accidentally putting themselves in awkward situations, have clear rules around data exfiltration and lateral movement: assure them that you will always pay based on the worst-case impact of their findings; in exchange, ask them to stop as soon as they get a shell and never access any data that isn’t their own.
So… are there any downsides?
Yep. Other than souring up your relationship with the community if you implement your program wrong, the other consideration is that bug bounties tend to generate a lot of noise from well-meaning but less-skilled researchers.
When this happens, do not get frustrated and do not penalize such participants; instead, help them grow. Consider publishing educational articles, giving advice on how to investigate and structure reports, or offering free workshops every now and then.
The other downside is cost; although bug bounties tend to offer far more bang for your buck than your average penetration test, they are more random. The annual expenses tend to be fairly predictable, but there is always some possibility of having to pay multiple top-tier rewards in rapid succession. This is the kind of uncertainty that many mid-level budget planners react badly to.
Finally, you need to be able to fix the bugs you receive. It would be nuts to prefer to not know about the vulnerabilities in the first place – but once you invite the research, the clock starts ticking and you need to ship fixes reasonably fast.
So… should I try it?
There are folks who enthusiastically advocate for bug bounties in every conceivable situation, and people who dislike them with fierce passion; both sentiments are usually strongly correlated with the line of business they are in.
In reality, bug bounties are not a cure-all, and there are some ways to make them ineffectual or even dangerous. But they are not as risky or expensive as most people suspect, and when done right, they can actually be fun for your team, too. You won’t know for sure until you try.
We’re just over three weeks away from the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend 2018, our community celebration of Raspberry Pi’s sixth birthday. Instead of an event in Cambridge, as we’ve held in the past, we’re coordinating Raspberry Jam events to take place around the world on 3–4 March, so that as many people as possible can join in. Well over 100 Jams have been confirmed so far.
Find a Jam near you
There are Jams planned in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and Zimbabwe.
Take a look at the events map and the full list (including those who haven’t added their event to the map quite yet).
We will have Raspberry Jams in 35 countries across six continents
Birthday kits
We had some special swag made especially for the birthday, including these T-shirts, which we’ve sent to Jam organisers:
There is also a poster with a list of participating Jams, which you can download:
Raspberry Jam photo booth
I created a Raspberry Jam photo booth that overlays photos with the Big Birthday Weekend logo and then tweets the picture from your Jam’s account — you’ll be seeing plenty of those if you follow the #PiParty hashtag on 3–4 March.
Check out the project on GitHub, and feel free to set up your own booth, or modify it to your own requirements. We’ve included text annotations in several languages, and more contributions are very welcome.
There’s still time…
If you can’t find a Jam near you, there’s still time to organise one for the Big Birthday Weekend. All you need to do is find a venue — a room in a school or library will do — and think about what you’d like to do at the event. Some Jams have Raspberry Pis set up for workshops and practical activities, some arrange tech talks, some put on show-and-tell — it’s up to you. To help you along, there’s the Raspberry Jam Guidebook full of advice and tips from Jam organisers.
The packed. And they packed. And they packed some more. Who’s expecting one of these #rjam kits for the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend?
Download the Raspberry Jam branding pack, and the special birthday branding pack, where you’ll find logos, graphical assets, flyer templates, worksheets, and more. When you’re ready to announce your event, create a webpage for it — you can use a site like Eventbrite or Meetup — and submit your Jam to us so it will appear on the Jam map!
We are six
We’re really looking forward to celebrating our birthday with thousands of people around the world. Over 48 hours, people of all ages will come together at more than 100 events to learn, share ideas, meet people, and make things during our Big Birthday Weekend.
Since we released the first Raspberry Pi in 2012, we’ve sold 17 million of them. We’re also reaching almost 200000 children in 130 countries around the world through Code Club and CoderDojo, we’ve trained over 1500 Raspberry Pi Certified Educators, and we’ve sent code written by more than 6800 children into space. Our magazines are read by a quarter of a million people, and millions more use our free online learning resources. There’s plenty to celebrate and even more still to do: we really hope you’ll join us from a Jam near you on 3–4 March.
If you’re an educator from the UK, chances are you’ve heard of Bett. For everyone else: Bett stands for British Education Technology Tradeshow. It’s the El Dorado of edtech, where every street is adorned with interactive whiteboards, VR headsets, and new technologies for the classroom. Every year since 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been going to the event hosted in the ExCeL London to chat to thousands of lovely educators about our free programmes and resources.
On a mission
Our setup this year consisted of four pods (imagine tables on steroids) in the STEAM village, and the mission of our highly trained team of education agents was to establish a new world record for Highest number of teachers talked to in a four-day period. I’m only half-joking.
Educators with a mission
Meeting educators
The best thing about being at Bett is meeting the educators who use our free content and training materials. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the everyday tasks of the office without stopping to ask: “Hey, have we asked our users what they want recently?” Events like Bett help us to connect with our audience, creating some lovely moments for both sides. We had plenty of Hello World authors visit us, including Gary Stager, co-author of Invent to Learn, a must-read for any computing educator. More than 700 people signed up for a digital subscription, we had numerous lovely conversations about our content and about ideas for new articles, and we met many new authors expressing an interest in writing for us in the future.
We also talked to lots of Raspberry Pi Certified Educators who we’d trained in our free Picademy programme — new dates in Belfast and Dublin now! — and who are now doing exciting and innovative things in their local areas. For example, Chris Snowden came to tell us about the great digital making outreach work he has been doing with the Eureka! museum in Yorkshire.
Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Chris Snowden
Digital making for kids
The other best thing about being at Bett is running workshops for young learners and seeing the delight on their faces when they accomplish something they believed to be impossible only five minutes ago. On the Saturday, we ran a massive Raspberry Jam/Code Club where over 250 children, parents, and curious onlookers got stuck into some of our computing activities. We were super happy to find out that we’d won the Bett Kids’ Choice Award for Best Hands-on Experience — a fantastic end to a busy four days. With Bett over for another year, our tired and happy ‘rebel alliance’ from across the Foundation still had the energy to pose for a group photo.
Note: the Pi Towers team have peeled away from their desks to spend time with their families over the festive season, and this blog will be quiet for a while as a result. We’ll be back in the New Year with a bushel of amazing projects, awesome resources, and much merriment and fun times. Happy holidays to all!
Now back to the matter at hand. Your brand new Christmas Raspberry Pi.
Your new Raspberry Pi
Did you wake up this morning to find a new Raspberry Pi under the tree? Congratulations, and welcome to the Raspberry Pi community! You’re one of us now, and we’re happy to have you on board.
But what if you’ve never seen a Raspberry Pi before? What are you supposed to do with it? What’s all the fuss about, and why does your new computer look so naked?
Setting up your Raspberry Pi
Are you comfy? Good. Then let us begin.
Download our free operating system
First of all, you need to make sure you have an operating system on your micro SD card: we suggest Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s official supported operating system. If your Pi is part of a starter kit, you might find that it comes with a micro SD card that already has Raspbian preinstalled. If not, you can download Raspbian for free from our website.
An easy way to get Raspbian onto your SD card is to use a free tool called Etcher. Watch The MagPi’s Lucy Hattersley show you what you need to do. You can also use NOOBS to install Raspbian on your SD card, and our Getting Started guide explains how to do that.
Plug it in and turn it on
Your new Raspberry Pi 3 comes with four USB ports and an HDMI port. These allow you to plug in a keyboard, a mouse, and a television or monitor. If you have a Raspberry Pi Zero, you may need adapters to connect your devices to its micro USB and micro HDMI ports. Both the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi Zero W have onboard wireless LAN, so you can connect to your home network, and you can also plug an Ethernet cable into the Pi 3.
Make sure to plug the power cable in last. There’s no ‘on’ switch, so your Pi will turn on as soon as you connect the power. Raspberry Pi uses a micro USB power supply, so you can use a phone charger if you didn’t receive one as part of a kit.
Learn with our free projects
If you’ve never used a Raspberry Pi before, or you’re new to the world of coding, the best place to start is our projects site. It’s packed with free projects that will guide you through the basics of coding and digital making. You can create projects right on your screen using Scratch and Python, connect a speaker to make music with Sonic Pi, and upgrade your skills to physical making using items from around your house.
Here’s James to show you how to build a whoopee cushion using a Raspberry Pi, paper plates, tin foil and a sponge:
Explore the world of Raspberry Pi physical computing with our free FutureLearn courses: http://rpf.io/futurelearn Free make your own Whoopi Cushion resource: http://rpf.io/whoopi For more information on Raspberry Pi and the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, including Code Club and CoderDojo, visit http://rpf.io Our resources are free to use in schools, clubs, at home and at events.
Diving deeper
You’ve plundered our projects, you’ve successfully rigged every chair in the house to make rude noises, and now you want to dive deeper into digital making. Good! While you’re digesting your Christmas dinner, take a moment to skim through the Raspberry Pi blog for inspiration. You’ll find projects from across our worldwide community, with everything from home automation projects and retrofit upgrades, to robots, gaming systems, and cameras.
You’ll also find bucketloads of ideas in The MagPi magazine, the official monthly Raspberry Pi publication, available in both print and digital format. You can download every issue for free. If you subscribe, you’ll get a Raspberry Pi Zero W to add to your new collection. HackSpace magazine is another fantastic place to turn for Raspberry Pi projects, along with other maker projects and tutorials.
And, of course, simply typing “Raspberry Pi projects” into your preferred search engine will find thousands of ideas. Sites like Hackster, Hackaday, Instructables, Pimoroni, and Adafruit all have plenty of fab Raspberry Pi tutorials that they’ve devised themselves and that community members like you have created.
And finally
If you make something marvellous with your new Raspberry Pi – and we know you will – don’t forget to share it with us! Our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+ accounts are brimming with chatter, projects, and events. And our forums are a great place to visit if you have questions about your Raspberry Pi or if you need some help.
It’s good to get together with like-minded folks, so check out the growing Raspberry Jam movement. Raspberry Jams are community-run events where makers and enthusiasts can meet other makers, show off their projects, and join in with workshops and discussions. Find your nearest Jam here.
At re:Invent 2014, we announced AWS Lambda, what is now the center of the serverless platform at AWS, and helped ignite the trend of companies building serverless applications.
This year, at re:Invent 2017, the topic of serverless was everywhere. We were incredibly excited to see the energy from everyone attending 7 workshops, 15 chalk talks, 20 skills sessions and 27 breakout sessions. Many of these sessions were repeated due to high demand, so we are happy to summarize and provide links to the recordings and slides of these sessions.
Over the course of the week leading up to and then the week of re:Invent, we also had over 15 new features and capabilities across a number of serverless services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS [email protected], AWS SAM, and the newly announced AWS Serverless Application Repository!
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda Doubles Maximum Memory Capacity for Lambda Functions – We’ve doubled the maximum memory that you can configure a function to have available, to 3 GB. With this, comes proportional increases to CPU and networking so that your function gets access to two CPU cores!
AWS Lambda Supports Traffic Shifting and Phased Deployments with AWS CodeDeploy – Traffic shifting allows you to deploy your Lambda functions using standard industry best practices such as canaries and blue/green deployments. With CodeDeploy, you get the ability to automate rollbacks and have events fired off by triggers set around the lifecycle of an individual deployment.
Set Concurrency Limits on Individual AWS Lambda Functions – You can now set a concurrency reservation for a function in your account allowing you to limit functions from using too many backend resources or taking up too much concurrency, or to control costs.
Amazon API Gateway Supports Canary Release Deployments – You can now use canary release deployments to gradually roll out new APIs. This helps you more safely roll out API changes and limit the blast radius of new deployments.
Amazon API Gateway Supports Access Logging – The access logging feature lets you generate access logs in different formats such as CLF (Common Log Format), JSON, XML, and CSV. The access logs can be fed into your existing analytics or log processing tools so you can perform more in-depth analysis or take action in response to the log data.
Amazon API Gateway Supports Generating SDK in Ruby – This is in addition to support for SDKs in Java, JavaScript, Android and iOS (Swift and Objective-C). The SDKs that Amazon API Gateway generates save you development time and come with a number of prebuilt capabilities, such as working with API keys, exponential back, and exception handling.
AWS Serverless Application Repository
Serverless Application Repository is a new service (currently in preview) that aids in the publication, discovery, and deployment of serverless applications. With it you’ll be able to find shared serverless applications that you can launch in your account, while also sharing ones that you’ve created for others to do the same.
Coming up with the right mix of talks for an event like this can be quite a challenge. The Product, Marketing, and Developer Advocacy teams for Serverless at AWS spent weeks reading through dozens of talk ideas to boil it down to the final list.
From feedback at other AWS events and webinars, we knew that customers were looking for talks that focused on concrete examples of solving problems with serverless, how to perform common tasks such as deployment, CI/CD, monitoring, and troubleshooting, and to see customer and partner examples solving real world problems. To that extent we tried to settle on a good mix based on attendee experience and provide a track full of rich content.
Below are the recordings and slides of breakout sessions from re:Invent 2017. We’ve organized them for those getting started, those who are already beginning to build serverless applications, and the experts out there already running them at scale. Some of the videos and slides haven’t been posted yet, and so we will update this list as they become available.
At re:Invent, we delivered instructor-led skills sessions to help attendees new to serverless applications get started quickly. The content from these sessions is already online and you can do the hands-on labs yourself! Build a Serverless web application
Still looking for more?
We also recently completely overhauled the main Serverless landing page for AWS. This includes a new Resources page containing case studies, webinars, whitepapers, customer stories, reference architectures, and even more Getting Started tutorials. Check it out!
Feeling uncontainable? re:Invent 2017 might be over, but the containers party doesn’t have to stop. Here are some ways you can keep learning about containers on AWS.
Learn about containers in Austin and New York
Come join AWS this week at KubeCon in Austin, Texas! We’ll be sharing best practices for running Kubernetes on AWS and talking about Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and Amazon EKS. Want to take Amazon EKS for a test drive? Sign up for the preview.
We’ll also be talking Containers at the NYC Pop-up Loft during AWS Compute Evolved: Containers Day on December 13th. Register to attend.
Join an upcoming webinar
Didn’t get to attend re:Invent or want to hear a recap? Join our upcoming webinar, What You Missed at re:Invent 2017, on December 11th from 12:00 PM – 12:40 PM PT (3:00 PM – 3:40 PM ET). Register to attend.
Start (or finish) a workshop
All of the containers workshops given at re:Invent are available online. Get comfortable, fire up your browser, and start building!
All of the keynote and breakouts from re:Invent are available to watch on our YouTube playlist. Slides can be found as they are uploaded on the AWS Slideshare. Just slip into your pajamas, make some popcorn, and start watching!
Andy Jassy announced two big updates to the container landscape at re:Invent, AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS. Here are some resources to help you learn more about all the new features and products we announced, why we built them, and how they work.
AWS Fargate
AWS Fargate is a technology that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS)
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to configure and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.
Today, the following Security, Compliance, & Identity sessions, workshops, and chalk talks will be presented at AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas. All sessions are in the MGM Grand and all times are local. See the re:Invent Session Catalog for complete information about every session. You can also download the AWS re:Invent 2017 Mobile App for the latest updates and information.
If you are not attending re:Invent 2017, keep in mind that all videos of and slide decks from these sessions will be made available next week. We will publish a post on the Security Blog next week that links to all available videos and slide decks.
Today, the following Security, Compliance, & Identity sessions, workshops, and chalk talks will be presented at AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas. All sessions are in the MGM Grand and all times are local. See the re:Invent Session Catalog for complete information about every session. You can also download the AWS re:Invent 2017 Mobile App for the latest updates and information.
If you are not attending re:Invent 2017, keep in mind that all videos of and slide decks from these sessions will be made available next week. We will publish a post on the Security Blog next week that links to all available videos and slide decks.
Today, the following Security, Compliance, & Identity sessions, workshops, and chalk talks will be presented at AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas. All sessions are in the MGM Grand and all times are local. See the re:Invent Session Catalog for complete information about every session. You can also download the AWS re:Invent 2017 Mobile App for the latest updates and information.
If you are not attending re:Invent 2017, keep in mind that all videos of and slide decks from these sessions will be made available next week. We will publish a post on the Security Blog next week that links to all available videos and slide decks.
Today, the following Security, Compliance, & Identity sessions, workshops, and chalk talks will be presented at AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas. All sessions are in the MGM Grand and all times are local. See the re:Invent Session Catalog for complete information about every session. You can also download the AWS re:Invent 2017 Mobile App for the latest updates and information.
If you are not attending re:Invent 2017, keep in mind that all videos of and slide decks from these sessions will be made available next week. We will publish a post on the Security Blog next week that links to all available videos and slide decks.
Contributed by Tiffany Jernigan, Developer Advocate for Amazon ECS
Get ready for takeoff!
We made sure that this year’s re:Invent is chock-full of containers: there are over 40 sessions! New to containers? No problem, we have several introductory sessions for you to dip your toes. Been using containers for years and know the ins and outs? Don’t miss our technical deep-dives and interactive chalk talks led by container experts.
If you can’t make it to Las Vegas, you can catch the keynotes and session recaps from our livestream and on Twitch.
Session types
Not everyone learns the same way, so we have multiple types of breakout content:
Birds of a Feather An interactive discussion with industry leaders about containers on AWS.
Breakout sessions 60-minute presentations about building on AWS. Sessions are delivered by both AWS experts and customers and span all content levels.
Workshops 2.5-hour, hands-on sessions that teach how to build on AWS. AWS credits are provided. Bring a laptop, and have an active AWS account.
Chalk Talks 1-hour, highly interactive sessions with a smaller audience. They begin with a short lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a discussion with the audience.
Session levels
Whether you’re new to containers or you’ve been using them for years, you’ll find useful information at every level.
Introductory Sessions are focused on providing an overview of AWS services and features, with the assumption that attendees are new to the topic.
Advanced Sessions dive deeper into the selected topic. Presenters assume that the audience has some familiarity with the topic, but may or may not have direct experience implementing a similar solution.
Expert Sessions are for attendees who are deeply familiar with the topic, have implemented a solution on their own already, and are comfortable with how the technology works across multiple services, architectures, and implementations.
Session locations
All container sessions are located in the Aria Resort.
MONDAY 11/27
Breakout sessions
Level 200 (Introductory)
CON202 – Getting Started with Docker and Amazon ECS By packaging software into standardized units, Docker gives code everything it needs to run, ensuring consistency from your laptop all the way into production. But once you have your code ready to ship, how do you run and scale it in the cloud? In this session, you become comfortable running containerized services in production using Amazon ECS. We cover container deployment, cluster management, service auto-scaling, service discovery, secrets management, logging, monitoring, security, and other core concepts. We also cover integrated AWS services and supplementary services that you can take advantage of to run and scale container-based services in the cloud.
Chalk talks
Level 200 (Introductory)
CON211 – Reducing your Compute Footprint with Containers and Amazon ECS Tomas Riha, platform architect for Volvo, shows how Volvo transitioned its WirelessCar platform from using Amazon EC2 virtual machines to containers running on Amazon ECS, significantly reducing cost. Tomas dives deep into the architecture that Volvo used to achieve the migration in under four months, including Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS CloudFormation.
CON212 – Anomaly Detection Using Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR Learn about the architecture that Cisco CloudLock uses to enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the entire development lifecycle, from the first line of code through runtime. It includes integration with IAM roles, Amazon VPC, and AWS KMS.
Level 400 (Expert)
CON410 – Advanced CICD with Amazon ECS Control Plane Mohit Gupta, product and engineering lead for Clever, demonstrates how to extend the Amazon ECS control plane to optimize management of container deployments and how the control plane can be broadly applied to take advantage of new AWS services. This includes ark—an AWS CLI-based deployment to Amazon ECS, Dapple—a slack-based automation system for deployments and notifications, and Kayvee—log and event routing libraries based on Amazon Kinesis.
Workshops
Level 200 (Introductory)
CON209 – Interstella 8888: Learn How to Use Docker on AWS Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to get hands-on experience with Docker as you containerize Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application and deploy it using Amazon ECS.
CON213 – Hands-on Deployment of Kubernetes on AWS In this workshop, attendees get hands-on experience using Kubernetes and Kops (Kubernetes Operations), as described in our recent blog post. Attendees learn how to provision a cluster, assign role-based permissions and security, and launch a container. If you’re interested in learning best practices for running Kubernetes on AWS, don’t miss this workshop.
TUESDAY 11/28
Breakout Sessions
Level 200 (Introductory)
CON206 – Docker on AWS In this session, Docker Technical Staff Member Patrick Chanezon discusses how Finnish Rail, the national train system for Finland, is using Docker on Amazon Web Services to modernize their customer facing applications, from ticket sales to reservations. Patrick also shares the state of Docker development and adoption on AWS, including explaining the opportunities and implications of efforts such as Project Moby, Docker EE, and how developers can use and contribute to Docker projects.
CON208 – Building Microservices on AWS Increasingly, organizations are turning to microservices to help them empower autonomous teams, letting them innovate and ship software faster than ever before. But implementing a microservices architecture comes with a number of new challenges that need to be dealt with. Chief among these finding an appropriate platform to help manage a growing number of independently deployable services. In this session, Sam Newman, author of Building Microservices and a renowned expert in microservices strategy, discusses strategies for building scalable and robust microservices architectures. He also tells you how to choose the right platform for building microservices, and about common challenges and mistakes organizations make when they move to microservices architectures.
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON302 – Building a CICD Pipeline for Containers on AWS Containers can make it easier to scale applications in the cloud, but how do you set up your CICD workflow to automatically test and deploy code to containerized apps? In this session, we explore how developers can build effective CICD workflows to manage their containerized code deployments on AWS.
Ajit Zadgaonkar, Director of Engineering and Operations at Edmunds walks through best practices for CICD architectures used by his team to deploy containers. We also deep dive into topics such as how to create an accessible CICD platform and architect for safe blue/green deployments.
CON307 – Building Effective Container Images Sick of getting paged at 2am and wondering “where did all my disk space go?” New Docker users often start with a stock image in order to get up and running quickly, but this can cause problems as your application matures and scales. Creating efficient container images is important to maximize resources, and deliver critical security benefits.
In this session, AWS Sr. Technical Evangelist Abby Fuller covers how to create effective images to run containers in production. This includes an in-depth discussion of how Docker image layers work, things you should think about when creating your images, working with Amazon ECR, and mise-en-place for install dependencies. Prakash Janakiraman, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Nextdoor discuss high-level and language-specific best practices for with building images and how Nextdoor uses these practices to successfully scale their containerized services with a small team.
CON309 – Containerized Machine Learning on AWS Image recognition is a field of deep learning that uses neural networks to recognize the subject and traits for a given image. In Japan, Cookpad uses Amazon ECS to run an image recognition platform on clusters of GPU-enabled EC2 instances. In this session, hear from Cookpad about the challenges they faced building and scaling this advanced, user-friendly service to ensure high-availability and low-latency for tens of millions of users.
CON320 – Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging for Containerized Services As containers become more embedded in the platform tools, debug tools, traces, and logs become increasingly important. Nare Hayrapetyan, Senior Software Engineer and Calvin French-Owen, Senior Technical Officer for Segment discuss the principals of monitoring and debugging containers and the tools Segment has implemented and built for logging, alerting, metric collection, and debugging of containerized services running on Amazon ECS.
Chalk Talks
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON314 – Automating Zero-Downtime Production Cluster Upgrades for Amazon ECS Containers make it easy to deploy new code into production to update the functionality of a service, but what happens when you need to update the Amazon EC2 compute instances that your containers are running on? In this talk, we’ll deep dive into how to upgrade the Amazon EC2 infrastructure underlying a live production Amazon ECS cluster without affecting service availability. Matt Callanan, Engineering Manager at Expedia walk through Expedia’s “PRISM” project that safely relocates hundreds of tasks onto new Amazon EC2 instances with zero-downtime to applications.
CON322 – Maximizing Amazon ECS for Large-Scale Workloads Head of Mobfox DevOps, David Spitzer, shows how Mobfox used Docker and Amazon ECS to scale the Mobfox services and development teams to achieve low-latency networking and automatic scaling. This session covers Mobfox’s ecosystem architecture. It compares 2015 and today, the challenges Mobfox faced in growing their platform, and how they overcame them.
CON323 – Microservices Architectures for the Enterprise Salva Jung, Principle Engineer for Samsung Mobile shares how Samsung Connect is architected as microservices running on Amazon ECS to securely, stably, and efficiently handle requests from millions of mobile and IoT devices around the world.
CON324 – Windows Containers on Amazon ECS Docker containers are commonly regarded as powerful and portable runtime environments for Linux code, but Docker also offers API and toolchain support for running Windows Servers in containers. In this talk, we discuss the various options for running windows-based applications in containers on AWS.
CON326 – Remote Sensing and Image Processing on AWS Learn how Encirca services by DuPont Pioneer uses Amazon ECS powered by GPU-instances and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to run proprietary image-processing algorithms against satellite imagery. Mark Lanning and Ethan Harstad, engineers at DuPont Pioneer show how this architecture has allowed them to process satellite imagery multiple times a day for each agricultural field in the United States in order to identify crop health changes.
Workshops
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON317 – Advanced Container Management at Catsndogs.lol Catsndogs.lol is a (fictional) company that needs help deploying and scaling its container-based application. During this workshop, attendees join the new DevOps team at CatsnDogs.lol, and help the company to manage their applications using Amazon ECS, and help release new features to make our customers happier than ever.Attendees get hands-on with service and container-instance auto-scaling, spot-fleet integration, container placement strategies, service discovery, secrets management with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, time-based and event-based scheduling, and automated deployment pipelines. If you are a developer interested in learning more about how Amazon ECS can accelerate your application development and deployment workflows, or if you are a systems administrator or DevOps person interested in understanding how Amazon ECS can simplify the operational model associated with running containers at scale, then this workshop is for you. You should have basic familiarity with Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2, and IAM.
Additional requirements:
The AWS CLI or AWS Tools for PowerShell installed
An AWS account with administrative permissions (including the ability to create IAM roles and policies) created at least 24 hours in advance.
WEDNESDAY 11/29
Birds of a Feather (BoF)
CON01 – Birds of a Feather: Containers and Open Source at AWS Cloud native architectures take advantage of on-demand delivery, global deployment, elasticity, and higher-level services to enable developer productivity and business agility. Open source is a core part of making cloud native possible for everyone. In this session, we welcome thought leaders from the CNCF, Docker, and AWS to discuss the cloud’s direction for growth and enablement of the open source community. We also discuss how AWS is integrating open source code into its container services and its contributions to open source projects.
Breakout Sessions
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON308 – Mastering Kubernetes on AWS Much progress has been made on how to bootstrap a cluster since Kubernetes’ first commit and is now only a matter of minutes to go from zero to a running cluster on Amazon Web Services. However, evolving a simple Kubernetes architecture to be ready for production in a large enterprise can quickly become overwhelming with options for configuration and customization.
In this session, Arun Gupta, Open Source Strategist for AWS and Raffaele Di Fazio, software engineer at leading European fashion platform Zalando, show the common practices for running Kubernetes on AWS and share insights from experience in operating tens of Kubernetes clusters in production on AWS. We cover options and recommendations on how to install and manage clusters, configure high availability, perform rolling upgrades and handle disaster recovery, as well as continuous integration and deployment of applications, logging, and security.
CON310 – Moving to Containers: Building with Docker and Amazon ECS If you’ve ever considered moving part of your application stack to containers, don’t miss this session. We cover best practices for containerizing your code, implementing automated service scaling and monitoring, and setting up automated CI/CD pipelines with fail-safe deployments. Manjeeva Silva and Thilina Gunasinghe show how McDonalds implemented their home delivery platform in four months using Docker containers and Amazon ECS to serve tens of thousands of customers.
Level 400 (Expert)
CON402 – Advanced Patterns in Microservices Implementation with Amazon ECS Scaling a microservice-based infrastructure can be challenging in terms of both technical implementation and developer workflow. In this talk, AWS Solutions Architect Pierre Steckmeyer is joined by Will McCutchen, Architect at BuzzFeed, to discuss Amazon ECS as a platform for building a robust infrastructure for microservices. We look at the key attributes of microservice architectures and how Amazon ECS supports these requirements in production, from configuration to sophisticated workload scheduling to networking capabilities to resource optimization. We also examine what it takes to build an end-to-end platform on top of the wider AWS ecosystem, and what it’s like to migrate a large engineering organization from a monolithic approach to microservices.
CON404 – Deep Dive into Container Scheduling with Amazon ECS As your application’s infrastructure grows and scales, well-managed container scheduling is critical to ensuring high availability and resource optimization. In this session, we deep dive into the challenges and opportunities around container scheduling, as well as the different tools available within Amazon ECS and AWS to carry out efficient container scheduling. We discuss patterns for container scheduling available with Amazon ECS, the Blox scheduling framework, and how you can customize and integrate third-party scheduler frameworks to manage container scheduling on Amazon ECS.
Chalk Talks
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON312 – Building a Selenium Fleet on the Cheap with Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet Roberto Rivera and Matthew Wedgwood, engineers at RetailMeNot, give a practical overview of setting up a fleet of Selenium nodes running on Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet. Discuss the challenges of running Selenium with high availability at minimum cost using Amazon ECS container introspection to connect the Selenium Hub with its nodes.
CON315 – Virtually There: Building a Render Farm with Amazon ECS Learn how 8i Corp scales its multi-tenanted, volumetric render farm up to thousands of instances using AWS, Docker, and an API-driven infrastructure. This render farm enables them to turn the video footage from an array of synchronized cameras into a photo-realistic hologram capable of playback on a range of devices, from mobile phones to high-end head mounted displays. Join Owen Evans, VP of Engineering for 8i, as they dive deep into how 8i’s rendering infrastructure is built and maintained by just a handful of people and powered by Amazon ECS.
CON325 – Developing Microservices – from Your Laptop to the Cloud Wesley Chow, Staff Engineer at Adroll, shows how his team extends Amazon ECS by enabling local development capabilities. Hologram, Adroll’s local development program, brings the capabilities of the Amazon EC2 instance metadata service to non-EC2 hosts, so that developers can run the same software on local machines with the same credentials source as in production.
CON327 – Patterns and Considerations for Service Discovery Roven Drabo, head of cloud operations at Kaplan Test Prep, illustrates Kaplan’s complete container automation solution using Amazon ECS along with how his team uses NGINX and HashiCorp Consul to provide an automated approach to service discovery and container provisioning.
CON328 – Building a Development Platform on Amazon ECS Quinton Anderson, Head of Engineering for Commonwealth Bank of Australia, walks through how they migrated their internal development and deployment platform from Mesos/Marathon to Amazon ECS. The platform uses a custom DSL to abstract a layered application architecture, in a way that makes it easy to plug or replace new implementations into each layer in the stack.
Workshops
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON318 – Interstella 8888: Monolith to Microservices with Amazon ECS Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to get hands-on experience deploying Docker containers as you break Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application into containerized microservices. Using Amazon ECS and an Application Load Balancer, you create API-based microservices and deploy them leveraging integrations with other AWS services.
CON332 – Build a Java Spring Application on Amazon ECS This workshop teaches you how to lift and shift existing Spring and Spring Cloud applications onto the AWS platform. Learn how to build a Spring application container, understand bootstrap secrets, push container images to Amazon ECR, and deploy the application to Amazon ECS. Then, learn how to configure the deployment for production.
THURSDAY 11/30
Breakout Sessions
Level 200 (Introductory)
CON201 – Containers on AWS – State of the Union Just over four years after the first public release of Docker, and three years to the day after the launch of Amazon ECS, the use of containers has surged to run a significant percentage of production workloads at startups and enterprise organizations. Join Deepak Singh, General Manager of Amazon Container Services, as he covers the state of containerized application development and deployment trends, new container capabilities on AWS that are available now, options for running containerized applications on AWS, and how AWS customers successfully run container workloads in production.
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON304 – Batch Processing with Containers on AWS Batch processing is useful to analyze large amounts of data. But configuring and scaling a cluster of virtual machines to process complex batch jobs can be difficult. In this talk, we show how to use containers on AWS for batch processing jobs that can scale quickly and cost-effectively. We also discuss AWS Batch, our fully managed batch-processing service. You also hear from GoPro and Here about how they use AWS to run batch processing jobs at scale including best practices for ensuring efficient scheduling, fine-grained monitoring, compute resource automatic scaling, and security for your batch jobs.
Level 400 (Expert)
CON406 – Architecting Container Infrastructure for Security and Compliance While organizations gain agility and scalability when they migrate to containers and microservices, they also benefit from compliance and security, advantages that are often overlooked. In this session, Kelvin Zhu, lead software engineer at Okta, joins Mitch Beaumont, enterprise solutions architect at AWS, to discuss security best practices for containerized infrastructure. Learn how Okta built their development workflow with an emphasis on security through testing and automation. Dive deep into how containers enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the development lifecycle. Also understand best practices for implementing AWS security and secrets management services for any containerized service architecture.
Chalk Talks
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON329 – Full Software Lifecycle Management for Containers Running on Amazon ECS Learn how The Washington Post uses Amazon ECS to run Arc Publishing, a digital journalism platform that powers The Washington Post and a growing number of major media websites. Amazon ECS enabled The Washington Post to containerize their existing microservices architecture, avoiding a complete rewrite that would have delayed the platform’s launch by several years. In this session, Jason Bartz, Technical Architect at The Washington Post, discusses the platform’s architecture. He addresses the challenges of optimizing Arc Publishing’s workload, and managing the application lifecycle to support 2,000 containers running on more than 50 Amazon ECS clusters.
CON330 – Running Containerized HIPAA Workloads on AWS Nihar Pasala, Engineer at Aetion, discusses the Aetion Evidence Platform, a system for generating the real-world evidence used by healthcare decision makers to implement value-based care. This session discusses the architecture Aetion uses to run HIPAA workloads using containers on Amazon ECS, best practices, and learnings.
Level 400 (Expert)
CON408 – Building a Machine Learning Platform Using Containers on AWS DeepLearni.ng develops and implements machine learning models for complex enterprise applications. In this session, Thomas Rogers, Engineer for DeepLearni.ng discusses how they worked with Scotiabank to leverage Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Docker, GPU-accelerated Amazon EC2 instances, and TensorFlow to develop a retail risk model that helps manage payment collections for millions of Canadian credit card customers.
Workshops
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON319 – Interstella 8888: CICD for Containers on AWS Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for containerized microservices. You get hands-on experience deploying Docker container images using Amazon ECS, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline, automating everything from code check-in to production.
FRIDAY 12/1
Breakout Sessions
Level 400 (Expert)
CON405 – Moving to Amazon ECS – the Not-So-Obvious Benefits If you ask 10 teams why they migrated to containers, you will likely get answers like ‘developer productivity’, ‘cost reduction’, and ‘faster scaling’. But teams often find there are several other ‘hidden’ benefits to using containers for their services. In this talk, Franziska Schmidt, Platform Engineer at Mapbox and Yaniv Donenfeld from AWS will discuss the obvious, and not so obvious benefits of moving to containerized architecture. These include using Docker and Amazon ECS to achieve shared libraries for dev teams, separating private infrastructure from shareable code, and making it easier for non-ops engineers to run services.
Chalk Talks
Level 300 (Advanced)
CON331 – Deploying a Regulated Payments Application on Amazon ECS Travelex discusses how they built an FCA-compliant international payments service using a microservices architecture on AWS. This chalk talk covers the challenges of designing and operating an Amazon ECS-based PaaS in a regulated environment using a DevOps model.
Workshops
Level 400 (Expert)
CON407 – Interstella 8888: Advanced Microservice Operations Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. In this workshop, you help Interstella 8888 build a modern microservices-based logistics system to save the company from financial ruin. We give you the hands-on experience you need to run microservices in the real world. This includes implementing advanced container scheduling and scaling to deal with variable service requests, implementing a service mesh, issue tracing with AWS X-Ray, container and instance-level logging with Amazon CloudWatch, and load testing.
Know before you go
Want to brush up on your container knowledge before re:Invent? Here are some helpful resources to get started:
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