Trent Hornibrook (GAICD)

There has been a lot of hype around the Rust programming language. Most articles and blogs I read are heavy on promises, and a little light on testing. I’ve done a simple comparison between a lambda written in Python vs the same lambda written in Rust. Both use the official AWS SDKs. Boto3 is well established but the Rust SDK is new. The official release was about 8 months ago at reinvent. I’ve load tested both using K6. Why? Well, because I want to see for myself if I really do get the 8x improvement in performance and equivalent reduction in cost that people promote. What were the results? Come along and find out! https://lnkd.in/gfzVfDXY

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Google's Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has weighed in on the UniSuper fiasco. The multi region setup accidentally deleted... These incidents are possible, always ask the "What if question....?" "How do we recover...?" #cloud #privatecloud #dr #businessplan #gcp #google #aws #microsoft #azure https://lnkd.in/er_MNmEh

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In recent years, vulnerable legacy enterprise networks have migrated to full cloud solutions to improve security, scalability, and functionality. However, this shift has often come at the cost of data sovereignty and data lifecycle ownership. I am confident that, eventually, we will need to consider a mix of data sovereignty solutions and offshore computer processing. A likely return to edge computing, which emphasises local data storage and enhanced protection, is on the horizon. I look forward to helping our customers diversify their computing storage and processing capabilities by shifting from cloud computing to edge computing. Let’s see how this plays out!

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Next up we have the crazy and always hilarious Paul McCarty. Paul will he presenting "Repo Swatting: How to delete anyone's source code repository anonymously". Paul will discuss a new attack called Repo Swatting identified in major SCM providers including GitHub, GitLab, and Gitea. He identified the attack and theorized that it could be weaponized to take developer resources offline. He was correct. Swatting is a terrible practice as it allows malicious attackers to target unsuspecting, innocent people by using law enforcement as a directed weapon. Join Paul to learn more about this attach and how he found it. https://lnkd.in/gqPDu9Ca #BSidesMelb2024

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AWS ECS is amazing but also needs a lot of tooling around it maximise delivery and productivity. We at Gravity Cloud have automated all of the tooling needed in a beautiful, functional and configurable UI to bring: 1. Easy creation of services, including timed-preview builds 2. 1-click CI/CD with Rollbacks 3. Auto-scaling and securely managing ENV Variables 4. Approval flows to cut down tickets 5. Alerting and monitoring for your tasks 6. Cost spends and auto-cost savings at compute level 7. Audit Trails Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gmWwexNc #aws

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I just noticed the exciting news from our Instaclustr by NetApp Apache Kafka team (posted today, July 4th in Australia!) about our new Kafka tiered storage feature (public preview) here https://lnkd.in/g79MK_PJ This basically answers the age-old question of "Is Kafka a streaming platform or a database?" with "both" (at least for time series data) and will open up potentially a whole bunch of different use cases for streaming historic data (e.g. ML training and replaying data into new sink systems via Kafka connect) but I'm sure there are more! I was interested in the potential for improvements in Kafka client and cluster performance due to the optimisation of real-time and historic workloads and improvement to cluster operations (e.g. broker recovery operations)! Great work team! I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities to try this out and do some performance/scalability experiments and even performance modelling/predictions in the future.

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Always good to have backups of your cloud data. Especially for mission critical apps such as this $125 BILLION Australian pension app. That Google Cloud deleted all the data by mistake. Fortunately, the pension fund UniSuper had most of the data backed up in Azure and their own servers. Otherwise it would have been a total egg on face scenario. Even so, customers could not access their account balances for over a week! And it is taking a lot of work to get accurate account data back online. Apparently the Google their GCP account was "misconfigured" and it auto deleted. I always recommend testing that you can restore your backups. And to test your DR (Disaster Recovery) plan to stand up a new copy of your app with data. An untested DR plan may have fatal flaws or missing passwords or steps due to tech debt or changes in processes. Article about the situation in comments.

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Google Cloud accidentally deleted a massive customer account, causing two weeks of downtime for UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members. The incident raised concerns about the safeguards in place to prevent account deletion and the importance of a multi-cloud solution. While UniSuper was able to recover its data using backups from a different provider, the incident highlights the need for redundancy in cloud storage. #GoogleCloud #cloudstorage #disasterrecovery

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If you're a DevOps / Cloud Engineer, you need to be picking up more GCP experience. You may ask yourself, "but Julien, GCP holds less than 10% of the market share in Australia. What are you on about?". This time next year, things will look different. For most companies adopting a multi-cloud approach, they're the provider of choice. Especially when running Kube-heavy, building something AI-driven or data-intensive. This demand stacks up with our placement data, 9 people starting new jobs in the last few weeks. It was their GCP experience that got them the jobs (or at least a foot in the door) to start work on some of these interesting AI/ML platforms. The AWS people on our shortlists did not get interviews. It also seems to be where the money is, with day rates around $1200 and salaries north of $190-200 plus retention/performance bonuses. If I was a DevOps/Cloud Engineer, I'd be looking at how I can get some practical experience with GCP or at least complete some of the foundational certs. Looking for GCP Engineers for your team? Give me a call.

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🚨 Secret Cloud Update 🚨 It has been announced today that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has secured a $2b contract to establish a Top Secret Cloud for Australia's Defence and National Intelligence Community, creating over 2,000 jobs. ☁️✅ Key highlights of this initiative: -Three new data centres will be built to host Australia’s most sensitive military and intelligence information. 🛠️🖥️ -The TS Cloud will leverage AI and machine learning for enhanced security. 💻 -Supports interoperability with key allies, including the UK and US. 🇦🇺🇬🇧🇺🇸 -Vital part of the REDSPICE program, boosting Australia’s cyber security capabilities. 🔒 This is a particularly exciting development for its technological advancement in warfighter capability - every second is critical and being able to share and analyse data at speed is crucial. 🕐📈 This partnership strengthens our national defense and drives innovation and job creation in cybersecurity, infrastructure and cloud. I’m excited to see how this progresses in the coming months. 📅 If you’re looking to get involved, get in touch.👇 📩: [email protected] ☎️: 0481 468 355 Jacob Bywater Matthew Kiss Evie Martin #secretcloud #aws #defence

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Next time you think backups are not important, just remember the time when Google Cloud accidentally deleted an entire cloud environment for an investment company managing over $80 billion. Luckily, they had extra backups with another cloud provider. https://lnkd.in/ej_H5rr2 #gitops #devops #devsecops #devopsengineer

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Over the years, my family and I have tackled our fair share of home improvement projects. Repainting rooms in the house 🎨 ✅, assembling furniture 🛋️ ✅ (mostly IKEA), and organising the garage (twice!) ✅ ✅. But there’s one thing we always try to avoid: navigating through our crowded hallway while carrying the shopping! 🛒🍎. This weekend my kids suggested for our next project that we build a secret passage🚪They both think that it would be a game changer – a quick, hassle-free route straight to the kitchen. No tripping over shoes 👟, dodging toys 🧸 or dogs 🐶, or dealing with unexpected detours, often caused by the Guinea Pig 🐹. Just a smooth, direct, private path to where we need to get to. That way they also don’t need to worry too much about clearing up most of the stuff on the floor … which is 95% theirs 😢 Reflecting on this, it reminds me of AWS PrivateLink. Just like the kid’s “planned” secret passage, PrivateLink gives you a secure, private connection to your AWS services – without the need to pass through the public internet, where you might run into all sorts of unwanted traffic. It's direct, it's private and you won’t need to dodge hundreds of toys 🧸 and shoes 👟! Well, if you’re an Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer, looking for a secure and reliable way to access AWS Resource Access Manager, I’ve got some great news for you. It now supports AWS PrivateLink It’s like having your own secret hallway – minus the clutter! #AWS #PrivateLink #CloudComputing #AWSNetworking #FamilyLife #AWSCloud #CloudSecurity https://lnkd.in/gd_Crf79

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An article The Australian today from Edward Chung CEO of TechnologyOne is well worth a read - 75% of technology projects fail. What I find surprising is that while the Government has spent billions of dollars on failed IT projects, they don't seem to have spent money on how to create successful IT projects. I think this points to a fundamental misunderstanding of and disinterest in people. IT is not about the vendor, product or technology, its about people: 1. how you have people excited to be part of a changing environment 2. how you have people willingly give up control of how its done and 3. how you have people excited to discover something new 4. understanding that very few people are expert at the above. The 75% failure rate says that 1-3 are not being addressed.

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"The cloud is someone else's server" really comes to life when Google Cloud wipes a customer's account. Congratulations are in place for the team at UniSuper who worked hard to recover their systems and data, while keeping their customers informed as much as possible. They clearly had proper business continuity and disaster recovery policies in place, and someone was wise enough to have secondary backups with a third-party provider. The official statement relies on vague language and obscure actors like “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.” It is a real shame that Google Cloud has not released a postmortem report, like other cloud providers do. Those of us who work in technology deserve a proper report with all the technical details, explaining what happened, how it happened and what have they done to prevent this from happening again. https://lnkd.in/gGTrXiPK

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Are you aware of the potential risks involved in using public cloud services? This article from The Guardian highlights the importance of having a disaster plan that doesn't rely solely on your cloud provider. It's always better to be safe than sorry, even if you're with a major provider. Remember, it's just someone else's computer, and they can break it as easily as anyone else! This story serves as a reminder to keep your systems secure and have backups in place. If you want to talk IT or have any concerns about your own systems, feel free to drop me a message. It's always good to talk and ensure we're prepared for any potential disasters. Check out the article here: https://lnkd.in/eqrhg-hX

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Recently, UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, experienced a catastrophic event where GCP accidentally deleted its entire account, including all backups stored on their service. This event raises critical questions about the reliability and the safety of Data storage in cloud providers. A robust redundancy strategy within a multi-cloud approach is the key to avoid such catastrophic events. Diversifying your backup solutions across multiple cloud providers can significantly mitigate risks and ensure data integrity. Article link : https://lnkd.in/ekAcJnRb #GCP #Cloud

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