Paul Marshall

🚨 A Cautionary Tale for AWS Users: The Empty S3 Bucket That Cost $1,300 🚨 I recently came across an interesting story that serves as a critical lesson for those leveraging AWS services. Imagine setting up an S3 bucket for testing, expecting no charges because it’s empty. But then, you unexpectedly receive a bill of $1,300! 💸 Here’s what happened: Someone had unintentionally configured an open-source tool incorrectly, causing it to send backup requests to the wrong S3 bucket. This empty bucket, which was meant only for testing, ended up receiving about 100 million unauthorized S3 PUT requests in a single day. The key takeaway? AWS charges for unauthorized requests, even if they result in 4xx errors. Each failed attempt by the open-source tool to access the bucket was racking up charges on the owner’s bill. When an unauthorized request is made to your S3 bucket, such as: aws s3 cp ./file.txt s3://your-bucket-name/random_key you'll be charged for it, despite the AccessDenied error. Interestingly, no AWS account is needed to initiate such requests. Anyone who knows the name of any of your S3 buckets can ramp up your AWS bill as they like. #AWS #CloudComputing #S3Bucket #CostManagement #DevOps

10

By choosing Dropbox, you not only save time but also enhance your team's collaboration capabilities and provide effortless access to your most important files. 🏆According to a Principled Technologies study conducted in 2023, Dropbox outperformed its competitors in 289 out of 336 comparisons of file uploading, downloading, and syncing. Dive into the findings at the link below.

4

I'm reaching out to my LinkedIn community during a time of unexpected change. Recently, I found myself among the many affected by Tesla layoffs. After 16 months of pouring my passion and skills into projects I truly believed in, saying goodbye was not easy. During my tenure on the Vision Automation team, I had the privilege of: * Enhancing vehicle quality by using computer vision to identify defects. * Architecting an in-house machine learning platform for efficient model labelling, training, and deployment. * Developing a robust labeling platform to gather SME insights and train cutting-edge ML models. * Streamlining our authentication processes by transitioning to Microsoft OIDC. * Creating an application alert system by customizing Prometheus, Grafana, and Alert Manager for application-specific alarms. * Collaborating with an extraordinary team of engineers who inspired me every single day. Now, as I navigate this transition on a visa with a tight 60-day timeline, I am actively seeking opportunities where I can bring my expertise to the table. I'm looking for roles in Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, or Machine Learning Operations where I can continue to grow and make an impact. If you, or someone you know, can guide me towards potential opportunities, I would be grateful for your support. Let's connect and explore how my experience can benefit your team. Together, we can achieve great things! #TeslaLayoffs #OpenToWork #Tesla #EngineeringExcellence #MachineLearning #SoftwareEngineering

1,832

101 Comments

Inspired by Google Cloud Next '24! ✈️🧠 Just wrapped up an incredible week at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, and my mind is buzzing with possibilities for the future of cloud technology at Alaska Airlines! 🤯 The sessions on Generative AI and AI were particularly eye-opening. We learned about cutting-edge tools and techniques that can revolutionize the way we develop and maintain software. Here's how I envision leveraging these advancements at Alaska Airlines: - Secure Code Generation: Gen AI can assist in generating secure code by suggesting best practices and identifying potential vulnerabilities during the development process. This could significantly reduce the risk of security breaches and improve the overall quality of our codebase. - Automated Code Reviews and Refactoring: AI-powered tools can automate code reviews, identifying areas for improvement and suggesting refactoring opportunities. This will free up valuable developer time and ensure our code remains clean, efficient, and maintainable. - Intelligent Testing and Debugging: AI can be used to create more intelligent and comprehensive testing frameworks, leading to faster identification and resolution of bugs. This will improve the stability and reliability of our applications. - Predictive Maintenance: By analyzing operational data, AI models can predict potential issues and recommend preventative measures, ensuring optimal performance and minimizing downtime. I'm excited to bring these learnings back to the Alaska Airlines cloud team and explore how we can implement these technologies to enhance our development processes and deliver a world-class experience for our customers. Now enjoy the power of VertexAI and let me know which picture is your favorite from the 3 below 😂 #GoogleCloudNext #GenAI #AI #CloudComputing #SoftwareDevelopment #Innovation #VertexAI #AlaskaAirlines #FutureofTech #Tech #Cloud

19

4 Comments

<rant> Yesterday morning I wrote a post about the phrase "scaling independently" while waiting for my KIND cluster to spin up, and I promised that I would give an example of where you really DO want things to "scale independently" in a separate post. Well, that post is here. Let's talk about #apachekafka and its new Raft-based metadata solution, known as KRaft (yes, it evokes Mac-and-Cheese, which is partially why I like it so much). KRaft is a replacement for ZooKeeper's former role in Kafka. In a KRaft-based cluster, the Metadata Quorum is a group of Kafka Servers that have the "controller" role. The Metadata Quorum stores information such as "what topics exist in my cluster?" and "which Broker is the leader for which Partition?" and "which follower replicas live on which Broker?". This information is CRITICAL for the availability and consistency of a Kafka cluster. In order to ensure consistency of the Metadata Quorum, one specific Controller is chosen as the leader. All write requests go through that leader. In order to ensure availability of the Metadata Quorum, there can be "follower" Controllers in the Metadata Quorum which also store the metadata updates (synchronous replication). In case of failure of the leader, one of the followers can become the leader. In this specific case, it DOES make sense to scale the Brokers and Controllers independently. Why? First, the Controllers don't actually scale. One can be a leader at a time, so the others are just providing backup (note: for reasons beyond the scope of this post, it's best to have an odd number). Additionally, before KIP-853 is implemented, it's actually really hard to add or remove Controllers to/from the Metadata Quorum without downtime. Secondly, it's possible for a misbehaving client to take down a Broker, for example by sending way too much data to a specific partition. If it's just a single Broker that's lost, most of the cluster will continue on and live to fight another day. However, losing a Controller is a Very Bad Thing. Thus, by separating the Controllers from the Brokers, we can improve the availability of the cluster. It is indeed possible to run Kafka with some servers that share the responsibility of Controller and Broker. This is great for development (especially local dev) and also in *SOME* highly resource-constrained production environments. However, I would suggest as a rule of thumb that you should probably: - Separate out your Controllers on their own isolated machines - Start with a Metadata Quorum of size 3, which allows losing one Controller and continuing on alive - Put your Brokers on another set of nodes. Now, there's another good example of how Kafka scales X and Y independently: Compute and Storage. Watch out for the next "Colt Rant" about this, coming later this week! </rant> PS—here's the link to the previous post: https://lnkd.in/gXU77rKW

12

6 Comments

CockroachDB 24.1 is here! I'm excited about this release because 241 is the older of the twin primes 239 and 241, but most importantly because we built this release for organizations who need to reduce operational complexity, enhance developer productivity, and keep their data secure and resilient. We made migrations simpler, with improved SQL compatibility as well as updates to our migration tool MOLT Fetch. If you’re still running on a legacy database and want to make the leap, CockroachDB can help support your cloud-native migration. We designed this release so you can spend less time on database management and more time building. CockroachDB 24.1 features enhanced support for UDFs, Stored Procedures, Read Committed transactions, CDC Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Azure Event Hub, and our CockroachDB Cloud Terraform Provider. We didn’t forget about resilience or security either. Cloud clusters are now officially backed by a SLA of 99.999%. You can organize roles and permissions with Folders and increase security controls with support for GCP Private Service Connect. And Self-Hosted customers can use Physical Cluster Replication with fast cutback to reduce risk from major incidents or disasters. This post is just scratching the surface of the impressive work the Cockroach Labs team has done in making this release possible, so dive into the blog below for an in-depth look at what’s new. https://lnkd.in/efwZCwr9 

70

2 Comments

I'm hiring an SRE for my team in the Bay Area. My rough parameters (but everything is negotiable, please don't self-select out): - Preference for folks who can be in our SF office at least 2 days per week, WFH the other 3 days. Sunnyvale office days is a secondary option. - Targeting mid-career engineers, not your first job, but you don't need to be senior either. - Total team size is 10, with 40% women. You'll be focusing on load balancers in general and Traffic Director specifically. - Overview of the general space: https://lnkd.in/gv8E7TSR - Deep dive into Traffic Director: https://lnkd.in/gvP9ssJy Hiring at Google is a lot different these days. Less generic, more targeted. While the link below has a lot of boilerplate text, it is for my specific opening. If you apply and notify me, I will personally review your application. https://goo.gle/41R0Dk6 If you have any questions, please message me. Good luck, and pass it along to anyone else you think might be interested!

128

17 Comments

Looking to get started with in-database machine learning with MySQL HeatWave? This guide will help get you on the right path. https://lnkd.in/gPjuJU9g

1

Blog about how Canva moved from an all-MySQL pipeline for accurate usage reporting at scale to one built around AWS #DynamoDB, #Snowflake, and #MySQL. One thing that struck me was no use of #ApacheKafka (or equivalent) at ingest, & use of Snowflake to do the big crunching instead of #ApacheSpark or #ApacheFlink. I wonder how much of that is their existing familiarity with Snowflake (as mentioned in the article) vs it being more suitable for the job. https://lnkd.in/g8DnBwe7 #dataEngineering

13

1 Comment

Retool's newest State of AI report is here! See what 700+ developers and tech leaders said about their AI stacks, use cases, challenges, and more as AI adoption accelerates:

5

Crystalloids (a Data focused partner that I have known for many years) took our Application Integration Partner training. They immediately started building integrations based own needs - for instance processing job applications and progressing through hiring a candidate, which touches many systems. This was a perfect way to build expertise and also create new customer-facing demos. Four Weeks Later (!!!) they came to the Cloud Summit with a detailed demo connecting Jira, Hubspot, BigQuery, DocAI and more. They even built a Custom Connectors for Exact Software, a popular Benelux accounting software - to me, this highlights how Partners can help adapt our product to meet the local market needs. The were kind enough to write an article that shows the speed and ease of Application Integration, the real use case they built, and gives great technical detail on how to build a Custom Connector: https://lnkd.in/evWGSHmb #applicationintegration #apigee #googlecloud cc Scott Haaland MadhuVandhini B Jean Dulau Madelon Privé Tessa Reef

42

4 Comments

Software and AI/ML engineering friends - this is a killer opportunity to work for one of my favorite platforms (and one that I use literally every single day). Let me live vicariously through you (especially given my complete lack of engineering skill). #job #hiring #discord #engineering #software #data #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #machinelearning

1

Fellow in-house taxonomists, ontologists, metadata managers, and semantic wizards: what is the name of the team or business unit that you work within? I have the good fortune of getting to rename the "Content Standards" program I lead at Kaiser Permanente IT. My team has determined that the name is too vague to convey the core activities of the program, and leads to confusion with the cross-functional teams we collaborate with. I'm looking for a clear name that will resonate with stakeholders within my org. So I've got a very classic taxonomist question: What to call the program? 🤔 For some context... What my program is responsible for: - Defining and governing standards for metadata, structured data, taxonomy, and ontology for classifying/structuring digital content - Implementing processes and platforms to good metadata hygiene - Assessment and remediation of content metadata What my program doesn't cover: - Writing or editorial style guides - Content design - Content strategy - Site maps or navigational structure - Data governance Any ideas are most welcome!

36

48 Comments

Now we have two first class data catalogs integrated with MS Fabric now available in Azure. Of course DataBricks is the heavy heavy favorite in the enterprise lakehouses as well as AI (as of the conference that just finished 🤓)

6

Super excited to share some massive wins from my teams in Bitbucket Cloud. On April 23rd, we shipped TWO massive new capabilities that catapult Bitbucket Cloud into a new paradigm for Code & CI/CD Management. Dynamic Pipelines are a powerful new tool for building intelligent, standardised, and scalable CI/CD workflows across your entire organisation: https://lnkd.in/eFb_6gf8 And Custom Merge Checks are your go-to tool for enforcing policy, process, and compliance controls when new code is being merged into your repositories: https://lnkd.in/efUi-M8m Check them out, get started, and stay-tuned for more! #bitbucket #CICD #devops #atlassian #pipelines

16

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear how companies like DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, and LinkedIn are scaling data integration pipelines and how they are able to support a variety of use cases from data flows for operational systems and applications,to analytics, business intelligence, and reporting, to rapid experimentation to roll GenAI use cases into production at scale. What you’ll learn: Join Jobin George, Data & Analytics Solutions Architect at Google, and Avinash Shahdadpuri, Co-founder and CTO at Nexla, to learn how to scale data integration pipelines in and out of Google BiqQuery. Jobin and Avinash will cover real-world scenarios with BigQuery and show you how you can seamlessly scale data pipelines for every use case from GenAI to Business Intelligence and Operational Systems with Nexla and Google BigQuery. Use cases will include: Creating intelligent data flows to and from Google BigQuery from anywhere in minutes, easily and reliably. Best practices for operational data integration pipelines that run your business and applications with trillions of records. Considerations for optimizing ETL/ELT pipelines for analytics use cases for enhanced business intelligence and dashboards. New and emerging use cases like transformations to vector embeddings for GenAI and rapid experimentation with various LLMs.

1

Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. ��� Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

20

1 Comment

Whoever comes across this post, did you get into SWE for the money, tech, people, passion, and/or anything else? I see so many posts of people saying for the money, but for me personally I can't imagine wanting to do anything else so far. I love learning about all technologies whether it be computer hardware, different APIs, front/back end frameworks, programming languages and their different methodologies, and just learning about how every single application is designed and built from the ground up on all sides of what goes into it. I can't imagine not wanting to learn just only security, or only front/back end, or only DevOps/SWE, etc. I think there's a benefit to seeing things from ALL perspectives and learning as much as you can from every "team" in just at least a general tech sense beyond what you're getting paid to do...then again I'm not a professional high up SWE YET, but I wont change because of my fascination with building things in the physical world and non-physical world. I like to see the blueprints of major applications and how each person contributed and how each team is made and segregated based on knowledge/language/system design etc. Just a ramble but my two centz of seeing this world from both the outside/peaking through the door...

3

1 Comment