Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #19.
Tech
How to Successfully Hand Over Systems
SoundCloud’s Aleksandra Gavrilovska:
Who will take ownership of the systems that were owned by a team that doesn’t exist anymore or that are better suited to be owned by another team? It’s in everyone’s interest that the ownership be given to a team familiar with the system’s domain, so that they can continue the maintenance and evolution.
Handing over systems is one of the most important tasks we do, and often one of the hardest. It’s vitally important that we get these right, for the health of the overall system. Soundcloud has some great ideas in here.
Cryptocurrency is an Abject Disaster
Drew DeVault:
Cryptocurrency problems are more subtle than outright abuse, too. The integrity and trust of the entire software industry has sharply declined due to cryptocurrency. It sets up perverse incentives for new projects, where developers are no longer trying to convince you to use their software because it’s good, but because they think that if they can convince you it will make them rich.
This is a great read about the many, many faults of cryptocurrency.
How a WhatsApp status loophole is aiding cyberstalkers
Louisa Stockley on traced.app:
There is, however, nothing to stop someone who wants to track an ex, a girl- or boyfriend, a spouse, from using one of these apps.
When nearly all of your engineers are from the same background, they don’t have the experience necessary to know how other people will abuse new features. This is yet another example.
SRE Case Study: Mysterious Traffic Imbalance
Charles Li at eBay:
It had been working like this for many years until mid-2007, when the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team noticed that Denver started getting slightly more traffic than Miami. The discrepancy was under 1%, which wasn’t significant enough to cause any impact. It just seemed to be strange as it never happened before, so the SRE team opened a case and started to monitor the traffic distribution more closely.
After several weeks of monitoring, the team clearly observed a trend that the Internet traffic from the users was shifting to Denver slowly and consistently, from 1% to 2% to 3%. At this point, the severity level of the case was raised and more engineers were grouped together to figure out the root cause.
This is an oldie but a goodie that resurfaced in a couple of forums lately. It’s really amazing how things far, far outside of your control or scope can have a profound impact on your operations.
The top 3 mistakes companies make with SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs
The Cortex engineering blog:
We see teams fall into a few common traps with SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs, particularly when they’re just starting out. In this article, we’ll first define these three acronyms (it’s easy to get confused!) and show you how to avoid the mistakes other teams make.
This is a great, easily digestible explanation of these concepts.
Grab Bag
A Casino Gets Hacked Through a Fish-Tank Thermometer
Gene Marks:
“The attackers used that (a fish-tank thermometer) to get a foothold in the network,” she recounted. “They then found the high-roller database and then pulled that back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud.”
Not gonna lie, that’s more than a little impressive. If you can pull off a hack like this, you kinda deserve it.
Beavers chew through 4.5-inch thick tube, disrupting internet
Tessa Vikander for CTVNews Vancouver:
Beavers are being blamed for an internet, cellphone and cable TV outage in a remote town in northern B.C.
Tumbler Ridge, a four-hour drive north-east of Prince George, with a population of 1,982, is in the midst of what is now a two-day-long Telus coverage outage due to damage on local fibre cables by resident wildlife.
Nature is healing.