You may seen the recent announcement from Microsoft that Xbox is now the first ‘carbon aware’ games console – reducing carbon footprint by optimizing updates and downloads to run at a time when the console can use the most renewable energy.
Given the increasingly power-hungry needs of the worlds data centres, there is huge opportunity to shift workloads in this … Read more “Building carbon-aware software”
Any organisation more than a few years old typically ends up with a pretty diverse set of technology in use, changing over many years. Team members come and go with different skills, motivations and interests. Technologies shift in popularity, industry trends, and therefore in availability of skills, and ongoing support.
Keeping this in check requires active effort across engineering teams … Read more “Communicating the evolution of your technology stack – and keeping it in check!”
In a recent project I encountered a need for an AWS Lambda function to receive messages from a Kinesis stream, and forward them on to an IoT pipeline in another ‘target’ AWS account.
The basic steps are:
The basic steps are:Create a role in the ‘target’ AWS account, with the permissions to … Read more “Cross-account lambdas and renewing security tokens”
At FundApps we had a semi-dynamic data schema, which could be defined by our regulatory team in accordance with the market data required to enforce regulations.
Imagine a table of stock holdings like the below, with potentially millions of rows, and possibly a few hundred column headers. The data was sparse, but with much overlap in data according to the … Read more “Reducing memory consumption for dynamic tabular data”
We got caught out recently by significantly high usage of AWS CloudWatch, and realised we’d been spending $1000/month more than expected. After tracking down the cause (one of the team had turned on detailed instance monitoring) – I wanted to ensure we had a bit more of a heads up next time. We had budgets set for all the major … Read more “Simple catch-all AWS budgets”
It appears there’s now another tool in the arsenal for those looking at implementing BeyondCorp style security model, with the arrival of OIDC authentication support in AWS’s application load balancer. It adds to a growing list of possiblities, at least for HTTP-based services. Who needs VPN anyway?
The options I’m aware of now include:
… and regardless of cloud provider, it’s (probably) costing you 2x what it would on dedicated kit. So AWS could be costing you 4x what it would cost to license on dedicated hardware.
Disclaimer: I am certainly not a SQL Server licensing expert, nor that much of a cloud expert. The purpose of this post is to hopefully prove that … Read more “Licensing SQL Server in AWS? It’s up to twice as expensive as Azure or Rackspace Cloud.”
NDepend is an analysis tool giving you all kinds of code quality metrics, but also tools to drill down into dependencies, and query and enforce rules over your code base.
There’s a version that integrates with Visual Studio, but there’s also a version that runs on the console to generate static reports, and enforce any code rules you might have … Read more “Integrating NDepend metrics into your Build using F# Make & TeamCity”
I’ve previously depended a little too much on TeamCity to construct our build process, but have been increasingly shifting everything to our build scripts (and therefore source control).
We’ve been using F# make – an awesome cross platform build automation tool like make & rake.
As an aside (before you ask): The dotCover support in TeamCity is already excellent – … Read more “Code coverage using dotCover and F# make”
If you’re running a HTTPS-only web application, then you probably have requireSSL set to true in your web.config like so:
<httpCookies requireSSL="true" httpOnlyCookies="true"With requireSSL set, any cookies ASP.NET sends with the HTTP response – in particular, the forms authentication cookies – will have the “secure” flag set. This ensures that they will only be sent to your website when … Read more “SSL Termination and Secure Cookies/requireSSL with ASP.NET Forms Authentication”
As it took far too much Googling to find this, if you need to access the AppData folder for the System account, go here:
C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local I hit this because we needed to clear the NuGet package cache for a TeamCity build agent which was running as a service under the System account.
At FundApps we run a regular SkipFish scan against our application as one of our tools for monitoring for security vulnerabilities. In order for it to test beyond our login page, we need to provide a valid .ASPXAUTH cookie (you’ve renamed it, right?) to the tool.
Because we want to prevent Cross-site request forgeries to our login pages, we’re using … Read more “Get ASP.NET auth cookie using PowerShell (when using AntiForgeryToken)”