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Continuous Deployment for AWS Glue

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:51:25 -0500

AWS Glue is a managed service for building ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) jobs. It’s a useful tool for implementing analytics pipelines in AWS without having to manage server infrastructure. Jobs are implemented using Apache Spark and, with the help of Development Endpoints, can be built using Jupyter notebooks. This makes it reasonably easy to write ETL processes in an interactive, iterative fashion. Once finished, the Jupyter notebook is converted into a Python script, uploaded to S3, and then run as a Glue job.

Security by Happenstance

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 11:25:14 -0500

Key rotation, auditing, and secure CI/CD

Companies often require employees to regularly change their passwords for security purposes. PCI compliance, for example, requires that passwords be changed every 90 days. However, NIST, whose guidelines commonly become the foundation for security best practices across countless organizations, recently revised its recommendations around password security. Its Digital Identity Guidelines (NIST 800-63-3) now recommends removing periodic password-change requirements due to a growing body of research suggesting that frequent password changes actually makes security worse. This is because these requirements encourage the use of passwords which are more susceptible to cracking (e.g. incrementing a number or altering a single character) or result in people writing their passwords down.

Introducing InfinitumFramework.com

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 01:36:36 -0600

Here’s a dose of shameless self-promotion. It’s coming up on a year since I started development on Infinitum, and I’m targeting its first full release on its birthday, February 11. Shortly before I moved the project to GitHub, they deprecated the downloads service, so I needed to fine a home for distributing the binaries as well as the Javadoc.

GitHub offers its pages service, but I figured I’d just host it myself. I threw together a website in a couple days and the result is www.infinitumframework.com. This website will be used to host the latest (and previous) releases of the framework, its documentation, and, in the future, announcements and updates for it.

Modularizing Infinitum: A Postmortem

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:04:16 -0600

In addition to getting the code migrated from Google Code to GitHub, one of my projects over the holidays was to modularize the Infinitum Android framework I’ve been working on for the past year.

Infinitum began as a SQLite ORM and quickly grew to include a REST ORM implementation, REST client, logging wrapper, DI framework, AOP module, and, of course, all of the framework tools needed to support these various functionalities. It evolved as I added more and more features in a semi-haphazard way. In my defense, the code was organized. It was logical. It made sense. There was no method, but there also was no madness. Everything was in an appropriately named package. Everything was coded to an interface. There was no duplicated code. However, modularity — in terms of minimizing framework dependencies — wasn’t really in mind at the time, and the code was all in a single project.