Daily Tech Digest - August 25, 2021

Forrester exec on robotic process automation’s ‘defining point’

Building a good feedback loop will also be essential. Adding better analytics and process discovery can train the AIs and allow them to deliver better recommendations while also shouldering more of the load. “The integration of process mining, digital work analytics, and machine learning will, in the short term, help generate RPA scripts that mimic the capabilities of humans, and, in the long term, help design more-advanced human-machine or human-in-the-loop (HITL) interaction,” the report stated. Another challenge will be finding the best way to deliver and price the software. Cloud-based services are now common and customers have the choice between installing the software locally or relying upon cloud services managed by the vendor. Many vendors often price their software by the number of so-called “bots” assigned to particular tasks. The report imagines that more fine-grained precision will offer customers the ability to move to “consumption-based pricing” that better follows their usage. “This may be per minute or hour of robot time or per task executed, but it solves the problem of bot underutilization,” the report predicted.


Kubernetes hardening: Drilling down on the NSA/CISA guidance

Your security efforts shouldn’t stop at the pods. Networking within the cluster is also key to ensuring that malicious activities can’t occur, and if they do, they can be isolated to mitigate their impact. In addition to securing the control plane, key recommendations include using network policies and firewalls to both separate and isolate resources and encrypting traffic in motion and protecting sensitive data such as secrets at rest. One core way of doing this is taking advantage of the Kubernetes namespace native functionality. While three namespaces are built-in by default, you can create additional namespaces for your applications. Not only does the namespace construct provide isolation, but it can help use resource policies to limit storage and compute resources at the namespace level as well. This can prevent resource exhaustion, either by accident or maliciously, which can have cascading effect on the entire cluster and all its supported applications. While namespaces can help provide resource isolation, leveraging network policies can control the flow of traffic between the various components including pods, namespaces and external IP addresses.


Conductor: Why We Migrated from Kubernetes to Nomad

The first major issue we ran into related to this job type was the GKE autoscaler. As customers’ workload increased, we started to have incidents where pending jobs were piling up exponentially, but nothing was scaled up. After examining the Kubernetes source code, we realized that the default Kubernetes autoscaler is not designed for batch jobs, which typically have a low tolerance for delay. We also had no control over when the autoscaler started removing instances. It was set to 10 minutes as a static configuration, but the accumulated idle time increased our infrastructure cost as we could not rapidly scale down once there was nothing left to work on. We also discovered that the Kubernetes job controller, a supervisor for pods carrying out batch processes, was unreliable. The system would lose track of jobs and be in the wrong state. And there was another scalability issue. On the control plane side, there was no visibility into the size of the GKE clusters’ control plane.  As load increases, GKE would automatically scale up the control plane instances to handle more requests. 


Attackers Actively Exploiting Realtek SDK Flaws

“Specifically, we noticed exploit attempts to ‘formWsc’ and ‘formSysCmd’ web pages,” SAM’s report on the incident said. “The exploit attempts to deploy a Mirai variant detected in March by Palo Alto Networks. Mirai is a notorious IoT and router malware circulating in various forms for the last 5 years. It was originally used to shut down large swaths of the internet but has since evolved into many variants for different purposes.” The report goes on to link another similar attack to the attack group. On Aug. 6 Juniper Networks found a vulnerability that just two days later was also exploited to try and deliver the same Mirai botnet using the same network subnet, the report explained. “This chain of events shows that hackers are actively looking for command injection vulnerabilities and use them to propagate widely used malware quickly,” SAM said. “These kinds of vulnerabilities are easy to exploit and can be integrated quickly into existing hacking frameworks that attackers employ, well before devices are patched and security vendors can react.”


The difference between digitization, digitalization & digital transformation

Digitization is the process of changing from an analog to digital form, also known as digital enablement. In other words, digitization takes an analog process and changes it to a digital form without any different-in-kind changes to the process itself. ... Now, perhaps more disputed is the definition of digitalization. According to Gartner, we can define it as the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. This means that businesses can start to use their digitized data. Through advanced technologies, businesses will be able to discover the potential of processed digital data and help them achieve their business goals. ... Finally, we are introduced to the concept of digital transformation. Here, Gartner states that digital transformation can refer to anything from IT modernization, for example, Cloud computing, to digital optimization, to the invention of new digital business models. Namely, this is the process of fully benefiting from the enormous digital potential in a business. 


Bootstrapping the Authentication Layer and Server With Auth0.js and Hasura

Hasura is a GraphQL engine for PostgreSQL databases. Hasura is also not the only available GraphQL engine. There are other solutions like Postgraphile and Prisma. However, after trying a few of them, I've come to appreciate Hasura for several reasons: Hasura is designed for client-facing applications and is one of the simplest solutions to set up. With Hasura, you get a production-level GraphQL server out-of-the-box that’s performant and has a built-in caching system; Powerful authentication engine that’s based on the RLS (Row Level Security) that allows building granular and complex permission systems; You can host Hasura on-premise using their Docker image, but you can also set up a working GraphQL server in a matter of minutes using Hasura cloud. This option is perfect for scaffolding your app and is the one we will use today; Hasura's dashboard is powerful and user-friendly. You can write and test your GraphQL queries, manage your database schema, add custom resolvers and create subscriptions, all from one place.


Why Work-From-Home IT Teams May Be at a Greater Risk for Burnout

Typical burnout indicators include a loss of interest, reduced productivity, and an inability to fully discharge their professional duties. “People may also experience high levels of exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and pessimism,” notes Joe Flanagan, senior employment advisor at online employment services provider VelvetJobs. Flanagan stated that burnout can also lead to, or trigger, other mental health issues. “Employers and managers should be trained and sensitized to identify these signs, and teams must have checks and balances to provide support to individuals who are at a higher risk,” he advises. Immediate action is necessary as soon as burnout is suspected in a team or a specific worker, Welch suggests. The solution may be as simple as extending a deadline or offering additional support. He also advises establishing communication channels, such as team video calls, which will allow colleagues to interact with each other, exchanging news, insights, and other types of chitchat. “Every team is different, so look for whatever works for the team,” Welch says.


Post-Brexit: how has data protection compliance changed?

While much of The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) have been incorporated into UK law, it’s still important to consider what has changed in terms of how companies – particularly UK-based ones – ensure compliance to data protection regulations. It was argued in 2017 by Index Engines that GDPR puts personal data back in the hands of citizens. This raises the question: “Does this still apply?” No matter what has changed, one challenge will remain: organisations’ ability to find business and legal-critical information within their vast unstructured data stores. Then there are the decisions about when to delete and where to store it, when to modify and rectify it. This is a complex issue now involving multiple petabytes of data, and organisations have no real understanding of what their unstructured data contains. With this top of mind, there is arguably a need for Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration to gain the ability to find and move data around at high speed by mitigating latency and packet loss. This works to provide quicker data access and retrieval.


What the US Army can teach us about building resilient teams

Science and stories are two of the best ways to defeat skepticism. Gen. Casey approached Dr. Seligman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania because it was one of the few known institutions that had conducted large-scale training on resilience and had published extensive peer-reviewed research in the area. It was also the only known entity that had extensive experience developing and implementing a resilience train-the-trainer model that had also been scientifically reviewed. ... Holistic programs have the power to inspire and transform an entire organization and those who work in it, and stories of transformation make the work come to life and help concepts stick. The last place I thought I would learn anything about vulnerability was with US Army drill sergeants. Yet I can speak personally about my own transformation working with them. I used to be someone who never talked about failure or my own challenges. It was too risky, especially when I was practicing law. But the soldiers helped me understand that talking about your obstacles isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s courageous and inspiring. Here are two examples.


How do you lead hybrid teams? 5 essentials

Transparency is often a leadership virtue in any type of organization, but it’s an absolute must for hybrid teams. It’s the basis for mutual trust and productivity when people aren’t consistently working together in the same location. This starts with a clear, highly visible method of setting goals and expectations – and a shared belief in how you’re tracking progress. “Leaders need to be transparent on a shared set of objectives and how they are measuring employee productivity,” says Thomas Phelps, CIO at Laserfiche. “For me, it’s not about how many hours you work or when you were last online.” ... Making broad assumptions about everyone’s shared understanding and experience is probably a bad idea in a hybrid work mode, for example. Make sure you’re checking in with people, listening to them, and making positive changes when they’re in order. Phelps says Laserfiche has been regularly soliciting employee feedback about current and future operational plans since the company’s pivot to fully remote/WFH last year. Nayan Naidu, head of DevOps and cloud engineering capability center at Altimetrik, likewise emphasizes the importance of transparently setting expectations and reinforcing them regularly. 



Quote for the day:

"It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it." -- Henry A. Kissinger

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