Weekly Tech Notes #3

Hello wonderful people! 👋

Another week, other food for thought. Let’s go!

• Infrastructure connectivity issue affecting multiple regions – This is a post-mortem from Datadog explaining how a connectivity issue took down their multi-region infrastructure for more than a day. Gergely Orosz covered the same story in his newsletter in a more detailed way.
• How Cloudflare’s wall of lava lamps helps keep the internet safe – Cloudflare uses a wall of lava lamps (along with two other physical projects) to maximize entropy for cryptographic seeds. First time I heard about this, and you can find more technical details here and here.
• The illustrated guide to S3 pre-signed URLs – Have you ever wondered how to handle uploads and downloads to S3 without exposing your bucket to the public? This article explains how to use pre-signed URLs to grant temporary access to S3 objects. I used this technique in the past and it worked like a charm.

Thanks for reading! 📚