Our Blog

Integrating Contentful with NuxtJS

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
October 7, 2022

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to collaborate on a cool NuxtJS project. I’m still somewhat new to Vue.js and its related frameworks, meaning I’m discovering exciting new tools and third-party services that can be integrated with them every time a new requirement appears. And there is a particular concept that I heard of, but never worked with until this project: using a Headless CMS to deliver content.

Essentially, a headless CMS permits creating a custom content model, making it accessible through one (or several) APIs that we can query, allowing us to choose whatever presentation layer we prefer to handle the display. This approach decouples the content management part (the “body”) of a project from the design, templates, and frontend logic (the “head”), becoming particularly useful when we have several application types that will interact with the same data, such as a website, a mobile app, or an IoT device.

With that in mind, let’s have a quick look at Contentful: It’s a headless CMS that is offered under the concept of content-as-a-service (CaaS), meaning the content is delivered on demand from a cloud platform to the …

Kubernetes From The Ground Up With AWS EC2

By Jeffry Johar
October 6, 2022

Photo by Darry Lin

One way to learn Kubernetes infrastructure is to build it from scratch. This way of learning was introduced by the founding father of Kubernetes himself: Mr. Kelsey Hightower. The lesson is known as “Kubernetes The Hard Way”.

For this blog entry I would like to take a less demanding approach than Kubernetes The Hard Way, while still being educational. I would like to highlight only the major steps in creating a Kubernetes cluster and what is covered in CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) exams. Thus we are going to use the kubeadm tools to build the Kubernetes cluster.

The steps of creating a Kubernetes cluster are hidden to you if you are using a Kubernetes as a service such as AWS EKS, GCP GKE or the enterprise suites of Kubernetes such as Red Hat Openshift or VMware Tanzu. All of these products let you use Kubernetes without the need to worry about creating it.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial we will need the following from AWS:

• An active AWS account
• EC2 instances with Amazon Linux 2 as the OS
• AWS Keys for SSH to access control node and managed nodes
• Security group which allows SSH and HTTP
• A decent editor such as Vim or Notepad++ to create the …

Git 2.38 packages for RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux 7 and 8

By Jon Jensen
October 5, 2022

Git 2.38 was released 2 days ago, and it has some interesting new features. Let’s look at a couple of them, which you may find make upgrading worthwhile.

Scalar

Git now includes a new command-line tool called scalar which is adapted to working with very large Git repositories. It reminds me of Google’s “repo” tool used to manage a group of multiple large Git repositories for the Android project, but unlike that, Scalar focuses on a single repository.

By default it makes a partial clone so that you need far less network transfer and local disk space to work with a large repository. One of our clients has a repository whose .git directory for a complete clone takes 7.1 GB, but when using scalar clone the partial clone of that repository uses only 46 MB. That’s only 0.6% the size! Your experience will vary based on how much of the repository data is in history vs. currently checked-out files.

I use SSH agent confirmation with ssh-add -c (on Linux; see references below for tips on doing it on Windows and macOS). Because of that, I am aware of every SSH connection that uses my SSH secret key, and noticed that Scalar had Git make 3 network connections to …

Vulnerability Scanning

By Jeremy Freeman
September 15, 2022

Define Your Terms

A security vulnerability is a flaw or bug that could be exploited by a threat agent/​threat actor. According to CrowdStrike, “A threat actor, also known as a malicious actor, is any person or organization that intentionally causes harm in the digital sphere.”

Once a bug or flaw is deemed a vulnerability, it is registered by the MITRE Corporation as a Common Vulnerability or Exposure (CVE) and stored in their CVE database. A CVE is given an identifying number by a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), for example, Red Hat, Microsoft, and other designated authorities.

Threat levels are quantified by assigning a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score from 0 to 10. CVSS is a free and open standard for evaluating the level of threat to a business or organization maintained by the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a federal agency housing the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). NIST provides a CVSS calculator. The NIST NVD database synchronizes with the MITRE CVE database. Only the NVD includes CVSS scores.

The Attackers

Real live people spend a lot of time and money …

CI/CD with Azure DevOps

By Dylan Wooters
August 28, 2022

Photo by Dylan Wooters, 2022.

A development process that includes manual builds, tests, and deployments can work for a small-scale project, but as your codebase and team grow, it can quickly become time-consuming and unwieldy. This can be particularly true if you’re a .NET developer. We all know the struggle of merging in the latest feature and clicking build in Visual Studio, only to have it fail, citing cryptic errors. “Maybe a clean will fix it?”

If this sounds like your current situation, it’s likely time to consider building a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline, commonly known as “CI/CD”. A good CI/CD pipeline will help you automate the painful areas of building, testing, and deploying your code, as well as help to enforce best practices like pull requests and build verification.

There are many great options to choose from when selecting a CI/CD tool. There are self-hosted options like Jenkins and TeamCity. There are also providers like GitHub and Azure DevOps, which offer CI/CD alongside cloud-hosted source control. All of these options have pros and cons, but if you’re looking for a large feature set, flexibility, and in particular good support for …

Kansas State University: One Year with VisionPort

By Sanford Libo
August 18, 2022

It has been almost a year since Kansas State University brought the VisionPort platform into their Hale library. I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Jeff Sheldon, Associate Director of the Sunderland Foundation Innovation Lab, to discuss how the school has been using the platform.

It’s no surprise to hear that the Architecture, Planning and Design (AP) students have taken to VisionPort immediately. Being originally designed around displaying geographic information system (GIS) data, the platform allows users to fly over and through city streets and see buildings in 3D, as well as travel around the world looking for areas of possible real estate development. Many of our clients also use VisionPort to give panoramic, three-dimensional tours of building interiors, to show future tenants properties right from their office and brainstorm design possibilities.

In addition to the AP Design students, VisionPort has found itself being used to immerse students in their education with an incredible National Geographic presentation that features 360° videos including swimming with sharks and getting up close to sea lions and elephants in their natural habitats, as well as …

Ansible tutorial with AWS EC2

By Jeffry Johar
August 11, 2022

Photo by David Buchi

Ansible is a tool to manage multiple remote systems from a single command center. In Ansible, the single command center is known as the control node and the remote systems to be managed are known as managed nodes. The following describes the 2 nodes:

1. Control node:

   • The command center where Ansible is installed.
   • Supported systems are Unix and Unix-like (Linux, BSD, macOS).
   • Python and sshd are required.
   • Remote systems to be managed are listed in a YAML or INI file called an inventory.
   • Tasks to be executed are defined in a YAML file called a playbook.

2. Managed node:

   • The remote systems to be managed.
   • Supported systems are Unix/Unix-like, Windows, and Appliances (eg: Cisco, NetApp).
   • Python and sshd are required for Unix/Unix-like.
   • PowerShell and WinRM are required for Windows.

In this tutorial we will use Ansible to manage multiple EC2 instances. For simplicity, we are going to provision EC2 instances in the AWS web console. Then we will configure one EC2 as the control node that will be managing multiple EC2 instances as managed nodes.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial we will need the following from AWS:

• An active AWS account.
• EC2 instances with Amazon …

Implementing Backend Tasks in ASP.NET Core

By Kevin Campusano
August 8, 2022

As we’ve already established, Ruby on Rails is great. The amount and quality of tools that Rails puts at our disposal when it comes to developing web applications is truly outstanding. One aspect of web application development that Rails makes particularly easy is that of creating backend tasks.

These tasks can be anything from database maintenance, file system cleanup, overnight heavy computations, bulk email dispatch, etc. In general, functionality that is typically initiated by a sysadmin in the backend, or scheduled in a cron job, which has no GUI, but rather, is invoked via command line.

By integrating with Rake, Rails allows us to very easily write such tasks as plain old Ruby scrips. These scripts have access to all the domain logic and data that the full-fledged Rails app has access to. The cherry on top is that the command-line interface to invoke such tasks is very straightforward. It looks something like this: bin/rails fulfillment:process_new_orders.

All this is included right out of the box for new Rails projects.

ASP.NET Core, which is also great, doesn’t support this out of the box like Rails does.

However, I think we should be able to implement our own …