Say you have a Aurora RDS PostgreSQL database that you want to use as the source database for Amazon Database Manager Service.

The documentation is unclear on this point so here you go: you can't use an Aurora RDS PostgreSQL database as the source database because Aurora doesn't support the concept of replication slots, which is how Amazon DMS migrates data from one database to another.

Better luck with other migration tools!

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Three years ago I quit my job and started consulting full time. It's worked out really well. I get to spend more time doing things I like to do and I've been able to deliver great products for clients. I wanted to go over some tips for starting a successful consulting business.

• Charge more - Everyone says it and it's true. I started out charging a monthly rate that was close to my full time salary / 12. This is not a good idea because you have overhead that your employer is no longer covering - health care probably the biggest one, you don't have paid vacations, there may be unpaid downtime between contracts and also companies might not pay you. You need to be charging a lot more to just break even.

  I dread "what's your rate" conversations every time and they haven't gotten easier. Before I quote my rate I reread the details of the High Tech Employee Antitrust case to pump myself up - it reminds me that I'm negotiating with a company that couldn't care less really and I am the only one who's going to stand up for myself. If you think you don't need the extra money - get it anyway, and then donate more to charities at the end of the year/buy CD's/put it in the stock market/give it to the government. Amazon just made $11 billion and paid $0 in taxes; you are going to spend an additional dollar better than Amazon's executives will.

  If you are not sure how much to charge, quote each new client more than the last. Your quote is often a signal of your quality so it's not even really the case that demand slopes downwards as you charge more.

  If you are working with a client and they are very happy with your work and want to extend your contract consider asking for a higher rate. "Now that you know how good I am," etc.

• Get the money - Signed contracts, work performed, don't matter until the money hits your bank account. I learned this the hard way. If a company is going under your invoices are worthless. You can hold onto the company IP but that's probably also worthless. You can sue but at the end you will win a judgment that you can collect money from a company that doesn't have any to pay you.

  Try to get as much of the contract as you can paid up front - I generally ask for half or more up front. If a company offers Net 30 ask if you can shorten it to Net 5 or 10 or submit your invoices in advance. Submit invoices on time - it's a very costly mistake and you won't learn its importance until it's too late.

  Try as hard as you can to figure out the financial health of the company - if you can do your homework in the press or ask questions to your primary point of contact, like how much cash they are burning, how many months of runway do you have. If a company is not forthcoming with this information it's a red flag that they may not be able to pay you.

  If you see any red flags - the company wants to cut the contract short, people start leaving, company suddenly cuts back on perks - tell your contact that you need to be paid upfront or you are not going to work anymore. If they push back on this they may not have the cash to pay you at all. It's a crappy situation but better to cut your losses than to work for someone that can't actually pay.

• Don't charge by the hour - I have never actually done this so I can't speak to how bad it is but don't do this. You don't want a client to cut you loose at 3pm and suddenly you lose three hours you were counting on. Charge per week.

• Get a lawyer - Get a lawyer to review every contract you sign. Read through them, flag concerning things to the lawyer. They will suggest language. Send the language to the company. You are not being difficult when you do this, the company does this all the time. Lawyers are expensive, expect to pay north of $400 per hour and contract review can take 30-60 minutes. This money is worth it.

  A good clause to try to push for is limitation of liability. You don't want to be in a situation where $2 million of damages occurred or a high value client left the company because of an error you pushed and the company is suddenly coming after everything you own. Similarly the company may want to protect against you trying to sue them for a high amount of damages to your reputation, future business etc. Limiting the total liability to the size of the contract, or a multiple of the size of the contract - on both sides - can be a good move.

• Register as a Company - Consult with the lawyer you hired on what kind of company you want to be. Generally the more "company-like" you are the harder it is for companies to try to take your personal assets. I don't have employees or shareholders so I have a single member LLC that is disregarded for tax purposes — read this description from the IRS. Sometimes businesses are confused what this means when I tell them or try to sign up for things. Still, it is a good fit for me. It may not be for you - I am not a lawyer, you should talk with one, learn the tradeoffs and see what makes sense for your business.

• Make Sure Contracts Are Signed With the Company - The contracts you sign should be between the client you are working with and your company NOT between the client and you personally. Discuss this with your lawyer.

• Get an accountant - As a small business a lot of stuff is tax deductible - a home office, client travel, for example, even if it's just across town - and you want to make sure you are getting ~35% off on everything that you can. An accountant will help you with this.

• Market yourself - Not necessarily ads or sponsorships, but: everyone you've worked with full time should know they can hire you now. If they don't then reach out to people and let them know. Put up a website that engineers can send to their boss. My website isn't fancy but it is effective. Order business cards - VistaPrint is garbage, order from moo.com. If you have a website or open source projects put a note at the bottom advertising that you're available for hire, like the one at the bottom of this post.

• Set up separate accounts for everything - Open separate accounts for your business. Get a business credit card or just a separate cash back card on your personal account. I don't have a checking account registered for the business but I opened a second checking account that I call my "business account". Clients pay into that account and I pay the business credit card out of that account. I even have a separate Clipper card that I use for business travel.

  There are two reasons for this. It makes tax accounting a lot easier. I know that every transaction on the business Clipper card is work travel and can be expensed; I don't have to try to remember what I was doing when I paid $2 to SamTrans at 5:34pm on July 27.

  Second, if you don't keep good records for the business - if you "commingle" funds between your personal life and the business - it makes it much easier for clients to go after your personal assets, what's called "piercing the veil." Separate accounts (and discipline about transfers!) make it much easier to argue that your business income and spending and personal income and spending are separate even if you don't necessarily have the legal structures to back them up.

  I also set up a new Github account for every company I work with. This avoids any issues with emails going to the wrong place, or the need to grant/revoke permissions to any 3rd party tools a company uses. I use github.com/kevinburke/swish to swap SSH settings between my Github accounts:

    $ cat $(which notion-github)
    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    ${GOPATH}/bin/swish --identity-file ${HOME}/.ssh/github_notion_ed25519 --user kevinburkenotion

• Balancing multiple clients: If you can do this or do things like charge retainers, great. I find it really hard to switch contexts so I work with one client at a time and treat it as a full time job. Do what works for you.

• Give back to the tools that make you successful - I give a percentage of my earnings every year to support software tools that help me do my job - iTerm2, Vim, Go, Postgres, Node.js, Python, nginx, various other open source projects. You should consider doing this too. (If you are an open source maintainer reading this - tell me how I can pay you!!)

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Last week I wrote about how AWS ALB's do not validate TLS certificates from internal services. Colm MacCárthaigh, the lead engineer for Amazon ELB, writes:

I’m the main author of Amazon s2n, our Open Source implementation of TLS/SSL, and a contributor to the TLS/SSL standards. Hopefully I’m qualified to chime in!

You’re right that ALB does not validate the certificates on targets, but it’s important to understand the context that ALBs run in to see why this is still a pending item on our roadmap, rather than something we’ve shipped already as a “must have”.

The role that server certificates play in TLS is to authenticate the server, so that it can’t be impersonated or MITM. ALBs run exclusively on our Amazon VPC network, a Software Defined Network where we encapsulate and authenticate traffic at the packet level. We believe that this protection is far stronger than certificate authentication. Every single packet is being checked for correctness, by both the sender and the recipient, even in Amazon-designed hardware if you’re using an Enhanced Networking interface. We think it’s better than the ecosystem where any CA can issue a certificate at any time, with still limited audit controls (though certificate transparency is promising!).

The short of it is that traffic simply can’t be man-in-the-middled or spoofed on the VPC network, it’s one of our core security guarantees. Instances, containers, lambda functions, and Elastic Network Interfaces can only be given IPs via the secure and audit-able EC2 APIs. In our security threat model, all of this API and packet level security is what plugs in the role performed by server certificates.

This contrasts with the older EC2 classic network, a big shared network, which is why classic load balancers do support backend authentication.

We actually find that many customers actually load their targets and backends with “invalid” certificates that are self-signed or expired, because it’s so operationally hard to stay up-to-date and it’s hard to automate, even with projects like LetsEncrypt, when your instances are inherently unreachable on the internet.

All that said, we’ll be adding support for certificate validation, probably including pinning and private CAs! Used well with good operational controls it can be a measure of defense in depth, and it’s important for cases such as targets hosted on less secure private networks such as on-premesis data-centers.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Want to know how to get rough profiling of any tool written in any language, whether you control the source or not? Keep reading.

For example, here's the output you get when you compile Go from source code. Each of these lines prints out a few seconds apart. How would you go about getting timings for each individual step, or how would you notice if one step was suddenly executing much more slowly than it did three days ago?

$ GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP=~/go1.10 ./make.bash
Building Go cmd/dist using /Users/kevin/go1.10.
Building Go toolchain1 using /Users/kevin/go1.10.
Building Go bootstrap cmd/go (go_bootstrap) using Go toolchain1.
Building Go toolchain2 using go_bootstrap and Go toolchain1.
Building Go toolchain3 using go_bootstrap and Go toolchain2.
Building packages and commands for darwin/amd64.
---
Installed Go for darwin/amd64 in /Users/kevin/go
Installed commands in /Users/kevin/go/bin

There are a few different methods you can use to get a sense for this, but I wanted to share my favorite one. Don't reach for a profiler, don't try to set a global variable, or do start/stop timing in code. Don't even start figuring out how to configure a logger to print timestamps, and use a log output format.

Then when you've done all this, rerun the command and pass it through a command that attaches timestamps to every output line. For example, I have a tool called tss (based on ts in the moreutils package) that does this. Pipe your command to tss and you'll get output like this:

$ GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP=~/go1.10 ./make.bash | tss
     11ms         Building Go cmd/dist using /Users/kevin/go1.10.
    690ms   679ms Building Go toolchain1 using /Users/kevin/go1.10.
  11.435s 10.745s Building Go bootstrap cmd/go (go_bootstrap) using Go toolchain1.
  18.483s  7.048s Building Go toolchain2 using go_bootstrap and Go toolchain1.
  40.788s 22.305s Building Go toolchain3 using go_bootstrap and Go toolchain2.
 1m0.112s 19.324s Building packages and commands for darwin/amd64.
1m19.053s 18.942s ---
1m19.053s      0s Installed Go for darwin/amd64 in /Users/kevin/go
1m19.053s      0s Installed commands in /Users/kevin/go/bin

The first column is the amount of time that has elapsed since the tool was invoked. The second column is the amount of time that has elapsed since the previous line was printed.

The good thing about this technique is you can use it in pretty much any situation - you don't have to know anything about the code besides:

• how to invoke it
• a rough idea of which code paths get hit
• how to print things to stdout

Just start adding print lines around interesting bits of code.

For example, you might have this in your test suite in Ruby to empty the database. How much time does this add to every test in your suite? Put print lines before and after to find out.

config.after(:each) do
  puts "database clean start"
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
  puts "database clean end"
end

Similarly, if you wanted to find out why it takes so long for your test suite to start running or your web framework to boot, you can annotate your spec_helper or bootstrap file, the top of the test file, before and after require lines, and the start and end of the first test in the suite. You can even drill down into third party libraries, just find the source file on disk and start adding print statements.

You can also use it with strace! strace will show you a list of the syscalls being opened by your program. Passing the output through tss can show you which syscall activity is taking a lot of time, or when your program is doing a lot of stuff without going to the disk.

Caveats

If you pipe program a to program b, and program a exits with a non-zero return code, Bash will by default report a return code of zero for the entire operation. This means if you are piping output to tss or ts you may accidentally change a failing program to a passing one. Use set -o pipefail in Bash scripts to ensure that Bash will return a non-zero return code if any part of a pipe operation fails. Or add this to a Makefile:

SHELL = /bin/bash -o pipefail

Second, the program being profiled may not flush output to stdout, that is, it may print something but it may not appear on the screen at the same time it was printed. If the timings on screen don't seem to match up with your intuition, check that the program is flushing print statements to the stdout file descriptor after printing them.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

It's a common, and distressing, pattern to have factories in tests that call out to a library like Faker to "randomize" the returned object. So you might see something like this:

User.create({
    id: uuid(),
    email: faker.random.email(),
    first_name: faker.random.firstName(),
    last_name: faker.random.lastName(),
    address: faker.random.address(),
});

package = Package.create({
    width: faker.math.range(100),
    height: faker.math.range(200),
    length: faker.math.range(300),
})

This is a bad practice and it's distressing to see it in such widespread use. I want to explain some reasons why it's bad.

The corpus is not large enough to avoid uniqueness failures

Let's say you write a test that creates two different users, and for whatever reason, the test fails if the users have the same name (due to a database constraint failure, write to same map key, array having 1 value instead of 2, &c). Faker has about three thousand different possible values for a first name. This means that every 3000th run on average, the randomly chosen names will collide, and your test will fail. In a CI environment or on a medium size team, it's easy to run the tests 3000 times in a week. Alternatively, if the same error exists in ten tests, it will emerge on average once every 300 runs.

The onus on catching failures falls on your team

Because the error only appears once in every 3000 test runs, the odds are you haven't fully or partially probed the space of possible test values when you submit your code and tests for review. This means that the other members of your team will be the ones who run into the error caused by your tests. They might lack the context necessary to effectively debug the problem. This is a very frustrating experience for your teammates.

It's hard to reproduce failures

If you don't have enough logging to see the problem on the first failure, it's going to be difficult to track down a failure that appears only once every 3,000 test runs. Run the test ten or even fifty times in a loop and it still won't appear.

An environment where tests randomly fail for unknown reasons is corrosive to build stability. It encourages people to just hit the "Rebuild" button and hope for a pass on the next try. Eventually this attitude will mask real problems with the build. If your test suite takes a long time to run (upwards of three minutes) it can be demoralizing to push the deploy or rebase button and watch your tests fail for an unrelated reason.

It's a large library (and growing)

It's common for me to write Node.js tests and have an entire test file with 50 or 100 tests exit in about 10 milliseconds.

By definition a "fixture" library needs to load a lot of fake data. In 2015 it took about 60 milliseconds to import faker. It now takes about 300 milliseconds:

var a = Date.now()
require('faker');
console.log(Date.now() - a);

$ node faker-testing/index.js
303

You can hack around this by only importing the locale you need, but I've never seen anyone do this in practice.

What you need instead

So faker is a bad idea. What should you use? It depends on your use case.

• Unique random identifiers. If you need a random unique identifier, just use a uuid generator directly. If you create 103 trillion objects in a given test, the odds of a uuid collision are still only one in a billion, so the odds of a collision are much lower than using the faker library. Alternatively, you can use an incrementing integer each time you call your factory, so you get "Person 0", "Person 1", "Person 2", etc.

• A fuzzer, or QuickCheck. Faker has tools for randomizing values within some input space, say a package width that varies between 0 and 100. The problem is that the default set up is to only exhaust one of those values each time you run the test, so you're barely covering the input space.

  What you really want is a fuzzer, that will generate a ton of random values within a set of parameters, and test a significant percentage of them each time the test runs. This gives a better guarantee that there are no errors. Alternatively, if there are known edge cases, you can add explicit tests for those edge cases (negative, 0, one, seven, max, or whatever). Tools like Haskell's QuickCheck or afl-fuzz make it easy to add this type of testing to your test suite.

If you want random human-looking data I suggest adding it yourself and using some scheme that makes sense for your company. For example, users named Alice and Bob are always friends that complete actions successfully, and Eve always makes errors. Riders with Android phones always want to get picked up in Golden Gate Park and taken to the Mission; riders with iPhones want to get picked up in the Tenderloin and taken to Russian Hill (or something). This scheme will provide more semantic value, and easily pinpoint errors (a "Bob" error means we should have submitted something successfully but failed to, for example).

That's all; happy testing, and may your tests never be flaky!

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

There are a number of Unix commands that manipulate something about the environment or arguments in some way before starting a subcommand. For example:

• xargs reads arguments from standard input and appends them to the end of the command.

• chpst changes the process state before calling the resulting command.

• envdir manipulates the process environment, loading variables from a directory, before starting a subcommand

Go is a popular language for writing tools that shell out to a subprocess, for example aws-vault or chamber, both of which have exec options for initializing environment variables and then calling your subcommand.

Unfortunately there are a number of ways that you can make mistakes when proxying to a subcommand, especially one where the end user is specifying the subcommand to run, and you can't determine anything about it ahead of time. I would like to list some of them here.

First, create the subcommand.

cmd := exec.Command("mybinary", "arg1", "-flag")
// All of our setup work will go here
if err := cmd.Run(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Standard Output/Input/Error

You probably want to proxy through the subcommand's standard output and standard error to the parent terminal. Just reassign stdout/stderr to point at the parent command. Obviously, you can redirect these later.

cmd.Stdout = os.Stdout
cmd.Stderr = os.Stderr
// If you need
cmd.Stdin = os.Stdin

Environment Variables

By default the subcommand gets all of the environment variables that belong to the Go process. But if you reassign cmd.Env it will only get the variables you provide, so you have to be careful with your implementation.

cmd.Env = []string{"TZ=UTC", "MYVAR=myval"}

Signals

If someone sends a signal to the parent process, you probably want to forward it through to the child. This gets tricky because you can receive multiple signals, that all should be sent to the client and handled appropriately.

You also can't send signals until you start the process, so you need to use a goroutine to handle them. I've copied this code from aws-vault, with some modifications.

if err := cmd.Start(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err) // Command not found on PATH, not executable, &c.
}
// wait for the command to finish
waitCh := make(chan error, 1)
go func() {
    waitCh <- cmd.Wait()
    close(waitCh)
}()
sigChan := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
signal.Notify(sigChan)

// You need a for loop to handle multiple signals
for {
    select {
    case sig := <-sigChan:
        if err := cmd.Process.Signal(sig); err != nil {
            // Not clear how we can hit this, but probably not
            // worth terminating the child.
            log.Print("error sending signal", sig, err)
        }
    case err := <-waitCh:
        // Subprocess exited. Get the return code, if we can
        var waitStatus syscall.WaitStatus
        if exitError, ok := err.(*exec.ExitError); ok {
            waitStatus = exitError.Sys().(syscall.WaitStatus)
            os.Exit(waitStatus.ExitStatus())
        }
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatal(err)
        }
        return
    }
}

Just Use Exec

The above code block is quite complicated. If all you want to do is start a subcommand and then exit the process, you can avoid all of the above logic by calling exec. Unix has a notion of parent and children processes - when you start a process with cmd.Run, it becomes a child process. exec is a special system call that sees the child process become the parent. Consider the following program:

cmd := exec.Command("sleep", "3600")
if err := cmd.Run(); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println("terminated")

If I run it, the process tree will look something like this:

 | |   \-+= 06167 kevin -zsh
 | |     \-+= 09471 kevin go-sleep-command-proxy
 | |       \--- 09472 kevin sleep 3600

If I run exec, the sleep command will replace the Go command with the sleep command. In Go, this looks something like this:

 | |   \-+= 06167 kevin -zsh
 | |     \--= 09862 kevin sleep 3600

This is really useful for us, because:

• We don't need to proxy through signals or stdout/stderr anymore! Those are automatically handled for us.

• The return code of the exec'd process becomes the return code of the program.

• We don't have to use memory running the Go program.

Another reason to use exec: even if you get the proxying code perfectly right, proxying commands (as we did above) can have errors. The Go process can't handle SIGKILL, so there's a chance that someone will send SIGKILL to the Go process and then the subprocess will be "orphaned." The subprocess will be reattached to PID 1, which makes it tougher to collect.

I should note: Syscalls can vary from operating system to operating system, so you should be careful that the arguments you pass to syscall.Exec make sense for the operating system you're using. Rob Pike and Ian Lance Taylor also think it's a bad idea.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Bazel is a build system that was recently open sourced by Google. Bazel operates on configuration files - a WORKSPACE file for your entire project, and then per-directory BUILD.bazel files. These declare all of the dependencies for your project, using a language called Skylark. There are a number of Skylark rules for things like downloading and caching HTTP archives, and language-specific rules.

This can be a pain to set up for a new project, but the advantage is you get builds that are perfectly hermetic. In addition, if your project has a lot of artifacts, Bazel has useful tools for caching those artifacts, and builds a dependency graph that makes it easy to see when things change. For example, if you compile Javascript from Typescript, you can cache the compiled Javascript. If the Typescript source file changes, Bazel knows that only the file that changed needs to be regenerated.

Anyway there are some gotchas about running Bazel on Travis CI that I wanted to cover, and when I was looking at instructions they weren't great.

1) Install Bazel

The official instructions ask you to add the Bazel apt repository, and then install from there. You can shave a few seconds by only updating that repository, instead of all of them.

echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://storage.googleapis.com/bazel-apt stable jdk1.8" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bazel.list
curl --silent https://bazel.build/bazel-release.pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update -o Dir::Etc::sourcelist="sources.list.d/bazel.list" \
    -o Dir::Etc::sourceparts="-" \
    -o APT::Get::List-Cleanup="0"
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk bazel

You can shave a few more seconds by just getting and installing the deb directly, though this requires you to manually update the version number when Bazel releases a new version. (This is in a Makefile, you'll need to change the syntax for Bash or a travis.yml file).

BAZEL_VERSION := "0.7.0"
BAZEL_DEB := "bazel_$(BAZEL_VERSION)_amd64.deb"

curl --silent --output /tmp/$(BAZEL_DEB) "https://storage.googleapis.com/bazel-apt/pool/jdk1.8/b/bazel/$(BAZEL_DEB)"
sudo dpkg --force-all -i /tmp/$(BAZEL_DEB)

2) Run Tests

Bazel ships with a ton of flags but these are probably the ones you want to know about/use:

• --batch: Run in batch mode, as opposed to client-server mode.

• --noshow_progress / --noshow_loading_progress: Travis pretends to be a TTY so it can show colors, but this causes Bazel to dump a whole bunch of progress messages to the screen. It would be nice if you could say "I can handle ANSI escape sequences relating to colors, but not screen redraws" but you only get the binary "I'm a TTY" / "I'm not", which is unfortunate. Anyway these options turn off the "show progress" log spam.

• --test_output=errors: By default Bazel logs test failures to a log file. This option will print them to the screen instead.

• --features: Enable features specific to a test runner. In particular for Go you may want the --features=race rule to run tests with the race detector enabled.

3) Cache Results

Bazel is much faster when it can load the intermediate results from a cache; on one library I maintain, tests run in 13 seconds (versus 47 seconds) when they are run with a full cache.

However, the Bazel caches are enormous. Caches for Go tests include the Go binary and source tree, which runs about 95MB alone. Add on other artifacts (including the Java JDK's used to run Bazel) and it's common to see over 200MB. If you are uploading or downloading caches from somewhere like S3, this can be a really slow operation. Also, it's difficult to remove large items from Bazel's cache without removing everything; the file structure makes the cache a little tough to remove parts of.

In particular, Travis's cache does go to S3, which means it skips the local caching proxies Travis sets up for e.g. apt and npm. Travis times out the cache download after 3 minutes, and Bazel quits if the cache is corrupt. In my experience Travis will not complete a 200MB cache download in 3 minutes, so your builds will fail.

That's it

For now it's probably best to eat the cold cache startup time. That's really unfortunate though; I hope we can find a better solution in the future. One way may be for Travis to run a local "remote cache", which responds to the WebDAV protocol. This would allow closer caching of Bazel objects.

It would also be nice if Travis had a "language: bazel" mode, which would come with the right version of Bazel installed for you.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.