I am proud to say that I have been working with the Hyperledger Fabric project nearly since it’s inception almost two years ago. While frustrating at times in the beginning (as is the case with most open-source, popular, and pre-alpha software), I have grown to enjoy working with the Fabric. It has improved my skills in a variety of areas such as golang, docker, encryption, pkcs11, continuous integration, and many more. Since the Fabric recently went 1.0, this blog post will focus on how to bootstrap the fabric without the aid of cryptogen tool.
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It’s very tempting to use the most popular Linux distributions as a base for docker containers. In fact, most of the time, that is actually a good idea. However, when trying to build the most secure container possible, at the lowest possible size, these base images become bloat. Why include libraries and other binaries in your docker container if your application does not need them?
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Nginx is a great web server which offers very high performance with little resource consumption. This makes it ideal for docker containers, small embedded devices, or even just dealing with a ton of connections. I also often use Nginx’s powerful proxy capabilities. Nginx is one of those applications I use quite often, pretty much for anything related to http(s). Having said that, it becomes very important for me to be able to deploy this in a secure manner.
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Let’s Encrypt is awesome! This service allows you to automate the retrieval of as many valid TLS certificates as you wish, as long as you can “prove” that you own the domain. One of the first proofs that they offered was the http-01 challenge. This proof works by essentially sending your domain a random HTTP GET request string which your lets-encrypt client must receive and send back.
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MemSQL is a cool distributed In-Memory Database which offers high performance, sharded horizontal scale-out design, High Availability (with Enterprise edition), and the familiar SQL syntax. It also ships with a great looking GUI that displays most of information you need to know about your cluster.
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gbolo

Security + DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer

Toronto