Do You Trust Your Front-End Tests as Much as We Do?
Consider the following scenario: A critical bug has been detected on your web application overnight and a fix must be deployed quickly. How fast can it get to production during off hours?
How much do you trust your tests’ coverage?
Elasticsearch has always been good to us at Forter. It’s truly reliable. It’s damn good at searching, and it’s a solid distributed application as well. It balances a cluster relatively quickly, and it is easy to configure and easy to backup/restore, etc., but… we were haunted by an issue which
Get your team engaged in a heated debate about an opinionated subject
(in this case Versioning and Dependency management)
Have you ever talked passionately about data binding concepts with a backend engineer? I have, and most of the time they look at me as if I were a caveman who doesn’t speak their language… so for all you cavemen (and backend engineers) out there… Let’s get some
If you haven’t seen the Software Architecture Addict website. Enjoy! 
The video was shot with a Nexus 5 mobile phone, a tripod and iStablizer Mount XL and edited with Windows Movie Maker – nothing fancy. The dark scenes were shot
So you are working at a startup, and you have been wondering at what point should you start looking into security considerations and compliance? Which technical debt should be postponed for a later stage, and which systems should be hardened this instant? What are the main considerations?
Technical debt gets piled up, and in many cases it is easier to pay later rather than now. For example, if you are using ElasticSearch without username/passwords, you should double check your firewall settings. After round-B your startup would probably have the manpower and budget to properly secure the ElasticSearch cluster.
Startup culture is a bit more difficult to change "later". Let's take a trivial example. Developers that are used to pushing code without code review, would complain that peer review would bog down the development, and it might even smell "too corporate" for them.
So which security considerations are relevant at an early stage?
What security concerns were raised by customers willing to pay for your product?
What are the security expectations in your industry (Medical, Finance, Enterprise)?
What are the target market (country) regulations (Data Privacy, Data Residency)? Europeans are known to have tougher regulations. Different US States have different regulations.
Which tools and policies would not hurt your team's morale.
How long would it take you to prepare a security risk plan (see example at the bottom of this document)?
What is the impact of Intellectual Property theft, business plans theft, bitcoin/ec2 theft, losing all your data ? How would it affect your sales, customers, investors?
How can you protect against a data breach?
How can you reduce the exposure after a data breach?
We grouped together the expected security recommendations by the different phases a start-up goes through. The more money and data the startup handles, the bigger the investment in security:
Did you ever attend a talk – in a conference, a local meetup or simply listening to an interesting podcast on your commute to work – and felt so inspired, that you couldn’t wait to get back to work and try it out?
It rarely happens, but I’ve listened to some
A few hundred milliseconds latency is achievable for a complex fraud prevention system, but with very little wiggle room. In the past two years, we have selected a few design patterns that have helped us achieve our latency goals, using standard technologies used by most SaaS companies (load balancers, queues,
At Forter our business is all about streaming. We’re utilizing Apache Storm for multiple streaming use cases that require different approaches, namely hight-throughput vs. low latency. In the following lecture I’m describing the different approaches, useful streaming practices that we employ and the rational behind why we chose those practices
