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“The Cloud Never Goes Down”, Azure SLAs and other availability trivia

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]“The Cloud” is infinite. It can scale to eternity. It’s entirely redundant and resilient to any outage. Except when it isn’t: And when it isn’t, stuff kinda stops working: Why is it always at 2am that stuff goes offline?! Hey, it happens, even though there are those who d...

Your API versioning is wrong, which is why I decided to do it 3 different wrong ways

In the end, I decided the fairest, most balanced way was to piss everyone off equally. Of course I’m talking about API versioning and not since the great “tabs versus spaces” debate have I seen so many strong beliefs in entirely different camps. Imagine this: HTTP GET: https://haveibeenpwned.com/api/breachedaccount/foo Response: ["Adobe","Gawker"] This was just fine. When I built Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com] (HIBP) in late November, it was intended to be a simple, fas...

Here’s how Bell was hacked – SQL injection blow-by-blow

This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "Ethical Hacking: SQL Injection" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/ethical-hacking-sql-injection]Yes, yes, it’s happened again – OWASP’s number one risk in the Top 10 [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/05/owasp-top-10-for-net-developers-part-1.html] has featured prominently in a high-profile attack this time resulting in the leak of over 40,000 records from Bell in Canada [http://o.canada.com/technology/bell-canada-security-breach-391451/]. I...

For your convenience, please disable security warnings

Let’s just start here [https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq]: Allow me to provide a technical security perspective on this – it’s complete bullshit. More specifically, you’re seeing this because whoever designed the Smashwords site screwed up and embedded insecure content in a page loaded over a secure connection. So what does this look like? Here’s an example in Internet Explorer: But more importantly, what does it actually mean? Short answer: you can’t trust the page any more tha...

Azure will save you from unexpected Godzilla attack part 2: Red Gate will save you from yourself

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure] Yesterday I wrote part 1 of this 2 part series [https://www.troyhunt.com/2014/01/azure-will-save-you-from-unexpected.html] and explained the Godzilla redundant approach of storage in Azure. Each bit of data you put into Azure storage gets replicated multiple times over within the...

Azure will save you from unexpected Godzilla attack part 1: SQL Azure export will save you from yourself

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]The other day I wrote about how I’d implemented the notification service behind Have I been pwned? [https://www.troyhunt.com/2014/01/behind-notification-service-of-have-i.html] and I pointed out how I’d used SQL Azure to manage the data associated with this part of the service. Ye...

With great Azure VM comes great responsibility (which is why you really want an Azure Web Site)

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]I’ve had a recurring discussion with a number of well-meaning people (WMPs) recently which has gone kind of like this: WMP: We’re going to build you a web site and we’re going to use Azure. Me: Awesome! So you’d use an Azure Web Site service then? WMP: No, even better, we’re goi...

Measuring all the things with Azure Web Sites and friends

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]Azure Web Sites are not your father’s hosting. The big thing you need to wrap your head around is that this model of standing up web sites moves us away from the classic paradigm of just firing up files over FTP then not thinking about the hosting again to one where serving content...

I’m pwned, you’re pwned, we’re all pwned – introducing domain wide searches

It’s about six weeks into the life of Have I been pwned? [https://haveibeenpwned.com] now and I’m enormously pleased with the reception its received. The fact that I’ve had to write posts like the micro optimisation one [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/micro-optimising-web-content-for.html] or the one about getting too big for Google [https://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/too-big-for-google-when-analytics-fails.html] and had to deal with all the problems I’ve discussed there has actually been a very...

NewRelic reports on Azure and ignoring the Kudu fetch handler (or not)

These real world experiences with Azure are now available in the Pluralsight course "Modernizing Your Websites with Azure Platform as a Service" [http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/modernizing-websites-microsoft-azure]I was checking the NewRelic [http://newrelic.com] stats on “Have I been pwned?” the other day (you do have the free NewRelic service on your Azure websites [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudEnablingNewRelicPerformanceMonitoringOnWindowsAzureWebsites.aspx] , righ...