Azure

I have been, and still remain, a massive proponent of "the cloud". I built Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) as a cloud-first service that took advantage of modern cloud paradigms such as Azure Table Storage to massively drive down costs at crazy levels of performance I never could have achieved before. I wrote many blog posts about doing big things for small dollars [https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-an...

For the most part, Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) runs very smoothly, especially given how cheaply I run many parts of the service for [https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure-functions/] . Occasionally though, I screw up and get something wrong that interrupts the otherwise slick operation and results in some outage. Last weekend was one such occasion and I want to explain what I got wrong, how y...

As time has gone by, one of the things I've enjoyed the most in running Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) is seeing how far I could make the dollars stretch. How big can it go whilst at the same time, running it on a shoestring? I keep finding new ways of optimising cost and the two most significant contributions to that since launching almost 5 years ago have come via serverless technology provided by 2 of my favourite tech companies: Cloudflare and Microsoft. By way of (v...

Two of my favourite developer things these days are Azure Functions [https://www.troyhunt.com/azure-functions-in-practice/] and Cloudflare Workers [https://scotthelme.co.uk/cloudflare-workers-report-uri/]. They're both "serverless" in that rather than running on your own slice of infrastructure, that concept is abstracted away and you get to focus on just code executions rather than the logical bounds of the server it runs on. So for example, when you have an Azure function and you deploy it und...

In the immortal words of Ricky Bobby, I wanna go fast [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qJGsSuFRIg]. When I launched Pwned Passwords V2 last week [https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/], I made it fast - real fast - and I want to talk briefly here about why that was important, how I did it and then how I've since shaved another 56% off the load time for requests that hit the origin. And a bunch of other cool perf stuff while I'm here. Why Speed Matters for Pwned...

A few years back, I added a donations page to Have I been pwned (HIBP) [https://haveibeenpwned.com/Donate]. Now as I explained at the time, I didn't particularly need them to cover my hard-cash outgoings because I run the thing on a shoestring, but as I explain on that page, it takes a massive amount of effort. If people want to fling me a coffee or some beers, that's just great and I appreciate it enormously. Problem is, it's hard to individually show that appreciation. Especially during a busy...

I've been really actively involved with building things on Microsoft's Azure cloud for probably about 4 or 5 years now. Many of you will know already that Have I been pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) was built from the ground up on Azure (in fact, one of the reasons I built the service was to play with Azure "in anger"!), what less people know is the work I'd been doing before that. In my previous life looking after Pfizer's software architecture in this corner of the world [https://w...

I wrote recently about how Have I been pwned (HIBP) had an API rate limit introduced and then brought forward [https://www.troyhunt.com/content-images-2016-09-a-one-week-traffic-snapshot-1-png/] which was in part a response to large volumes of requests against the API. It was causing sudden ramp ups of traffic that Azure couldn't scale fast enough to meet and was also hitting my hip pocket as I paid for the underlying infrastructure to scale out in response. By limiting requests to one per every...

Let us start with what's wrong with the world today, and that's certificate authorities. Just take a look at the trusted root CAs running on a Windows 10 machine: The very premise of having these root CAs on your machine is that they ultimate get to decide which websites your browser will consider to have a valid SSL certificate. The root CAs serve other purposes too, but that's what I'm especially interested in here. Edit: As Tom points out below [https://www.troyhunt.com/everything-you-nee...

Hey, did you hear about this new security risk? It’s called SQL injection and attackers can just suck all your datas out of your system if you screw it up badly enough. Allegedly there’s like, millions of websites at risk and even kids can easily break into them! Wait – this isn’t a new risk?! Well how come it’s all over the news and these seriously large companies keep getting pwned by it?! How is that even possible?! And here we are at that reality of today; SQL injection, whilst well unders...