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CountVonGuetzli

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Company as Code 6 months ago

Wat, how have I never heard of this! Very cool. Do you have any insights you could share on your own setup, what worked well and what didn't? Are you just storing information in plaintext, or do you use some visualization libraries to make consuming the information a bit easier as well? Very curious about your setup.

I recently used the AI feature in n8n to write a code node to parse some data, which worked really well. Feels more like LLMs are enhancing low-code solutions.

Also, I see great value in not having to take care of the runtime itself. Sure, I can write a python script that does what I want much quicker and more effectively with claude code, but there is also a bunch of work to get it to run, restart, log, alert, auth…

Credential Stuffing 9 months ago

For us, introducing a simple device and location validation system (track which users log in with which devices and from where), combined with breached password detection from HIBP, which both can trigger an email validation code flow, practically solved the credential stuffing issues we had immediately.

For the user it's kind of a a soft MFA via email where they don't have to enable it, but also don't always get the challenge.

Astonishingly, we had barely any complaints about the system via customer care and also didn't notice a drop in (valid) logins or conversion rates.

Thats what we did as well, via wolfram alpha. I.e. we were too lazy to look up everything ourselves and just asked it straight up how long of a roundtrip it would be between two destinations via fiber. We checked one result and it was spot on. This was six years ago tho

It would be really cool if it didn't just show the ping, but how much worse it is compared to the theoretical optimum (speed of light in fiber optic medium, which I believe is about 30% slower than c).

I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible in the first place.

After doing the first-time CTO thing three years ago in an established company with over 100 engineers, I think these two are the minimum required reading:

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Eng Management (https://lethain.com/elegant-puzzle)

and

The Art of Leadership, small things done well (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Leadership-Small-Things-Done/dp/1...)

There are a lot more that were helpful to me, but those two encompass most of the important concepts and skills already in a usefully synthesized way, at least for me.

Interesting that this is enough evidence to the contrary for you. To me that looks more like what they say, not what they do, and is a well crafted smoke screen. They still seem to be acting as if they’re purely interested in extracting maximum shareholder value, at the expense of the public.

Not sure where you’re getting your information from, but I feel like the opposite is true. If you want to work remotely, they even have a remote working contract specifically designed for that case.

Maybe what looks archaic to you is that under French labor law, employees can’t be treated differently if they have the same type of contract. Meaning one individual can’t work two days from home and another three. Or one person can’t just have their travel expenses to and from the office payed, unless all employees with the same contract have that too.

I believe this is why they had to introduce the new contract for remote work. With this, their strong worker protections stay in tact while still allowing for more modern ways of working.

What is archaic is their bloody governmental control system. There is an inspector for every stupid thing you can imagine and it is an enormous waste if time and money.

I’ve had similar issues and recently made a big step forward by doing one thing: I publish my posts but don’t list them and block search engines from scraping /posts via robots.txt.

It’s not a safe way to hide content by any means, but is just enough to stop myself from worrying about what others still think about my writing. I can still share links with individuals if I want.

I have been trying to get myself to write more for twenty years and this was the first thing that helped.

Hmm no, sorry. We only ever had a small number of realms. I would be cautious and test it with the number of realms you intend to use it with. We used locust (https://locust.io/) successfully to do loadtesting on a few of keycloaks auth flows.

Yeah, no issues here either in containers. We did have to make some custom tooling at the time to get all configuration files under source control though

Not really. But we also haven't had any issues that required taking a closer look. We're used to hosting JVM stuff since our devs produce a lot of scala code.

I'm looking forward to them switching to Quarkus, which will make it more ameneable to be run in containers.

No issues with reliability.

We did some load testing and noticed that the first thing to become a bottleneck was the database, after running 4k concurrent logins or so. I suspect we'd have to introduce propper postgres connection pooling to overcome that (we were running a single postgres instance).

You do need to watch out for the way it caches things though . I suggest to read the relevant documentation, as it works a bit differently in cluster mode https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_installation/#_o...

One thing to keep in mind as well is that if you create an SPI extension to cover a spicific usecase, you'll have to add your own metrics collection. It was a bit of overhead to configure in prometheus, since you'll end up having a metrics endpoint to scrape for each SPI.

TL;DR: We use Keycloak with millions of users and it works fine. You don't have to shell out for outsourced auth if you would consider a self-hosted solution. You also don't need a team to run it.

I work for a large organization that incorporates multiple other businesses with millions of users under their own domains. After using Auth0 and other SaaS auth providers, we've settled on using Keycloak and are happy with it. Cost, security (you own all data) and extensibility were the driving factors.

+ If you have Java developers, you can extend its features via SPIs. Worked great for some custom authentication and migration flows we had to build for legacy systems.

+ It comes with batteries included: Install it, hook it up and for most cases you are done.

+ Redhat seems quite invested in it, so it has corporate backing. This could also be a bad thing, depending on your view of Redhat and which direction they take the product.

- It is a big pile of java. Since it works so well, even in cluster mode and containerized, we've never had to dig into its internals. But it is still a big pile of java. They are working on a rewrite with Keycloak X, but that is still in development.

I learned the hard way that other companies than Google also contribute to the blacklist. A site I was working on got falsely flagged by netcraft.com (which they admitted after I spent a week explaining it to them). They do some kind of active AI cyber defence bollocks and have netflix as a customer. Their Automated Idiot classified our login page as trying to phish netflix.

The fun part of this is that I could have prevented this if I had seen the warning email that Google sent me, but since Gmail classified it as an email phishing attempt, I never saw it (straight to spam folder). How ironic.

Consequences:

- Our website was blocked in all major browsers, not just chrome

- AWS, who also look at the blacklist and were contacted by netcraft automatically, threatened to delete our account. I had to convince both parties that we did nothing wrong

- One week offline

Can't wait to not have to faff about with configuring strongswan/ipsec for roadwarrior configurations anymore. Setting up WireGuard server and clients on notebooks and phones was a breeze. Really a huge leap for me in terms of usability.

First time in a long time I actually enjoyed using front-end tech.

Elm sparks joy, similar to Ruby/Rails did back in the day <3.