Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Google Developer Documentation Style Guide

Just linking this here as a reminder for myself.

I'm finding that I'm writing quite a bit of documentation these days, and having a style guide from a large international organization like Google is a very helpful reference.

The Google Developer Documentation Style Guide.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

PCI DSS when you're not a merchant

A nice article by the PCI Guru echoing what I've been saying for years.

It's fairly clear that PCI DSS is written with a primary focus on merchants, with acquirers and particularly issuers sometimes seeming to be more of an afterthought. This is unfortunate because issuers as a class have significantly different requirements regarding what they do with cardholder data to merchants and acquirers. The same standard is applied uniformly to these different entities, potentially causing headaches for issuers who are already in the business of managing risks associated with their own portfolio.

It is possible to comply with PCI DSS while running an issuing and processing platform without any compensating control worksheets - I've done it myself. However, doing so requires discipline and focus on this objective across the organization on an ongoing basis. It also requires sufficient control of your IT infrastructure to implement and maintain solutions where PCI DSS compliance is an overriding design requirement (as it really should be in this space).

If you have already achieved the goal of PCI DSS compliance with no CCW's, congratulations! You've clearly made substantial investments which are paying off handsomely.

If you're still working towards this goal, you may want to consider streamlining the process by licensing a software platform designed from the ground up with PCI DSS compliance as a core requirement. One I can recommend, and that I'm involved with developing, is Tritium® by Episode Six.

Monday, September 4, 2017

Amazon Lightsail network rate limited?

Amazon Lightsail is the entry-level hosted server platform provided by Amazon AWS. For $5 per month, you get a bundle including the server, storage, network, and DNS hosting for one zone. You could assemble something similar using Amazon EC2 services, but the result would cost a little more and some costs such as network bandwidth would be unpredictable because they'd be billed based on usage. In putting together the Lightsail packages, it's pretty clear that Amazon is deliberately intending to compete head-to-head with the standard Droplets from DigitalOcean.

It's "common knowledge" that the Lightsail servers are packaged versions of the EC2 t2-series servers. In this model, the $5 Lightsail server based on, and expected to provide the performance of, a t2.nano server. However, in using a bottom-tier Lightsail server for a small project, this has not been my experience. It feels like compromise have been introduced by Amazon to try and compete on cost with DigitalOcean but not cannibalize sales of fully-featured entry level AWS instances.

By design, the t2 servers are subject to CPU resource throttling based on recent usage. However, they have no issue serving multiple Megabytes per second to the network. Unfortunately this has not been my experience with the Lightsail servers. In fact, using a $5 Lightsail server, I've consistently observed outbound network throughput limited to 64 KiB/second. I've done transfers at different times of day, through http, https, and scp, and never significantly exceeded 64 KiB/second. In fact, when copying a file a few MiB in size, observed data transfer rate is a little less than 64 KiB/second because of protocol overheads.

For a cheap server, this seems like it shouldn't be a big deal - after all, you're not paying for a whole lot. However, modern web frameworks end up causing a simple page to require several hundred KiB of data to render properly, due to embedded javascript libraries, web fonts, and so on. The result is a simple Wordpress landing page without any images being accessed by one user takes 3 seconds just to load because of network rate limiting. With search engines factoring page load time in their ranking algorithms, this makes a Lightsail-hosted prototype site unlikely to do well in search rankings regardless of whatever other SEO tricks you use.

Amazon could mitigate this to some extent by making whatever rate limiting they've implemented "burstable", i.e. for the first few seconds a connection can transfer data quickly before being slowed down to ensure you don't exceed your allowance. This would make these servers much more responsive for light web serving duties. For whatever reason they seem to have chosen to use a flat rate cap instead.

If you've decided to use Amazon to host your prototype site on small servers and are considering using Lightsail, think carefully. Unless you really need the guarantee of fixed cost, the EC2 t2 series servers are likely to offer a better user experience because of much higher outbound bandwidth available, and therefore potentially better page rankings, for not much more cost.