The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser - podcast cover

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own. Most of my content in the podcast is an audio version of videos I post on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering Buy me a coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hnasr 🧑‍🏫 Courses I Teach https://husseinnasser.com/courses
Last refreshed:
Follow this podcast in the Metacast mobile app to refresh it and see new episodes.
Download Metacast podcast app
Podcasts are better in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episodes

How to Overcome Procrastination

In this video, I go through how I overcome procrastination as a software engineer. What is Procrastination? 0:00How to Defeat * Reward based system - a reward after achieving 1:20* discipline, remembering why started this, your goal 3:16* Professional - I need to do the work and ship 6:10

Dec 28, 202010 min

2020 Retrospective

2020 retrospective Intro 0:00 Goals 0:50 Teaching vs Documenting 4:30 Channel Growth 7:40 2021 10:50

Dec 24, 202013 min

The 2020 Google Outage (Detailed Analysis)

0:00 Intro 1:00 Summary of the Outage 4:00 Detailed Analysis of the Incident Report On Dec 14 2020 Google across the globe suffered from an outage that lasted 45 minutes nobody could access most of Google services. Google has released a detailed incident report discussing the outage, what caused it, technical details on their internal service architecture and what did they do to mitigate and prevent this from happening in this in the future In this video, I want to take a few minutes to summariz...

Dec 20, 202052 min

Did Google run out of disk space? - The Google Outage ( Early report )

At 3:47 am PST almost all google services went down including, gmail, youtube, drive, docs, meet, nest , google maps and many more. It took close to an hour to bring them back up. We still don’t know what caused this outage, in this video we will try to make sense from what we have gathered so far. A detailed analysis video will follow once we get a response from google symptoms Could not sign in to google (account not found) Could not authenticate if you already have a token Services not requir...

Dec 14, 20207 min

Certificates Gone Bad! Certificate Revocation Techniques Explained (CRL, OCSP, OCSP Stapling)

When the private key of a matching public key that belong to a certificate is leaked, an attacker can intercept server hello, use their own dh parameters sign it with the stolen private key and ship it to the client effectively doing MITM. This is extremely dangerous and we have no way in the client to know a MITM has happened. That is why a certificate sometimes has to be revoked, and in this video I’m going to discuss those revocation techniques. 0:00 How Certificate Works 3:00 Certificate Rev...

Dec 14, 202010 min

Meet mySQL RAPID - distributed, in-memory, columnar, query processing engine by ORACLE

Oracle introduces a Game Changer Feature in MySQL that allows for OLAP & OLTP workloads in a single database. This is huge let us discuss https://www.oracle.com/emea/news/announcement/oracle-announces-mysql-database-service-with-integrated-analytics-engine-2020-12-03.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-analytics/en/mysql-analytics-introduction.html 0:00 Intro 1:40 History of ETL 7:00 How Kafka Helped Data Warehouse 8:20 How RAPID Solves this 11:14 MySQL Database Service Analytics Engine (RA...

Dec 06, 202021 min

Will AWS Babelfish Succeed Moving Developers Away from SQL Server to Postgres?

In AWS re-invent, Amazon announced open sourcing Babelfish for PostgreSQL, a SQL Server-compatible end-point for PostgreSQL to make PostgreSQL fluent in understanding communication from apps written for SQL Server. Let us discuss what is this technology and whether if its gonna really move developers away form Microsoft SQL Server to Postgres Resources https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/want-more-postgresql-you-just-might-like-babelfish/ Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:30 Postgres vs SQLServer 5:20 W...

Dec 03, 202022 min

We Need a Solution to NPM Trojans - post-install hell

Attackers have been disguising trojans and other malicious codes in post-install NPM packages and developers have been targeted. This is another incident from NPM. NPM needs to step up and solve this problem https://www.zdnet.com/article/malicious-npm-packages-caught-installing-remote-access-trojans/

Dec 03, 20207 min

A Detailed Analysis of The Amazon Kinesis Outage on US East-1 Region

AWS US east-1 experienced an outage Nov-25-2020. Amazon has updated us with summary detailing what exactly happened to amazon Kinesis that caused the outage let us discuss it 0:00 Intro 1:00 Tldr (diagram) 7:30 Detailed Analysis of What Happened 25:00 Why Cognito Went Down 31:20 Why CloudWatch Went Down 33:20 Why Lambda and AutoScaling Went Down 35:50 Why EventBridge, Elastic Kubernetes and Container Service Went Down 38:00 Why Service Status Went Down 40:00 Summary https://aws.amazon.com/messag...

Nov 29, 202046 min

AWS US East-1 Region Experienced Outages, What was the Cause? let us discuss!

AWS US east-1 experienced an outage yesterday, let us discuss what could have been the problem and what amazon did to solve it — Latest Update (6:23 PM PST): We’d like to provide an update on the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API, and other dependent services, within the US-EAST-1 Region. We have now fully mitigated the impact to the subsystem within Kinesis that is responsible for the processing of incoming requests and are no longer seeing increased error rates or latencies. However...

Nov 26, 202011 min

Why Redis Became the Most Popular Database on the Cloud in 2020

According to Sumo Logic's research, Redis is now officially the most popular database in 2020 on AWS cloud deployment. Let us discuss some of the reasons why the in-memory database became so popular https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/23/redis_the_most_popular_db_on_aws/

Nov 24, 202013 min

Using GitHub Actions ? Be Aware of this High-Severity Injection Bug Found in GitHub Actions

Felix Wilhelm of Google Project Zero found an injection Vulnerability affecting GitHub Actions and Workflow Commands specifically related to setting malicious environment variables by parsing STDOUT Resources https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-github-actions-deprecating-set-env-and-add-path-commands/ https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=2070&can=2&q=&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Milestone%20Owner%20Summary&cells=ids https://www.zdnet.com/arti...

Nov 23, 20209 min

Envoy Proxy Fixes Two Zero Day vulnerabilities (UDP Proxy, TCP Proxy)

The Envoy Proxy fixed two zero day vulnerabilities, from Envoy groups : We are announcing the fixes for two zero days that were identified today: Crash in UDP proxy when datagram size is > 1500. This can happen if either MTU > 1500 or if fragmented datagrams are forwarded and reassembled: https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/14122 . This issue was already under embargo and a new issue was opened in public GitHub. Proxy proto downstream address not restored correctly for non-HTTP connec...

Nov 22, 20208 min

SAD DNS - A Clever DNS Cache Poisoning Attack

A group of researchers from UC Riverside and Tsinghua University announced a new attack against the Domain Name System (DNS) called SAD DNS (Side channel AttackeD DNS). In this video I explain this attack 0:00 Intro 1:00 What is DNS? 3:10 Original DNS Poisoning 6:30 DNS Poisoning with Fragmentation Attack 9:30 ICMP Explained 13:00 DNS Poisoning with ICMP Error Messages Resources https://blog.cloudflare.com/sad-dns-explained/ https://www.saddns.net/ https://bit.ly/3lHTn45 https://en.wikipedia.org...

Nov 19, 202020 min

Is this the end of WebSockets? - The New WebTransport Protocol

There is a new Protocol called WebTransport, it sets to solve some limitations in WebSockets, the question is will this completely replaces WebSockets? I’ll leave this question to you guys. Let us discuss Resources https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTBM9CDO_Wk&feature=youtu.be https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kinnear-webtransport-http2/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vvv-webtransport-http3/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vvv-webtransport-quic/...

Nov 19, 202011 min

Is FireFox HTTPS only Mode The death of HSTS?

FireFox Enables HTTPS Only Mode, let us discuss https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/11/17/firefox-83-introduces-https-only-mode/ What does it mean? Death of HSTS? No more plugins Will it ever become default? (Government sites unencrypted, backward compatible)

Nov 18, 20208 min

Denial of Service through DNS request Discovered in Node JS (CVE-2020-8277)

A Node.js application that allows an attacker to trigger a DNS request for a host of their choice could trigger a Denial of service by getting the application to resolve a DNS record with a larger number of responses. (CVE-2020-8277) I discuss this attack in this video and whether you should fix it. Impacts: * Versions 12.16.3 and higher on the 12.x release line * Versions 14.13.0 and higher on the 14.x release line * All versions of the 15.x release line Resources https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vul...

Nov 17, 20207 min

🔴 Facebook's is all about QUIC, MASQUE, RIP Kafka's Zookeeper, dotNET 5 and more! - Backend Engineering Show Live with Hussein Nasser

In this Livestream we discuss the following topic Facebook moving to QUIC https://engineering.fb.com/2020/10/21/networking-traffic/how-facebook-is-bringing-quic-to-billions/ Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption (masque) https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/masque/about/ KIP500, Kafka removing ZooKeeper https://www.confluent.io/blog/how-to-prepare-for-kip-500-kafka-zookeeper-removal-guide/ DotNET 5 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-5-0/...

Nov 15, 20201 hr 5 min

What is HTTP CONNECT? and Why MASQUE (Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption) is replacing it

HTTP CONNECT Method allows the client to create a tunnel through a proxy to forward any free-form content through it. Let us discuss why do the pros and cons of this 0:00 Intro 1:45 HTTP Proxy 5:50 HTTPS Proxy 9:40 HTTP CONNECT 14:15 HTTP CONNECT Chaining 16:10 Pros & Cons of CONNECT 23:20 MASQUE Resources https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.6 Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption (masque) https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/masque/about/ What if you want to connect ...

Nov 15, 202027 min

HTTP/2 Push is Being Removed, let us discuss

HTTP/2 Push is being removed since it is very difficult to implement and has no added value. Let us discuss Resource https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/K3rYLvmQUBY/m/vOWBKZGoAQAJ Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAfNRJJ_BrA

Nov 12, 20207 min

Opening Old Wounds - Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

An article from 2016 which caused lots of discussions in the software engineering community. We bring it back and open old wounds and discuss it again. 0:00 Intro 3:00 Problems with Architecture of Postgres 4:00 Postgres on-Disk Format 9:45 Replication 13:19 Write Amplification 16:44 Replication Bandwidth 21:16 Data Corruption 24:00 Replica MVCC 31:30 Postgres Upgrades 33:00 MySQL on-Disk Format 37:00 MySQL Replication 40:00 Connection Handling https://eng.uber.com/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ h...

Nov 11, 202048 min

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication)

WebRTC ( Web Real-Time Communication ) is a free, open-source project that provides web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via simple application programming interfaces (APIs). In this video I go through webrt and discuss all the concepts of WebRTC in details. We will learn about NAT, STUN, TURN, ICE, SDP, Signaling and we will show a demo too! Finally we will talk about the pros & cons 0:00 Intro 3:44 WebRTC Overview 11:17 NAT 16:54 NAT Translation Methods 2...

Nov 09, 20201 hr 12 min
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android