The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

By Hussein NasserTechnology

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser episodes

February 09, 2020 Episode 128 - Google blocks Embedded browsers sign ins to avoid MITM phishing attacks
In April 2019 Google blocked sign-ins from Embedded Browsers to avoid man in the middle phishing attacks. In this video, we discuss why.

https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-against-man-in-middle.html?m=1
8 min
February 09, 2020 Episode 127 - PostgreSQL 12 has some interesting new features, Is it worth the upgrade?
PostgresSQL version 12 has been released, let's go through the features that I think are most interesting and cool. #softwarenews
Feature Matrix https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/
- Allow adding columns to Index (GIST) https://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix/detail/314/
- COPY FROM WHERE COPY FROM ... WHERE
- More native support of JSON objects https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/functions-json.html#FUNCTIONS-SQLJSON-PATH
- Reindex concurrently (slow but allows writes) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/sql-reindex.html#SQL-REINDEX-CONCURRENTLY
- Performance on large partitioned tables - Stored Generated Columns
17 min
February 04, 2020 Episode 126 - Will the New Chrome version 80 finally end Cross-Site Request forgery?
Google just released the latest version of Chrome (80) and one of the interesting features making a big change to the default cookies that might actually prevent CSRF forever. Let’s discuss this.   #softwarenews *

Same Site Attribute * Break some apps * Devs must explicitly set None;secure * Will this end CSRF

  Resources https://youtu.be/GPz7onXjP_4
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592

News Theme 2 by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://audionautix.com/
12 min
January 29, 2020 Episode 125 - Layer 4 vs Layer 7 Load Balancing
Load balancing is process of balancing incoming requests to multiple machines, processes or services. In this video we will explain two types of load balancers, layer 4 and layer 7.

Layer 4 - haproxy, NLB
Pros
- great for simple packet-level load balancing
- Fast and efficient doesn’t look at the data
- More secure as it cant really look at your packets. So if it was compromised no one can look
- Uses NAT - One connection between client and server NATed

Cons
- Can't do smart load balancing based on the content, such as switch request based on the requested media type
- Cant do microservices with this type
- Has to be sticky as it is a stateful protocol (all segments)

Layer 7 (Nginx , haproxy)
This type of proxy actually looks at the content and have more context, it knows you are visiting the /users resources so it may forward it to a different server. Essential and Great for microservices , it knows the content is video:image etc..
38 min
January 20, 2020Episode 124 - NginX
NginX is an open source web server written in C and can also be used as a reverse proxy and a load balancer.
In this video, I want to go through the following topics in NginX
What is NginX? 2:25

Current & Desired Architecture 4:58

Layer 4 and Layer 7 Proxying in Nginx 8:40

Example 10:25
Install Nginx (mac) 13:30

Nginx as a Web Server 15:00 (webserver.conf)
Static context location root 20:00

regular expression 27:00

proxy pass 30:30

Nginx as a Layer 7 Proxy 33:30
Proxy to 4 backend NodeJS services (docker) 37:00

IP_Hash load balaning 43:00

Split load to multiple backends (app1/app2) 46:00

Block certain requests (/admin) 49:00

NGINX as a Layer 4 Proxy 51:30

Create DNS record 1:01:08

Enable HTTPS on Nginx (lets encrypt) 1:05:08

Enable TLS 1.3 on Nginx 1:14:00

Enable HTTP/2 on NGINX 1:17:10

Summary 1:20:10
Cards
3:40 proxy vs reverse proxy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozhe__GdWC8&t=1s
8:50 OSI Model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IS7gigunyI
10:00 L4 vs l7 load balancer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKMLgFVxZYk
34:00 spin up docker app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmSMrQ8Ev9w&t=14s
44:26 stateless vs stateful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFPzI_Qg3FU
1:16:30 TLS video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlE5X1NlHgg&t=8s
1 hr 27 min
January 02, 2020 Episode 123 - Horizontal vs Vertical Database Partitioning
In this podcast I explain what database partitioning is and illustrate the difference between Horizontal vs Vertical Partitioning, benefits and much more. Why Partitioning?

12 min
December 31, 2019 Episode 122 - ARP
ARP
Address Resolution Protocol is a protocol that maps IP address to a mac address so hosts can be addressed. I want to make a video explaining ARP because it is starting to surface a lot in different videos that I’m making such as man in the middle, load balancing, and security.

16 min
December 30, 2019 Episode 121 - What happens when you type google.com into your browser address box and hit enter?
In this video I want to go through what really happens under the hood when you type google.com and you hit enter in a browser. This is inspired by alex’s github page below, it is a great detailed description of what happens. I did however add more details to certain areas and I removed some stuff like keyboard events and low level operating system like that. So if you are interested stay tuned!
https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

5:30 HSTS https://youtu.be/kYhMnw4aJTw
19:30 tcp vs udp
https://youtu.be/qqRYkcta6IE
24:42 tls
https://youtu.be/AlE5X1NlHgg
40:56 mimesniffing
https://youtu.be/eq6R6dxRuiU
Initial typing
- lookup for most visited sites or an actual search
Google.com Enter
- parse is it a url or search term? If search do a search if url visit website
Which protocol? which port ?
HSTS?
HTTPS
or HTTP?
DNS
cached?
Hosts?
DoH?
Lookup ?
TCP
ip / port ?
arp?
NAT?
proxy?
HTTP 1.1 ? More than one connection
TLS
version? ciphers? Alpn? SNI ? H2 ? H3? Quic?
GET / - ?
Headers compress
cookies?
binary stream?
HTML?
H2 push?
HTML Parse?
Make multiple requests css? JS? Multiple streams?
If H1 then pipeline?
48 min
December 28, 2019 Episode 120 - What is Fail-over? Achieving High-Availability
Failover is the technique of switching to a redundant backup machine when a certain node goes down. This is a very common implementation for achieving high availability and it is often mixed with different load balancing techniques such as layer 4 and layer 7 balancing. In this video i want to go through following * What is Failover? 1:47  * ARP - Address Resolution Protocol 3:00  * VIP & VRRP 5:40  * High-availability Example 12:12  Cards 4:00 ARP 12:50 docker javascript 18:00 OSI Model
21 min
December 23, 2019 Episode 119 - HAProxy
HAProxy is free, open source software written in C that provides a high availability layer 4 and layer 7 load balancing and proxying . It has a reputation for being fast and efficient (in terms of processor and memory usage).
In this video I want discuss the following
Current & Desired Architecture 2:30
HAProxy Architecture 5:50
HAProxy as TCP Proxy & HTTP Proxy (Layer 4 vs Layer 7) 17:00
ACL (Access Control Lists) 19:20
TLS Termination vs TLS Pass Through 20:40
Example 24:23
Spin up the services 25:51
Install HAProxy - 28:00
HAProxy configuration 29:11
ACL Conditional 39:00
ACL Reject URL 48:00
Enable HTTPS HAProxy 53:00
Enable HTTP/2 on HAProxy 1:05:30
Summary
Cards
Docker Javascript node 4:00
Varnish 15:46
NAT 23:30
Docker Javascript node 26:00
Encryption 56:00
TLS 56:10
HTTP2 1:08:40
Source Code for Application
HAProxy config
https://github.com/hnasr/javascript_playground/tree/master/proxy
Docker application
https://github.com/hnasr/javascript_playground/tree/master/docker
resources
https://www.haproxy.com/blog/the-four-essential-sections-of-an-haproxy-configuration/
https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/aloha/10-0/traffic-management/lb-layer7/acls/#predefined-acls
https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/osx-nginx
1 hr 15 min

About The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

From the publisher's feed

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.