Month: February 2022

修正 Curl 的 TLS handshake，避開 bot 偵測機制

利用 TLS handshake 的 pattern 可以當作是某種 fingerprint，就可以知道你是用 Curl，這個方式在蠻多 CDN 都會用在 anti-bot 機制 (像是 Cloudflare)，而剛剛看到有人投稿自己的 patch，試著將 Curl 修改成 Firefox 的 pattern：「curl-impersonate」，Hacker News 上的討論在這邊可以看到：「Show HN: Curl modified to impersonate Firefox and mimic its TLS handshake (github.com/lwthiker)」。

作者有提到這次的 patch 偏 hack，不太可能整進上游，但希望未來改的乾淨一點，然後整進上游：

I hope to do so in the future, for now the implementation is extremely hacky so I doubt it can get accepted into curl.

另外有人提出來說應該要用 Firefox ESR 版本的 pattern 而非 stable channel，也有人提出來說用 Google Chrome 的更好，不過我覺得有人開始做就已經很棒了 XD

GitHub 的 Markdown 透過 Mermaid 支援各種流程圖

前幾天 GitHub 宣佈他們站上的 Markdown 透過 Mermaid 支援流程圖：「Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid」。

翻了一下 GitLab 也有 Mermaid 支援：「GitLab Flavored Markdown」，所以這個部份兩邊的系統可以通了...

寫 API 文件時也蠻常用到的東西，之前是在 GitLab 上面弄了 PlantUML 的支援，找時間來分析...

The State of JS 2021

在 Hacker News 上看到「The State of JS 2021」這個，另外也翻了一下 Hacker News 上的討論「State of JavaScript 2021 (stateofjs.com)」，算是年度總結看一下今年 JS 圈子又搞出了什麼新東西，或者說又喜新厭舊了哪些東西 XDDD

看了幾張比較有趣的，首先是「The State of JS 2021: Libraries」這張總表，右上角的表示用的人比較多，而且評價正面的選擇：

然後同一頁也有直接依照滿意度分級列出來：

在「The State of JS 2021: Front-end Frameworks」這頁可以看到 JS 前端喜新厭舊的情況，2018 的時候 Vue.js 上來，然後 2019 下去，2020 時 Svelte 上來，2021 下去，換 Solid 上來：

在「The State of JS 2021: Back-end Frameworks」這邊則是看 JS 後端的喜新厭舊，2020 時 Next.js 爬上來，2021 就被踢下去，換 SvelteKit 上來：

其他的也都可以看出來一直在「迭代」，整個 JS ecosystem 的概念一直都是砍掉重練 XD

Akamai 併購 Linode

目前在 Hacker News 首頁第一名，Akamai 併購 Linode：「Akamai To Acquire Linode to Provide Businesses with a Developer-friendly and Massively-distributed Platform to Build, Run and Secure Applications」，Linode 的新聞稿則是在「Linode and Akamai」，Hacker News 上的討論在「Akamai to Acquire Linode (akamai.com)」這邊。

併購金額與預期的時間表：

Under terms of the agreement, Akamai has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding equity of Linode Limited Liability Company for approximately $900 million, after customary purchase price adjustments. As a result of structuring the transaction as an asset purchase, Akamai expects to achieve cash income tax savings over the next 15 years that have an estimated net present value of approximately $120 million. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022 and is subject to customary closing conditions.

好像會有記者會... 應該會有更多說明。

Victor Mono 字型

本來是在 Hacker News 上看到「MonoLisa – A font designed for developers (monolisa.dev)」這個付費字型，但下面的討論反而提到了一些其他還不錯的 open source 的字型，其中一個就是這邊提到的 Victor Mono。

另外有提到「Programming Fonts - Test Drive」這個站，可以測很多不同的 Monospace 字型，看起來也可以翻翻...

Amazon EFS 效能提昇的一些討論

上一篇「Amazon EFS 的效能提昇」提到 Amazon EFS 的效能提昇，在 Hacker News 上看到 Amazon EFS 團隊的 PMT (Product-Manager-Technical) 出來回一些東西：「Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency (amazon.com)」，搜尋 geertj 應該就可以看到他回的東西了...

像是即使是 Jeff Barr 發表這篇文章，也還是經過 legal team 的同意才能發表：

(PMT on the EFS team).

Yes, the wordings are carefully formulated as they have to be signed off by the AWS legal team for obvious reasons. With that said, this update was driven by profiling real applications and addressing the most common operations, so the benefits are real. For example, a simple WordPress "hello world" is now about 2x as fast as before.

另外這次的效能提昇是透過 cache 層達成的：

I'm the PMT for this project in the EFS team. The "flip the switch" part was indeed one of the harder parts to get right. Happy to share some limited details. The performance improvement builds on a distributed consistent cache. You can enable such a cache in multiple steps. First you deploy the software across the entire stack that supports the caching protocol but it's disabled by configuration. Then you turn it for the multiple components that are involved in the right order. Another thing that was hard to get right was to ensure that there are no performance regressions due to the consistency protocol.

然後在每個 AZ 都有 cache：

The caches are local to each AZ so you get the low latency in each AZ, the other details are different. Unfortunately I can't share additional details at this moment, but we are looking to do a technical update on EFS at some point soon, maybe at a similar venue!

另外看起來主要就是 metadata cache 的幫助：

NFS workloads are typically metadata heavy and highly correlated in time, so you can achieve very high hit rates. I can't share any specific numbers unfortunately.

還是有很多細節數字不能透漏，但知道是透過 cache 達成的就已經可以大致上想像後面是怎麼弄出來的了...

Amazon EFS 的效能提昇

AWS 宣佈他們將 Amazon EFS 的 latency 大幅降低以提昇效能：「Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency」。

在 Linux 上一般是用 NFS 掛 EFS，個位數的 ms 的確對於效能影響超大，現在宣稱讀取的部份降到 0.6ms，應該會有蠻明顯的感覺：

Up until today, EFS latency for read operations (both data and metadata) was typically in the low single-digit milliseconds. Effective today, new and existing EFS file systems now provide average latency as low as 600 microseconds for the majority of read operations on data and metadata.

然後不另外收費：

This performance boost applies to One Zone and Standard General Purpose EFS file systems. New or old, you will still get the same availability, durability, scalability, and strong read-after-write consistency that you have come to expect from EFS, at no additional cost and with no configuration changes.

另外就是過去幾個禮拜他們把現有的 EFS 都轉移過去了：

We “flipped the switch” and enabled this performance boost for all existing EFS General Purpose mode file systems over the course of the last few weeks, so you may already have noticed the improvement. Of course, any new file systems that you create will also benefit.

不過 EFS 另外一個問題就是貴炸，用錢換方便...

Amazon EC2 推出 c6a 的機器

Amazon EC2 以新的 AMD 架構 (雖然也推出一陣子了) 的機器推出 c 系列的機種，代號為 c6a：「New – Amazon EC2 C6a Instances Powered By 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors for Compute-Intensive Workloads」。

價位上與 c5a 相比便宜一點點，是真的一點點：在 us-east-1 的 c5a.24xlarge 是 US$3.696/hr，而 c6a.24xlarge 是 US$3.672，差 0.65% 左右... (千分之六點五 XD)

所以宣稱的 15% 基本上都是從 CPU 效能提昇貢獻的：

Up to 15 percent improvement in compute price performance.

然後機器可以提供的範圍比較大台，c5a 最大到 c5a.24xlarge，而 c6a 支援了 c6a.32xlarge 與 c6a.48xlarge。

目前亞洲區都還沒上，要再等等了：

C6a instances are available today in three AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.

另外這次推出後，EC2 的機種超過 500 種了，主要是靠排列組合弄出來的：

PS – With the launch of C6a instances there are now officially more than 500 Amazon EC2 instances for customers to choose from!

AWS App Runner 總算可以存取 VPC 內的資源了

算是上個星期的消息了，App Runner 這個產品剛出來的時候無法連到 VPC 內的資源，不知道要怎麼用，現在總算是把這個功能補上了：「New for App Runner – VPC Support」。

不過還是不看好，旁邊還有 AWS Elastic Beanstalk、AWS Amplify 同質性超高的服務，都是只寫 code 丟上去就能跑：

AWS App Runner is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs, at scale and with no prior infrastructure experience required. Start with your source code or a container image. App Runner builds and deploys the web application automatically, load balances traffic with encryption, scales to meet your traffic needs, and makes it easy for your services to communicate with other AWS services and applications that run in a private Amazon VPC. With App Runner, rather than thinking about servers or scaling, you have more time to focus on your applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.

AWS Amplify is a set of purpose-built tools and features that lets frontend web and mobile developers quickly and easily build full-stack applications on AWS, with the flexibility to leverage the breadth of AWS services as your use cases evolve. With Amplify, you can configure a web or mobile app backend, connect your app in minutes, visually build a web frontend UI, and easily manage app content outside the AWS console. Ship faster and scale effortlessly—with no cloud expertise needed.

更不用說旁邊還有 Lambda 類的架構...

Mutt 現有維護者的節能宣告

在 Hacker News 上看到「Mutt 2.2.0 (mutt.org)」這篇，Mutt 的維護者 (應該是 Kevin McCarthy) 將只會負責 fix 類的事情了：

This obviously isn't a feature, but I wanted to mention that I will be moving away from Mutt maintainership after this release. There isn't a transition plan, so I'll keep maintaining the 2.2.x series with bug fixes and security issues.

It's been my pleasure to keep the releases coming since version 1.5.24. Unfortunately the past year, my time and energy available has been decreasing. So my plan is to focus the time I do have on keeping Mutt stable, secure, and bug free; until someone else has the desire to head up (and support) new-feature releases. Thank you everyone!

有人在討論串裡提到了 NeoMutt，也許之後會找機會看看...

目前還是有一套 email system 是跑在 Postfix + Procmail + Bogofilter + Mutt 上面，短期內應該不會換...