Project release: AWS Okta Keyman

Available today; AWS Okta Keyman. This package is a fork of previous work by Nextdoor, Inc. that adds Duo Auth support and has other features already on the roadmap.

This package allows the user, who uses Okta with AWS today, to authenticate with Okta, use that to authenticate to AWS, and then pulls down temporary credentials (access key and secret key) for interacting with the AWS APIs. This allows for users to have access to AWS APIs without long-lived API keys stored on their dev systems. This helps protect the AWS resources as the keys are only valid for at most an hour so an unintended disclosure or leak has a very short window of risk before the keys become invalid. It also helps by enforcing the idea of continually rotating keys; not so different from what the on-box EC2 experience is like when using IAM Roles for EC2.

If you are using Okta to log in to AWS give it a try today; pip install aws-okta-keyman

The source is available under the Apache 2.0 license.

For more information: https://github.com/nathan-v/aws_okta_keyman

Project release: resque-state gem

I’m posting this late as the code has been available for a bit now but I’ve published my first Ruby Gem (fork) on Github; resque-state. It adds more features to the original gem (resque-status) including more interactive-like controls to allow you to run semi-interactive jobs via Resque. The biggest addition was adding pause and revert functionality.

This project came from something I built (and hope to eventually publish) that runs automated rolling deployments to AWS. What the pause functionality gave me was the ability to let a user do a one-box or canary ahead of a full roll as well as the ability to pause a job that might be having troubles. This lets an engineer launch a deployment to an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) and initially add just a single machine. Once that instance is healthy the job then pauses and waits for the engineer to give the deployment the green light to continue. The pause/unpause functionality became one of the critical features to enable safer production releases.

Just added was a revert feature. You could accomplish something similar with on_failure but I thought that might be overloading that functionality a bit. I believe these are two different cases. If a job fails you may not want to undo it because the failure may have been fatal for the job process but not something that actually needs reverted. Maybe there was a network blip the automation didn’t handle well or perhaps you’re able to course-correct without actually pulling back what was done. Revert gives you a separate path for cases where you specifically want to pull back what was done. This can be done from the paused state (for example; a deployment one-box that is no good) as well as just while the job is running.

PRs and constructive feedback are welcome. 🙂

Consistency matters; even when you disagree

No matter where you fit into any of the great developer debates (vim vs Emacs, tabs vs spaces, 80 vs 120 vs no column limit) the most critical point is consistency. Switching between tabs and spaces inside your own project would certainly prove annoying for others should you share the code even it won’t affect function. When you’re working on a team, though, or as part of a large organization; consistency has to exist not just in your project but across many.

Maybe you’re a tab person. Cool. Go nuts; at home. If your company prefers spaces the reality is that your preference doesn’t matter. Conforming to a shared norm is more important. When you have to share code with others the bottom line is that the consistency is bigger than your preference. This can even escape your own company should you end up open-sourcing your work for others to benefit from.

This is why I prefer to lean on community-driven style guides. I may not agree that Ruby should be written with an 80 character line limit but the community-driven Ruby Style Guide says otherwise and Rubocop defaults to that as well. Given that; it then makes sense that in any project that I plan on making public I should follow these norms as much as possible.

When it comes to Python we have PEP. The old Sun Java guide works but there’s a newer offering from Google that could be used. Older languages aren’t left out; even Perl has guidelines.

It’s hard to get consensus when opinions are strong and nobody’s preference is really wrong (unless they prefer tabs- then they’re wrong). Rather than infighting and company-specific styles that lead to Python that looks like Java and Perl that looks like, well, chaos we should be able to agree to disagree and stick to accepted solutions. I’m going to link a few below. Mostly these are the top or near-top hits on Google if you look for style guides for these languages. Google is the source of some but as the massive engineering powerhouse they are that makes sense.

Decide what to use, commit to move forward with it, and stop wasting time arguing over the right column to end the line at.


Ruby: https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide
Python: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/
Java: https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html
Scala: http://docs.scala-lang.org/style/
Golang: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments
Perl: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlstyle.html
Shell: https://google.github.io/styleguide/shell.xml
R: https://google.github.io/styleguide/Rguide.xml
Haskell: https://wiki.haskell.org/Programming_guidelines
Javascript: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript
C#: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/67ef8sbd.aspx