Caching in: Lessons From Performance Engineering on Jira Cloud

Performance engineering is a big deal when you're serving millions of users from every corner of the globe. We previously wrote about a large engineering transformation program for Jira and Confluence, which we codenamed Vertigo – read more about the overall program here.

As part of the Vertigo program, we knew we were going to have to invest a lot of engineering effort into performance, and, in particular, the performance of Jira. While we have always spent time over the years improving Jira’s performance using the tools and architecture at hand, the Vertigo architecture brought a host of new opportunities to further improve the performance and reliability of Jira.

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Scaling Microservices: General Strategy

When designing distributed systems it's important to understand that explicit design decisions must be made to enable scalability within components. These applications must be engineered from the beginning with the requirement to meet anticipated needs with options that facilitate future growth. We build our systems in anticipation of scaling because we anticipate the platform will grow, which means more users, features, or data.

This is the first article in a series of posts where we will discuss topics which include:

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Making AI Facial Recognition Less Racist

AI has famously been rather poor at recognizing faces in a non-racist way. The size of the challenge was highlighted by recent work from MIT and Stanford University, which found that three commercially available facial-analysis programs displayed considerable biases against both gender and skin-types.

For instance, the programs were nearly always accurate in determining the gender of light-skinned men but had an error rate of over 34 percent when it came to darker-skinned women.

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API Security Weekly: Issue #22

This week, we have seen vulnerabilities in 3 million car alarms, snowboard helmets, and virtual worlds. In other news, there is a new API security platform built around OpenAPI contracts. We also take a look at the SANS checklists and HTTPS/TLS tutorials.

Vulnerabilities

This was a good week for PenTestPartners. They have uncovered a couple of serious API vulnerabilities:

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system_health Extended Events in Azure SQL Database

The system_health Extended Events session is incredibly useful. Further, it's running, by default, in every server you have under management that is 2008 or greater. Things are not the same in Azure though.

system_health in Azure SQL Database

If you look at the documentation for system_health, it shows that it's applicable to Azure SQL Database. However, if you try to run the example query, it won't work. This is because the implementation of Extended Events inside Azure SQL Database is a little different. Instead, you need to use the Azure SQL Database equivalent system views to create the same query like this:

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