Andrew Constant, Autor bei NETWAYS GmbH

stackconf 2023 – Recap Day 1

by Andrew Constant | Sep 13, 2023 | NETWAYS

We’re back again with two exciting days of knowledge-sharing, networking, and insightful conversations. This year, stackconf found its home in the vibrant city of Berlin, and it’s a pleasure to be back! Bernd set the tone for the event by extending a warm welcome to our eager attendees, ready to dive into the thought-provoking talks lined up for the conference. With both familiar faces and newcomers among our speakers, this year’s event promises fresh perspectives and engaging discussions.

Here are a few of the talks that stood out for me today. You can find the other presentations from our speakers and their profiles on our homepage or in the event app.

Scaling a Collaboration Service like Nextcloud to 20 Million users with Frank Karlitschek.

The day began with a captivating talk by Frank on the exciting world of Nextcloud AI. Frank gave us a sneak peek into the next update, highlighting the seamless integration of AI tools. What’s unique about this integration is that it’s localized on your server, keeping your data secure. Frank’s talk covered a range of applications, from writing headlines and summarizing emails to generating images and transcribing speech to text. The promise of a Nextcloud assistant AI on the horizon adds to the anticipation of what’s to come.

Open-Source: Open Choice – A DevOps Guide for OSS Adoption with Hila Fish

The second talk addressed a common challenge for many, selecting the right open-source project for their environment. Hila shed light on the DevOps perspective of open-source, emphasizing the importance of aligning an OSS project with your specific needs and pain points. With practical advice and insights, the talk guided attendees on how to evaluate key indicators and make informed choices, saving valuable time and resources.

Acknowledging Our Sponsors

Before we continue, we’d like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to our generous sponsors. Their support has been instrumental in making this conference possible. We truly appreciate their contributions, and their commitment to our community is invaluable. Thank you!

GitOps in Kubernetes with Alex Soco.

Alex’s presentation talked about a popular open-source GitOps Kubernetes Operator, ArgoCD. He explained how ArgoCD leverages the GitOps pattern to define application states through Git repositories. This simplifies Kubernetes management by automatically syncing Kubernetes manifests to target clusters, ensuring they remain in the desired state. It’s a valuable tool for streamlining Kubernetes operations.

Conclusion

As the day drew to a close, attendees not only had their minds enriched with knowledge but also their appetites satisfied with sumptuous food. The quality of the speakers left everyone looking forward to the rest of the conference. But that’s not all; the evening event promises to be a memorable one, featuring our renowned party with roulette—a fantastic opportunity for networking, relaxation, and fun.

In Berlin, we’re not just about sharing insights; we’re also about creating lasting memories. Stay tuned for more updates from the Berlin conference as we continue our journey of discovery, learning, and celebration.

Andrew Constant

Systems Engineer

Andrew ist der NETWAYS Familie 2020 beigetreten und hat seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration im Bereich der NETWAYS Web Services erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Der ehemalige Fremdsprachenkorrespondent und aus Northamptonshire stammende Engländer besticht durch seinen Humor und ergänzt das Team sehr gut. Er liebt es, in verschiedene Bereiche einzutauchen und dabei neue Dinge zu lernen. Eine seiner Lieblingsbeschäftigungen ist das Kochen, denn dabei kann er kreativ sein und mit verschiedenen Geschmacksrichtungen und Zutaten experimentieren. Außerdem reist er gerne und arbeitet daran, fließend Spanisch zu sprechen. Andrew versteht sich selbst als lebenslang Lernenden.

Read more from Andrew and meet the Team

Jitsi Feature Improved Moderator Controls

by Andrew Constant | Apr 27, 2022 | Web Services

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series NETWAYS Managed Services - Alles im Flow

It is time for another round of features Jitsi! We are always excited to explore the newest additions to Jitsi and this time we are looking at the new moderator options. This brings us new possibilities by allowing even more people in the same room and makes presenting a whole lot easier.

In the past, Jitsi had struggled with the number of participants allowed in a room and it often came to interruptions. Jitsi has been working hard on rectifying this and optimising the performance of the videos being sent. This is achieved by only sending the video streams of participants that are currently in view.

Moderators will now have the option to allow other participants to use their microphone or webcam. This means that the moderator is able to turn off all of the cameras and microphones and keep them off! This is great if you have a speaker or teacher who is presenting to a class and wants to avoid interruptions. The moderator is able to present freely without the worry of somebody cutting in and speaking over them, or other members being distracted by other videos.

What‘s great about this, is that the permission to turn on the camera and microphone again can be given back to the other users, for example when it comes to answering questions. Don‘t worry though, the moderator will never be able to turn on other users’ cameras or microphones as this wouldn‘t comply with privacy laws.

During the time that users are not allowed to use their camera or microphone, they are still able to raise their hand and the moderator can grant them use of their devices by asking the user to unmute themselves. When the user gets the notification asking to unmute, they are able to accept and proceed to talk or show something on their camera. When the moderator would like to continue with their presentation, they can simply mute all participants.

This add-on adds a great range of utility and opens up a lot of opportunities with Jitsi. If only one person in a meeting is able to share their audio and video, this greatly increases the number of people allowed in a room without disturbances. In the forums, people have claimed to have up to 500 members in a meeting! Although this is difficult to test, we can definitely work with around 200 people in a meeting, as long as cameras are off and audio is not being transmitted.

Here at NETWAYS we offer Jitsi as a SaaS App with standard settings, but if you need something more capable and fully customisable, then our Managed Jitsi is just for you. We are able to customise a whole range of settings and designs to personalise Jitsi to your needs. Why not get in touch with us and speak to one of our MyEngineers and we can help your projects become a reality.

Together we are better connected.

Andrew Constant

Systems Engineer

Andrew ist der NETWAYS Familie 2020 beigetreten und hat seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration im Bereich der NETWAYS Web Services erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Der ehemalige Fremdsprachenkorrespondent und aus Northamptonshire stammende Engländer besticht durch seinen Humor und ergänzt das Team sehr gut. Er liebt es, in verschiedene Bereiche einzutauchen und dabei neue Dinge zu lernen. Eine seiner Lieblingsbeschäftigungen ist das Kochen, denn dabei kann er kreativ sein und mit verschiedenen Geschmacksrichtungen und Zutaten experimentieren. Außerdem reist er gerne und arbeitet daran, fließend Spanisch zu sprechen. Andrew versteht sich selbst als lebenslang Lernenden.

Read more from Andrew and meet the Team

Jitsi Feature – Breakout Rooms

by Andrew Constant | Dec 8, 2021 | Jitsi

It’s finally here! After what feels like a decade, the feature is here and it’s just what we need. With this update comes not only breakout rooms but also some great features that we are really excited about. This feature makes your meetings easier to navigate and for online classes, you can split students into groups very easily. Here we show you how the feature works and also what is included in the new update.

Breakout Rooms

To activate breakout rooms, you just need to have the current version of Jitsi and the feature will already be there. You first click on “Participants” and a menu appears on the right side. Here you can click “Add breakout room” and a new room will be created. It is also possible to create rooms before all participants are present.

After a room is created, the participants can either go into the rooms freely or they could be moved into the room by the moderator. The rooms have no passwords and are only operated by the moderator. When a participant is in the room, they cannot control anything except “Leave”.

The moderator can also close the rooms and bring back all participants. Multiple rooms can be created and only the moderator has control over this function.

Moderator Features

What is also good about the update is what options are available to the moderator. There is now the option to ask a person to turn on the microphone. No participants are forced to turn on their camera or mic (and the moderator can’t force it either), but they can be asked and speak voluntarily. This feature is privacy-safe and, in our opinion, a good solution to an ever relevant topic.

The moderator also has the chance to turn off not only the microphones and camera when joining, but also the emoticon sounds as well. It may be that some people really like the emoticons, but now it can be muted (yay).

This update is pretty big and we haven’t explored everything yet. We tested the breakout room feature and we like it a lot. What’s your opinion? Also, stay tuned as we discover new features.

Want to have your own Jitsi instance with us? We also offer managed services for your machine and you could also have your own branding for Jitsi. If you would like to know more, just get in touch and one of our MyEngineers will be happy to help.

Andrew Constant

Systems Engineer

Andrew ist der NETWAYS Familie 2020 beigetreten und hat seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration im Bereich der NETWAYS Web Services erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Der ehemalige Fremdsprachenkorrespondent und aus Northamptonshire stammende Engländer besticht durch seinen Humor und ergänzt das Team sehr gut. Er liebt es, in verschiedene Bereiche einzutauchen und dabei neue Dinge zu lernen. Eine seiner Lieblingsbeschäftigungen ist das Kochen, denn dabei kann er kreativ sein und mit verschiedenen Geschmacksrichtungen und Zutaten experimentieren. Außerdem reist er gerne und arbeitet daran, fließend Spanisch zu sprechen. Andrew versteht sich selbst als lebenslang Lernenden.

Read more from Andrew and meet the Team

stackconf online 2021 | Continuous Security – Integrating Security into your Pipelines

by Andrew Constant | Sep 21, 2021 | stackconf

This entry is part 3 of 27 in the series stackconf online 2021

stackconf online 2021 is over and was a full success. It was all about open source infrastructure solutions in the spectrum of continuous integration, container, hybrid and cloud technologies. We’re still excited about all of our experts sessions and the large number of participants who joined us from all over the world. In the following you get an insight about one of our talks.

At stackconf online 2021 Matt Jarvis held a talk about the continuous security within pipelines. This is a great topic as security is not only extremly important, but more and more people are realising its importance.

Matt started off by giving us an introduction as to how Dev-ops has progressed and in the pre-cloud era the developer wrote the application and then IT operations took over the security side of things. Nowadays developers write the code, check, deploy and manage almost everything. Which can be a lot! The line has become blurred and the responsibility of security doesn’t have a rightful place, which is where Snyk comes in.

Security is usually considered to be an external practise and as it requires a higher responsibility, it needs to be made easier for developers to use. As we all know, once deployed, it is hard to implement security and having a secure system will help win over the trust of your customers. This problem only grows as each year, more and more code is written, which of course means a higher probability for errors and vunerabilities.

Dependencies and Vunerabilities

The problem with these vunerabilities isn’t always with dependencies themselves, but in fact their dependencies. Up to 70% of the vunerabilities are found here and these indirect dependencies can be used to hide malicious code.

In this example here, the code is hidden in sub dependencies and has had over 440,000 downloads/month! If people are only checking the top layer, there is a whole lot more they are missing. Sometimes all it takes is rebuilding an image or getting newer images. Up to 44% of Docker image vunerabilities can be resolved with a newer base image.

Here lies another problem and that is mainly when it comes to configuring the code. One of the most commonly seen issues is the misconfiguration of code. This is usually unintentional, but also what some developers don’t realise is that not all applications need root access. By default containers run as root and if this rule was changed before it was deployed, it could restrict access for would-be attackers. Something else to consider is the writable file systems that are mounted onto a container. By allowing this an attacker that compromises a container then has write access to the mount drive. If your containers are stateless, the attacker will have a harder time doing damage.

Integrate in a Developers Workflow

Matt went on to talk about how these security flaws can be shifted to the developers level. Security needs to be integrated into a developers workflow to help eliminate these problems at the source. Repositories need to also be taken into consideration and things like two factor authentication, strong key management practises and strong review processes are a great way to reduce weaknesses being exploited.

With the help of Snyk a developer is able to identify a lot of these flaws with monitoring scans and checks. These scans and checks can be automated into pipelines and relieve a lot of the responsibility. This was shown in the demo that Matt gave us and with these checks, the vunerabilities were able to be fixed with the Snyk wizard, amazing! This means that errors are found and corrected before they are even deployed. This is what was meant by moving the responsibility back and fixing the problem at the source. By integrating Snyk into the IDE, it fixes issues right away and elimates the need to worry about containers that are already deployed. Snyk is even smart enough to check packages and repos before they are pulled.

This is exactly the right approach to fixing the problem and by making the whole process easier, there really is no reason not to start implementing Snyk in you setups. Matt has identified the problem and shifted the responsibility to developer, but at the same time made it easy to implement. These tools give developers the help they need in order to secure their containers at the source and not cause future problem that can be easily solved with a few checks and corrections. Snyk helps developers at every step on the way and takes care of the security aspect allowing to release code faster and more securely.

Full talk and more from and about stackconf

Watch the the whole talk by Matt Jarvis:

stackconf 2022 will take place in Berlin. The final date will be announced soon. If you want to learn more about infrastructure solutions in advance you have the possibility to take look at our archive where you can find all slides and videos from this year’s stackconf.

Stay tuned!

Andrew Constant

Systems Engineer

Andrew ist der NETWAYS Familie 2020 beigetreten und hat seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration im Bereich der NETWAYS Web Services erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Der ehemalige Fremdsprachenkorrespondent und aus Northamptonshire stammende Engländer besticht durch seinen Humor und ergänzt das Team sehr gut. Er liebt es, in verschiedene Bereiche einzutauchen und dabei neue Dinge zu lernen. Eine seiner Lieblingsbeschäftigungen ist das Kochen, denn dabei kann er kreativ sein und mit verschiedenen Geschmacksrichtungen und Zutaten experimentieren. Außerdem reist er gerne und arbeitet daran, fließend Spanisch zu sprechen. Andrew versteht sich selbst als lebenslang Lernenden.

Read more from Andrew and meet the Team

Jitsi-Feature – Pop-up-Fenster

by Andrew Constant | Sep 8, 2021 | OpenStack, Jitsi

Jitsi ist sehr datenschutzfreundlich. Als Videokonferenzlösung halte ich es für eine der Besten auf dem Markt, da es absolut keine Einzelheiten an Dritte weitergibt. So kann man sicher sein, dass die eigenen Daten sicher und geheim bleiben. Jeder Jitsi-Raum wird nur auf Verlangen erstellt und nach Verlassen aller Teilnehmer sogleich gelöscht. Hiernach bleibt an Benutzerdaten nichts zurück – nichts. Jitsi speichert keine Daten, Chat-Historie oder Videodateien. Deshalb wird Jitsi bei denjenigen, die sich um ihre Privatsphäre sorgen, immer beliebter. Das ist aber noch nicht alles! Zusätzlich zur Teilnahme an der Videokonferenz ohne Spuren zu hinterlassen, kann als zusätzliches Feature Kamera und/oder Mikrofon bei Betreten des Raumes defaultmäßig deaktiviert eingestellt werden. Wer noch ein wenig mehr Sicherheit haben möchte, kann die Kommunikation im Raum auch Ende-zu-Ende-verschlüsseln. Was kann man sich mehr wünschen?

Obwohl Jitsi bereits Open Source ist, entsteht immer mal wieder der Kundenwunsch, eine Zustimmungsabfrage einzurichten, bspw. zum Akzeptieren des Datenschutzes, um strengeren europäischen Richtlinien zu genügen. Solche Pop-ups kennen Sie wahrscheinlich schon. Hier zeigen wir unsere Lösung, um das für unsere Jitsi-Kunden umzusetzen. Dies ist eine Eigenentwicklung und bei Jitsi in dieser Form nicht vorgesehen.

Das Pop-up bietet zwei Wahlmöglichkeiten. Wer den Bedingungen zustimmt, die frei formuliert werden können, wird berechtigt, die Jitsi-Instanz zu benutzen und einen Raum zu betreten. Ferner wird ein Cookie gespeichert, damit die Abfrage auf diesem Gerät nicht mehr erfolgen muss. Er wird für 30 Tage lokal gespeichert, verfällt danach und wird ausschließlich für den erläuterten Zustimmungszweck genutzt; wir sammeln oder verteilen keinerlei Daten. Falls man aus irgendwelchen Gründen den Bedingungen nicht zustimmen mag und auf “Ablehnen” klickt, wird man auf die zuvor besuchte Seite abgelenkt. Natürlich kann das Pop-up auch farblich anders gestaltet oder mit einem alternativen Logo versehen werden.

Es ist ebenfalls sehr nützlich, um Kunden/Besucher mit weiteren Informationen zu versorgen und/oder die Video-/Audio-Freigabe zu erläutern, kann aber auch sehr gut als Willkommensnachricht dienen.

Bei NETWAYS arbeiten wir immer hart daran, die neuesten Features zu implementieren und die kleinen Dinge an Ihrem System zu verbessern. Unsere Server werden hier in Deutschland betrieben. Haben Sie weitere Anpassungsideen oder -wünsche? Nehmen Sie gerne Kontakt mit uns auf und teilen uns diese mit!

Andrew Constant

Systems Engineer

Andrew ist der NETWAYS Familie 2020 beigetreten und hat seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker für Systemintegration im Bereich der NETWAYS Web Services erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Der ehemalige Fremdsprachenkorrespondent und aus Northamptonshire stammende Engländer besticht durch seinen Humor und ergänzt das Team sehr gut. Er liebt es, in verschiedene Bereiche einzutauchen und dabei neue Dinge zu lernen. Eine seiner Lieblingsbeschäftigungen ist das Kochen, denn dabei kann er kreativ sein und mit verschiedenen Geschmacksrichtungen und Zutaten experimentieren. Außerdem reist er gerne und arbeitet daran, fließend Spanisch zu sprechen. Andrew versteht sich selbst als lebenslang Lernenden.

Read more from Andrew and meet the Team