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State Farm Engineering

Information contained in the articles on this site may not be representative of actual use cases. The views expressed in the articles are personal views of the author and are not necessarily those of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively “State Farm”). Nothing in the articles should be construed as an endorsement by State Farm of any non-State Farm product or service.
Embracing Chaos by Ranjita Sahu
A Product Team's Journey

Perspectives

On a frigid night in late February 2012, I received a call for an emergency production issue. One of the critical batch jobs that processes data for the next day’s business had failed. At 9PM, there I was back in the office with 11 other State Farm developers. My then-product manager got us pizzas, coffee, and hot chocolate to cheer up the room, and the team spent the next couple hours pushing an emergency fix to production. Over the past decade, system failure analysis and maintenance…

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L...A...T...E...N...C...Y by Ron Keane
We can't change the speed of light.

Clocks with lightning around them

Transitional architecture can be a challenge for companies as they plan their cloud journey. Migrating to the cloud typically means a piecemeal approach to moving applications and services. Applications and services that once existed in the same data center, are now hosted hundreds of miles from each other. Distance results in increased network latency.

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AWS Multi-Account Management using Cloud Custodian and Serverless Compute by Ryan Ash
A simple and scalable approach to using Cloud Custodian for AWS governance, security and cost controls.

multi-tenant-cloud-custodian

Whether administering three or 300 AWS accounts, it is essential to implement consistent security and governance policies. Enabling users to leverage all the AWS services while remaining within the guardrails defined by your company is the goal. Polices should be relatively easy to create and implement. Having a stable deployment and runtime for these policies allows administrators to focus their valuable time elsewhere. Cloud Custodian policies provide flexibility to write governance rules in…

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Actuators in Action by Billy Malone
A Site Reliability Engineer's guide to using actuators effectively

A ships main control panel

Want to learn about actuators and which ones may benefit you from a Site Resiliency Engineering (SRE) perspective? This article is for you!

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DynamoDB Ingestion to an Enterprise Data Lake by Clete Blackwell II
A journey in discovering architectural patterns

DynamoDB Ingestion to Data Lake Design

Companies manage a lot of data – often having application data in many different data stores and in a variety of formats (e.g., File storage, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and more). That data can also live on many different physical data centers ranging from on-premises to vendor data centers to public cloud data centers. Each data store is created for a specific purpose, such as customer contact information, conversation logs, policy data, or purchase history.

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Red Team Research - Runspace Debugging by Michael Garrison
Finding creative opportunities for code execution and lateral movement

red team research

Tldr; Runspace debugging is a cool feature added into the .NET framework that allows developers to attach to a PowerShell Host (PSHost) process to debug a script. Once a process instantiates the PSHost, it never goes away, even if the runspace object is disposed. I submitted it as a bug to Microsoft and hopefully it will be fixed in the future. This can be used as a neat way to execute PowerShell code under someone else’s legitimate process or PowerShell session.

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The Coding Circle by Samantha Roska & Susan DeGennaro
Women Supporting Women at State Farm

women talking on a bench

March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate the past contributions of women while making progress toward a more equitable future. There is much to celebrate about the contributions by women in the field of information technology. However, although more women are choosing IT careers, studies show that additional progress can be made.

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