Gift for Testers, AWS Down Again: TGNS26

Hey, look for some last minute holiday gifts for that special tester in your life. Want to know how to handle when systems like AWS go down? You probably heard about the log 4J security risk we talked about last week, but do you know how to fix it? Find all the answers to these and all other end to end full pipeline DevOps automation, performance and Security testing in this episode of the Test Guild News Show. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this before we get into it, this episode of the Test Guild in the show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools and applitools is a next generation test automation platform powered by visual AI. It helps you increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with the world's most intelligent test automation platform. But don't take my word for it, seeing is believing. So create your free account now by clicking on the link in the comment down below. And while you're there, why not like leave a comment yourself and subscribe to get alerted every time I release a new episode. First up, Automation News first news item that caught my eye was BrowserStack has acquired Nightwatch, so they're going to join forces to help simplify test automation for developers. So if you don't know, Nightwatch is a Node JS end to end automation framework and it's actually one of the fastest growing selenium based tools with I think around 1 million monthly npm installs. And Andre mentions that by partnering with BrowserStack it gives them the resources to really build for the future and scale Nightwatch to even greater heights. So this really does seem like a win win. Browser stack has supported open source projects before and they help infuse Nightwatch to give them a little more capital, do a little more development. So if you're invested in either one of these platforms, this is a great sign, especially for Nightwatch GS users. Next news item that came my way is 10 CICD pipeline anti patterns and how to Overcome them this article is really important because it goes over why it's so critical to understand your CICD pipelines. And if you're doing any sort of software development, you really need to stop focusing your efforts on treating your CICD pipelines as a first class citizen. This article goes into a bunch of different ways on how you can help implement and improve your CI CD pipelines. Has a bunch of good best practices and suggestions on how to make them even better. So definitely a good read. So definitely check that out in the comments down below. Also, I heard about A new tool that's actually now free. It's Speed Scale makes free API observability tool available to the public. So observability has been a big trend on this new show and a lot of times when I speak with engineers the past year they all brought up observability. So this is a great development that now vendors are starting to make available more open source tools or free available tools. I don't know if this is open source to help us with observability as well. So Speed Scale also plans in the future to include load generation capabilities to enable developers to run tests locally and this really goes with the overall goal. We've been seeing what companies want to shift left earlier in the development life cycle. This will help you actually develop APIs further left towards the developers that create them. So it'll make it more close to the metal while developers are developing they have these tools like Speed Scale to help them before actually goes even further into the CICD pipelines that we talked about earlier. And with more and more companies developing microservices API type infrastructure, I think tooling like this is really critical. So really great tool to see available now for free. So if you haven't checked it out, definitely check it out in the link below. Down below. Also when searching tools, I also noticed that Selenium Base if you do anything with Python and you like test automation, you definitely should check out Selenium Base. They actually released a new version, version 2.2 10. This release actually helps improve reliability and refreshes dependencies. If you're using Selenium Base, definitely something to be aware of. Give it a try to get that extra stability, especially if you are using Chrome. And speaking of APIs, are you looking for a last minute Christmas gift for this special tester in your life? Well, I just noticed the first draft of Test Web APIs by Mark Wintergham is now complete and available for purchase just in time for the holidays. So this was actually posted on LinkedIn by Mark. It's great to see that the first draft is fully complete now and if you click on that link in Mark's post, you'll notice that it takes you to the Manning meep. So you get access to this first draft right away and you'll get access to all the updates made in the finished ebook once it's complete as well. This book covers a lot of things like how to design and implement a web API testing strategy, how to set up test automation suites, and a whole bunch more. So as I mentioned, if you're looking for a last minute holiday gift for that special tester in your life. Definitely give this a look. I think it'd be a great stocking stuffer for sure. Another holiday gift that's sure to please that special tester in your life is a ticket to the Automation Guild 2022 event. It's the sixth annual online event dedicated 100% to helping you succeed with all types of end to end automation testing. So not just functional UI automation, we're also going to have topics on chaos engineering, security testing, performance testing, GitHub Actions, all types of automation that's going to help you develop software with better quality in the new year. And what's even better is you probably can get reimbursed for the for your ticket. And at the end of the year a lot of companies have extra money still hanging around in their education budget. So if you have money to spend that you need to spend by the end of the year, use it or lose it. This would be a great use for that as well. So I highly recommend you check out Automation Guild. Head on over to Automation Guild and check out our awesome lineup and check out some of our awesome speakers and topics that are going to be relevant to helping you accelerate your career in your automation efforts in the new year. So definitely check it out. Head on over to automationguild.com and register today. Next up performance is Server Liability news. So if you're into open source technology and you're into performance, you're probably very familiar with JMeter. But do you know GMeter just released a new version 5. 4 and here's a really quick article on the announcement of the Release of JMeter 5.42, how to Download it, and how it does not contain the log4j exploit that I told you about last time on the show. So thank you Naveen Kumar for that quick update on JMeter. Also last week we talked about how AWS went down the week before. Well it actually went down again last week and do you want to know why? Well I'm here to tell you and TechRadar has an article on why AWS went down last week and this outage affected Hulu PSN Twitch. The outage wasn't as long as last time. So TechRadar released this great write up on and it turns out the cause of the outage was due to network congestion triggered by AWS traffic engineering executed in response to congestion outside of its network. So how do you handle these major outages that we've seen with AWS over the past few weeks. So what am I go to resources for SRE type information is Evan Evan used to be a Evan actually used to be a hardcore automation engineer as well. So he has a very good testing background but he got into say reliability engineering a few years ago and he's been publishing a lot of great content around this. So if you're not following Evan, definitely give him a follow. And along those lines he created a really quick video on how he handles these types of issues when out with outages. So really timely video for Evan. So thank you Evan for all you do and definitely give him a follow. Like I said, Next up Security News. So normally this news item would be in my Follow the Money section, but I don't have the Follow the Money graphic loaded up on my new computer system. But just picture money raining down on us because this next company, Daz from Next Microsoft Team actually got 60 million to automate cloud security recently. So this investment is helping them with their AI driven products to be available probably in the first quarter of 2022. And the startup is focused on rapidly fixing cloud security issues with the help of automation and AI and doing so in a developer friendly manner. So it's going to help you address major issues with cloud security pitfalls like misconfiguration and other vulnerabilities that a lot of developers sometimes miss. So first time I heard of Daz but looks like a promising startup so definitely keep your eye on them. And like I said, automation security really hot topic. So as you can see, Follow the Money. This is a great opportunity to get involved if you're not involved already as well. You probably already heard a lot about log 4J, but what does it all mean? Well, I found a great resource for you. She Hacks Purple actually released a bunch of new information on log 4J. She has something on her blog post, but she also has a log 4J explained for software developers and AppSec folks on a YouTube channel as well that I think is going to be really helpful for you. So I have a link to this video and she hacks Purple's blog post as well to learn more about log 4J from a security expert on what it all means and what you could do to help fix it. All right, for links of everything of value we covered in this episode, head on over to Links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our awesome sponsor applitools by creating a free account using that link. Thank you everyone to help and support the show by clicking on the link and checking out applitools. So that's it for this episode of the Test Skill new show. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack pipeline automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.