Log4j Security Alert, Angie Jones Leaving Test TGNS25

Hey, did you hear that Angie Jones is leaving the testing space? Want to know why AWS went down last week and do you use log 4j? If so, your software might be at risk. Find out 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 for the week of December 12th. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. This episode of the Test Skill News show is sponsored by the awesome folks at applitools. Applitools is the next generation test automation platform powered by visual AI. So it helps you to increase quality, accelerate delivery and reduce costs with what I think is 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 leave a comment and subscribe to get alerted every time I release a new episode. First up, Automation News. All right, I'm not gonna lie, I'm still a little bit in shock when I saw this on Twitter with Angie Jones announcing that she's not only leaving applitools, but it sounds like she's also doing something outside of the testing space. So I've always thought Angie Jones must get hit up all the time for all kinds of opportunities. So I'm shocked but not shocked that this is happening. So. But because she probably gets hit up all the time for all kinds of opportunities, this must be an awesome, awesome change for her. So I can't wait to hear what her new opportunity is. I'm sure it's going to be epic. And so Angie, thank you for all you've done for the community and I'm sure you will stick around because I know you're still going to be on the applitools board helping them with Test Automation University. So thank you again Angie for your automation awesomeness all these years. Another announcement that caught my attention is that Peter Thomas announced that he's starting Karate Lab, a startup that's going to help you accelerate the development of web APIs by unifying API design documentation and test automation. So if you've been using Karate DSL for a while, it has a lot ofLove in GitHub, over 5,000 stars. It's really grown over the years. So really excited by this announcement, by Peter going all in by starting the startup. I always get excited when I see entrepreneurs in the testing space. Definitely follow Peter Thomas if you're not already to find out all about this awesome new startup that he's running. So excited to see where you take this Peter, and thank you once again for your contributions to the testing space as well. Also, did you see that Kristin Jacob actually released a new book called the Complete Software Testers Concepts, Skills and Strategies for High Quality Testing Book. So if you look actually at the index of this book, if you click on the link and go to Amazon. So this book really is an essential guide for you if you're into testing. It covers all areas of testing and it's especially really helpful for people that are new to testing and also experienced testers. So if you actually look at the table of contents, I don't know why it's not coming up for me on Amazon, but it's very extensive, really quality stuff here and hopefully I'll be able to get Kristen back on the podcast to talk all about this book. So like I said, just in time for Christmas for some awesome stocking stuffers for that special tester in your life. So definitely grab a copy now. So as you know, I always talk about how automation should be used not just for UI functional automation, but any place in the software delivery life cycle that you can use a tool to help you automate a process. You definitely should. And so really excited about this next announcement. How Red Hat actually brings Ansible Automation to Microsoft Azure Cloud. And the goal of this really is to help make IT teams to bridge multiple IT environments using a common framework to automatically configure everything from operating systems to security platforms across a hybrid cloud computing environment. And if you know Ansible is one of the de facto standards for automating IT environment. So definitely check that out in the links down below. I was also surprised to see that up 9 bought API mockup and software testing firm Mocklab. If you don't know, mocklab is actually the folks that brought us the open source application program interface mocking tool that a lot of testers use, a lot of developers use called Wiremock. And UP9 sells tools for monitoring and testing cloud native systems once again a big trend. And so this really helps enhance up 9s already great offerings for API testing platform. And so this is going to help you use to mock APIs that simulate the interface for many external systems to support testing, troubleshooting and prototyping while having to rely on the real thing. So hot trend Cloud native tools to help you use testing cloud native apps and how companies like Up9 is now investing in tools to expand their current portfolio to help you with testing. So cool development there as well. So if you want to learn about these trends and all other trends and how you can really accelerate your automation career in the new year, you definitely should check out Automation Guild 2022. It's an online event dedicated 100% to helping you succeed. We're creating end to end Full Stack Automation. It's taking place February 7th to the 11th. It's the sixth annual event that I've done. We have a lot of great speakers and sessions going over things that are really going to help you in the new year, like API testing, Cypress Automation, Selenium Automation, but not just UI automation. We're also going to be covering the last two days of the event. Performance testing, security testing, Chaos engineering, all kinds of really essential tools, techniques, best practices and mindsets you're going to need to help you with your automation efforts. So if you haven't already, definitely check it out and register and hope to see you there. Next up, Performance and Reliability News so I actually started my career as a performance engineer, so I always get excited when I see news items around performance testing. So here's some really great tips from the trenches for performance testing from the folks from Dynatrace. It's a really good interview done by Andy Grabner and they just go over some really cool techniques on don't be afraid to automate yourself out of a job and some other philosophies that Mike used to help him become a performance engineer and rock star. So definitely check it out. I think it's going to be some valuable tips that you should definitely know about with any type of testing, especially performance testing. So if you do anything in technology, you probably were affected by last week's outage of aws. Even myself, My small business, all the tools I rely on were down because of AWS pretty much for the whole day. So you know AWS went down, but do you know why it went down? I have a really found a really great Write up on LinkedIn by Lloyd Watts on some of the reasons why it went down and why it occurred. I always like seeing how people analyze outages to see what could have been avoided or why it occurred. And someone asked me on Twitter why I thought this was a site reliability and performance issue. Because we rely on AWS or one cloud type of provider, we need some sort of failover, right? Because if it goes down, where's the redundancy? You should have some sort of thing that you fail over to so you have a critical service that's needed by other companies utilizing your cloud service or your server or your web service. I definitely think you need to have a rollover plan where if something goes down it elegantly goes over to something else so that you don't have these long outages. But that's just my opinion. I know it's very difficult to do, but here's a really good breakdown on one some of the reasons why AWS went down with a really great summary. So this is definitely a must read as well. And I have a link for this down in the links down below. Next up, Security news. So this probably affects a lot of teams. If you're using log 4J, there's a zero day exploit that was announced and this article actually goes as far as saying that it poses a grave threat to the Internet. And the article talks about how exploit code has been released for a serious code execution vulnerability in log 4J, which is an open source logging utility that that's used in countless apps, including those used by large enterprise organizations. Several websites reported last Thursday and it actually one of the first applications that showed up in was Minecraft. The issue can allow remote access to your computer through the servers you log into. This means any public server you go onto creates a risk of being hacked. So it's a huge, huge issue. So for the time being people should pay close attention to this vulnerability and its potential to trigger really high impact attacks against a wide variety of apps and servers. So something definitely keep your eye on for sure. And last is a Follow the Money segment GitHub Cybersecurity startup Git Guardian raised $44 million. So this article talks about how GitGuardian has announced that has raised 44 million in new funding to accelerate growth strategies, extend its secret detection solution to become a comprehensive code security platform. And the article really points out how developing and launching secure applications must be be a shared responsibility between dev sec and cloud ops. So as I mentioned, anytime you see money being thrown to a certain issue, it's probably a flag to say you should pay attention to this. Security is definitely something as a tester you need to know. It's not some other type of testing. It's I believe it's critical for any tester to know about. And just following companies getting investments like this just shows the importance of it that the market is seeing as well. All right, for links to everything of value we covered in this news episode, head on over to the links in the first comment down below. And while you're there, make sure to check out our sponsor applitools free account offer and discover how to take your automation testing to the next level by leveraging visual AI. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild News Show. I'm Joe and my mission is help you succeed with creating end to end full stack pipeline automation testing. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.