The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

Welcome to another dev tools video, in this video I use dev tools to break down how Tiktok website works to pull short-form content.  We will use therock as a subject. It is an interesting episode, enjoy   

In this episode of the backend engineering show, I explain the journey of an HTTP request that gets initiated from a click on a link. I discuss DNS, TCP, API Gateways, reverse proxies, load balancers, backend web servers, and much more. Become a Member on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join 🔥 Members Only Content https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMO_ML5xP23...

In this episode of the backend engineering show, I explain the journey of an HTTP request that gets initiated from a click on a link. I discuss DNS, TCP, API Gateways, reverse proxies, load balancers, backend web servers, and much more. Become a Member on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join 🔥 Members Only Content https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMO_ML5xP23...

Right after the latest patch log 4j 2.16, a new denial of service vulnerability surfaced on log4j resulting in a new 2.17 patch. Let us discuss. 0:00 log4dos 4:50 History of log4j fixes 15:20 All love to the open source maintainers Previous Backend Engineering show episode coverage of log4shell https://youtu.be/77XnEaWNups https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/security.html# Become a Member on YouT...

In this episode of the backend engineering show, we go through a deep dive to uncover the reason behind the outage on December 7th, 2021 Amazon outage. RCA https://aws.amazon.com/message/12721 All outage analysis videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhZ5--R42AM&list=PLQnljOFTspQXdkZLiYCCh_5RBP1-T-Rnx Get the Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course https://database.husseinnasser.com...

In this episode of the backend engineering show, we go through a deep dive to uncover the reason behind the outage on December 7th, 2021 Amazon outage. RCA https://aws.amazon.com/message/12721 All outage analysis videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhZ5--R42AM&list=PLQnljOFTspQXdkZLiYCCh_5RBP1-T-Rnx Get the Fundamentals of Database Engineering udemy course https://database.husseinnasser.com...

In this episode of the backend engineering show, I discuss the log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228 also known as log4shell) that took the Internet by storm. 0:00 Intro 1:00 log4j 5:30 How the attack started 11:00 Attack with DNS 17:00 Remote Code Execution 23:00 Remedy 31:00 Scanning References https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-44228 https://youtu.be/oC2PZB5D3Ys 🧑‍🏫 Courses I Teach https...

In this episode of the backend engineering show taken from my udemy Q&A I discuss the reasons behind Postgres HOT Optimization or heap only tuple. 

Postgresql database implements MVCC by creating a new row version for any update/delete/or insert. While this is a sound implementation to support concurrent transactions reading old version of the rows, it does have some side effects and this is what I want to discuss in this episode of the backend engineering show. 0:00 Intro 1:00 Postgres MVCC design 6:42 MVCC on other databases 11:15 Side-effe...

Head to https://database.husseinnasser.com to get a discount coupon for my introduction to database engineering.   In this video, I answer some of your questions on the Introduction to Database Engineering Course.

head to https://database.husseinnasser.com to get a discount coupon for my Introduction to Database Engineering course In this episode of the backend engineering show, I’ll discuss three instances where indexes can be useless and might add overhead to your operations. Let us discuss. 0:00 Intro 1:34 What is an Index? 4:00 The Cost of Indexes 6:40 Most values are the similar 13:00 WHERE UPPER(NAME)...

The cost of a long-running update transaction that eventually failed in Postgres (or any other database for that matter. In Postgres, any DML transaction touching a row creates a new version of that row. if the row is referenced in indexes, those need to be updated with the new tuple id as well. There are exceptions with optimization such as heap only tuples (HOT) where the index doesn’t need to b...

In this episode of the backend engineering show, I’ll discuss all HTTPS/TLS binding options in Microsoft IIS and also explain why every web server and reverse proxy should have some of these fine level control. Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:00 Require Server Name Indication (SNI) 5:00 Disable TLS 1.3 Over TCP 8:30 Disable Legacy TLS 10:00 Disable OCSP Stapling 12:00 Disable QUIC 14:30 Disable HTTP/2 17:30...

I get a lot of emails asking me to talk about graph databases, so I want to start researching them, but I wanted to give you guys the framework of how I think about any databases to defuse any “magic” that might be there. In this video, I discuss what constrains a database and how the use cases try to work around them. 0:00 Intro 1:50 What constrains a database? 4:00 Indexing Techniques 5:30 Stora...

Certificates contain useful metadata including the public key, domain name, signature, etc. However, the private key can be leaked which causes the certificate to be invalid/dangerous to keep around. In that particular situation, we need a mechanism to revoke certificates and that is what I’m going to discuss in this show. 0:00 Intro 0:30 Why Certificates 12:00 Certificates can go bad 14:50 Certif...

In this episode, I go through the Facebook detailed article regarding their October 4th, 2021 outage and discuss it in length. enjoy Facebook blog: https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/ 0:00 Introduction on Facebook Networking Architecture 12:00 The Cause of the Outage 17:00 What’s DNS 23:00 DNS Servers disabled BGP ads 27:00 Could the outage have been prevented?...

Quick summary of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage on Oct 4th 2021

In this episode I discuss my recent flight through Alaskan airlines and how they block certain services but allow only texting.

Spook.js is a new transient execution side channel attack which targets the Chrome web browser. We show that despite Google's attempts to mitigate Spectre by deploying Strict Site Isolation, information extraction via malicious JavaScript code is still possible in some cases. Resources https://www.spookjs.com/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-isolation Paper...

In this episode of the backend engineering show, I’ll go through the SSL Stripping attack, what caused it, what were the mitigations enforced to solve it, and why it is still a problem. 0:00 Intro 2:10 The Web Security Model 14:30 SSL Stripping Example 22:00 How to Solve SSL Stripping? 27:00 Limitations of HSTS 31:00 Summary Become a Member on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWK...

Let us take a moment to appreciate the TCP/IP design by discussing it.

The gRPC team just submitted a proposal to support HTTP/3. This is big news and we have been waiting for a long time for this. In this show, I’ll discuss why would you want gRPC, why gRPC picked HTTP/2, what is actually wrong with HTTP/2 and what HTTP/3 solves. And Finally, I’ll discuss what is wrong with HTTP/3 and pitfalls that you as gRPC user might run into. Let us discuss! 0:00 Intro 1:30 why...

I discuss keepalive in TCP and HTTP and its pros and cons 0:00 Intro 3:28 What is KeepAlive 8:30 TCP KeepAlive 10:30 Middleboxes and Single-Path TCP 16:30 Middle Boxes and Keepalive 19:30 The FTP KeepAlive trap 25:00 HTTP KeepAlive 30:00 What's a good keepalive timeout? https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/02/10/curl-ootw-keepalive-time/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1122#section-4.2.3.6 ht...

In this video I’ll illustrate how a proxy server works under the hood. I Will go through how connection establishment works without a proxy, with an HTTP proxy and finally with HTTPS proxy in tunnel mode and TLS termination mode. 0:00 Intro 1:00 Connection Establishment without a Proxy 5:00 Connection Establishment with an HTTP Proxy 15:22 Connection Establishment with an HTTPS Proxy (Tunnel mode)...

I discuss the concept of process forking, copy on write (COW) aka shadowing, and how Redis the in-memory database take advantage of that for asynchronous snapshotting,    https://redis.io/topics/persistence