InfoQ – February 2025

Here are the articles I wrote for InfoQ in February 2025, covering everything from ransomware on Amazon S2 to the GLIDE Valkey client, from the benefits of ARM Instances to FerretDB v2.0.

How to Defend Amazon S3 Buckets from Ransomware Exploiting SSE-C Encryption

A new ransomware campaign, dubbed Codefinger, has been targeting Amazon S3 users by exploiting compromised AWS credentials to encrypt data using Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Keys (SSE-C). Attackers then demand ransom payments for the symmetric AES-256 keys required to decrypt the data. AWS has released recommendations to help users mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks on S3.

AWS Reduces Latency and Costs for Key/Value Datastores with AZ Affinity Routing and GLIDE Valkey

AWS recently introduced Availability Zone (AZ) awareness in version 1.2 of the open source Valkey General Language Independent Driver for Enterprise (GLIDE) client library. By implementing AZ affinity routing in the open source key/value datastore, developers can reduce latency and costs by directing requests to replicas within the same AZ as the client.

ClickHouse Reports 25% Performance Gain after Migrating Cloud Workloads to AWS ARM Instances

ClickHouse recently shared its migration strategy to AWS Graviton over the past six months, reporting a 25% performance improvement for end users. The engineering team outlines the steps taken to establish a performance baseline and transition the managed ClickHouse Cloud service to the new ARM deployment while handling large-scale production workloads.

FerretDB, an Open-Source Alternative to MongoDB, Releases Version 2.0

FerretDB has announced the first release candidate of version 2.0. Now powered by the recently released DocumentDB, FerretDB serves as an open-source alternative to MongoDB, bringing significant performance improvements, enhanced feature compatibility, vector search capabilities, and replication support.

How Locking, Saturation and CDN Network Issues Brought down Canva

The Canva engineering team recently published their post-mortem on the outage they experienced last November, detailing the API Gateway failure and the lessons learned during the incident.

Cloudflare Open Sources Documentation and Adopts Astro for Better Scalability

Cloudflare recently published an article detailing their upgrade of developer documentation by migrating from Hugo to the Astro ecosystem. All Cloudflare documentation is open source on GitHub, with opportunities for community contributions.