Do you want to run your application with a large heap size or a small heap size? What is the right strategy? Which strategy is more expensive? Which is more performant? Watch this video to know more!
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This week, a significant portion of the Web fell over when on Tuesday, sites powered by Fastly were impacted by a massive outage that affected around 85% of the network.
The near-total collapse — which was quickly identified and remedied — took out sites including GitHub, Stack Overflow, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Reddit, Amazon, and CNN. Furthermore, it was all but impossible to express rage on Twitter because the server that handles the social network’s emojis was also affected.
This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.
– Nick Rockwell, Senior VP of Engineering and Infrastructure, Fastly Inc.
The incident occurred at around 10:00 UST (06:00 EST) and prompted mass “Error 503” messages. It was identified by Fastly in less than a minute and patched within an hour.
Initial analysis indicates that the whole episode was triggered by a single customer updating their settings (in a perfectly valid way) — you know those nightmares you have about clicking the wrong button and deleting the whole Web? Yeah, imagine being that person. The precise combination of settings triggered a bug in an update that had been missed in Fastly’s QA and had been sitting in production code since May 12th.
If you’ve ever visited a serious server center, you’ll know the kind of security they employ in defense of potential criminal attacks. The only center I’ve visited in person was inside a nuclear-proof bunker, involved multiple security checks, and I wasn’t even allowed into the really secure part. But it turns out, all the terrorists need to do to crash the global economy is open a CDN account and update their settings.
Fastly actually reacted far faster than previous CDN mass-outages by its competitors — one possible reason its share price soared this week. But it is still trapped in a cycle of competition in which fast and cheap are easily compared, and good is somewhat abstract…until it’s not.
Most of us feel like seasoned hands at the Web when the truth is we’re very early adopters. It will be a century or more before the Web is truly integrated into society. Still, we are building the foundations now, and future generations need those foundations to be robust. We need less focus on clawing back a few pennies, less focus on delivering sites 3 nanoseconds before a user opens their browser, and a greater focus on resilience.
Like everyone, I love eye-peelingly fast sites, and I’m more than happy to get a good deal, but personally, I don’t feel either of those things is worth waking up to an Error 503 on a site I’m responsible for.
Image via Unsplash.
The post Poll: Fast CDN, Cheap CDN, Good CDN, Pick Any One… first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Configuring your wireless network is one of the essential tasks to upkeep the security of your corporate wireless network.
At least among IT professionals, it is not a big secret how important it is for the Wi-Fi networks to be safe for any business. You can do a quick search on Google or skim through the social media or news feed to read about it. You will indeed read some interesting content about how vulnerable wireless networks are to attacks and data stealing.
Whenever we need to do performance testing, mostly it is the APIs that come to mind.
Testing the performance of an application by putting load on APIs or on servers and checking out various metrics or parameters falls under server-side performance testing.
Every designer has their own preferred strategy for collecting resources. Some pluck brushes, fonts, and templates from different “stock photo sites” and public marketplaces. Others collect graphics from swipe files and forums around the web.
The never-ending desire for themes, visual content, and graphical components has prompted an influx of “design packages” to appear around the web. These all-in-one bundles, ranging from Envato Elements to Elegant Themes, promise a selection of valuable creative content in exchange for a single fee or monthly subscription.
If you’ve been planning to seek out a few of these high-value subscriptions yourself, you’re in the right place! Today, we’re going to talk about some of the top designer resources available on the market.
1. Envato Elements
Probably the best-known of all the designer resource marketplaces, Envato Elements advertises itself as the unlimited creative subscription. On this website, you’ll be able to access around 54 million creative assets through a single subscription. There are endless resources to unlock here, ranging from templates for your graphics to video templates, audio, and stock photos.
Unlike most marketplaces, Envato gives you peace of mind by promising only the highest quality designs and graphics. Your content comes with quality assurance, and there are many PSD elements on the site, too, including stationery and web design templates, mock-ups, and more. Categories for your creative content include:
- Stock photos
- Video templates
- Music
- Sound effects
- Graphic templates
- Graphic designs
- Presentation templates
- Fonts
- Photos
- Web templates
- Add-ons
- CMS templates
- WordPress resources
- 3D content
Pricing: Pricing starts at only $16.50 per month, and this gives you unlimited access to everything on the site, including millions of digital assets and stock photos. You’ll also be able to use various courses and tutorials on the website too.
2. Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes is an all-in-one creative resource for website themes. The solution offers you access to some of the most popular WordPress themes worldwide.
You’ll also get access to a visual page builder as part of the kit. When you sign up for the Elegant Themes subscription, you get access to all of the resources within, including the Divi page builder and WordPress theme, Extra, Monarch, Bloom, and more. If you’re a site builder or work on building pages for clients, this is a must-have subscription.
Elegant themes are currently the go-to resource for more than 750,000 people. It’s also home to some of the highest-rated themes around. Features include:
- Divi WordPress page builder
- Endless WordPress themes
- Page editing tools
- Monarch, Bloom, and Extra
- Hundreds of website packs
- Lifetime premium support
- Unlimited website usage
You can either pay for yearly access with Elegant Themes or pay a one-off price for lifetime access. For most, the lifetime option is likely to be a pretty appealing one. You don’t have to worry about renewing your subscription this way.
3. Template Monster
Template Monster offers the “ONE” web development membership, perfect for creative professionals. The MonsterONE offering is a complete unlimited subscription for all of your creative needs, with access to unlimited downloads, new weekly items, and simple licensing. You also get plenty of support from the Template Monster Team.
A goldmine for anyone who needs to upgrade their selection of video and photo assets, graphic templates, HTML templates, or anything else, Template Monster is packed full of amazing resources for any project. You can also find new products from fresh contributors all the time, so the value of your membership is constantly increasing.
Features include:
- HTML templates
- Presentation templates
- CMS templates
- Graphic templates
- Video assets
- 3D models
- Audio assets
- WordPress themes and plugins
Pricing starts at a tiny $6.90 per month, with a slight discount if you pay yearly. The lowest-cost package gives you access to all of your graphic and design assets, but you won’t get any eCommerce or WordPress themes. However, if you upgrade to the all-in-one package at $14.95 per month, you get a more extensive range of resources.
4. Creative Market
Creative Market is another one of those amazing all-in-one environments for creatives and designers. This marketplace is supplied by thousands of independent artists from around the globe, each offering a host of top-quality designs and resources. You’ll find photos, graphics, templates, fonts, web themes, and countless other tools on the Creative Market.
If you’re looking for sheer size, it’s hard to find another company that competes with the Creative Market package. There are literally millions of ready-to-use products available, including Instagram templates, textures, and procreate brushes.
You’ll have access to 3D content for your immersive website designs and a host of purchasing products. Although there’s no “subscription model” per-se for this marketplace, you can invest in a credit plan that allows you to set how much you spend on your assets each month.
Features include:
- Millions of creative products
- Huge selection of independent designers
- Brushes, textures, templates
- Fonts and web content available
- Huge selection of stock photos
- Convenient credit plan
The individual purchasing plan is likely to appeal more to people just beginning to test Creative Market for the first time. However, if you want a subscription experience, we’d recommend using the credit plan to estimate how many credits you’ll need each month.
5. Adobe Stock
All web designers know Adobe. The chances are that no matter what kind of creative work you do, you’ve developed a few skills with an Adobe product, from Photoshop to Lightroom. Adobe Stock is also one of the leading platforms for images on any topic.
Although Adobe Stock doesn’t compete with other marketplaces in terms of versatility, it still stands out as one of the main resources for designers. There are hundreds of millions of stock images, videos, editorial content, and vectors. You can also access a premium collection of custom content and 3D resources too. The great thing about Adobe stock is that you can easily create your own libraries and download content into your Adobe software. Resources include:
- Stock photos
- Premium images
- 3D content
- Vectors and brushes
- Stock video footage
- Royalty-free templates
- Vector art and illustrations
- Stock music and audio
- Integration with Adobe software
Adobe Stock is a little pricier than some of the other marketplaces available today, but it’s still pretty impressive. You’ll pay around $29.99 per month for 10 assets per month, or you can access a full annual plan at $199.99 per month. The amount you pay will depend on the quality of the resources that you want to download.
6. Motion Elements
If Elegant Themes is the go-to resource for designers searching for WordPress themes and web design solutions, Motion Elements is the top choice for “motion” content. Here, you’ll find videos, SFX content, images, music, 3D solutions, and so much more.
Though it’s located in Asia, Motion Elements is available worldwide. The marketplace offers a monthly subscription plan wherever you can download unlimited products to suit your needs. There are tons of resources to choose from here, including After Effects elements, tools for Lottie, Premiere Pro, FCPX motion, DaVinci Resolve, and more.
Features include:
- After Effects elements
- Premier Pro resources
- FCPX Motion
- DaVinci Resolve
- Video and audio content
- Stock images
- SFX resources
- 3D content
Pricing starts at $16.50 per month for an unlimited annual plan. This means that you can download as much as you like without having to pay any more. There is a small discount if you pay for a full year of access in one go.
7. Creative Tim
Simple but effective, Creative Tim is an amazing resource for front-end and back-end content bundles. You get fully coded UI tools here that can help you create various mobile and web apps and a huge selection of dashboards and templates. If you’re the kind of designer who likes working on top of things like Bootstrap, React, Angular, Laravel, Node.js, and more, then Creative Tim has you covered.
This is one of the more technical creative resource packages that we’ve looked at so far, but it has a lot of value to offer. That’s probably why there are already more than 1.5 million people using the service. You can search through administration dashboards, UI kits, premium templates, free content, and design systems. Of course, everything is easy to access too. Features include:
- Frontend design technologies for endless platforms
- Soft design, light design, paper design, and more
- Bootstrap content
- Resources and third-party tools
- Complete design and web kits
- UI kits and templates
- Admin and dashboard templates
There’s a free version of Creative Tim available for beginners if you want to keep your costs low, but it’s generally much better to sign up for the premium subscription. You can also purchase kits and templates on a one-off basis if you prefer to start small. However, the best prices generally come from buying the bundles from Creative Tim’s subscription side.
8. Storyblocks
Similar in style to Motion Elements, Storyblocks is a creative design resource for any designer getting involved with the video world. This website is home to some of the best free-to-use videos around, with simple licensing available at a click. Aside from high-quality videos and templates, you also get audio and sound effects as part of your subscription and images or illustrations.
The unlimited access pass gives you all the resources you might want, from 4K and HD footage to music and sound effects, After Effects templates, and photos, vectors, or illustrations. You can also export a host of your own video projects with access to the Maker video editor, which allows you to make various changes to your custom video content. Features include:
- HD and 4K video footage
- After Effects Templates
- Sound Effects and Music
- Photos, Illustrations, and Vectors
- Unlimited video exports
- Video editor access
- Licensing support
The standard all-access plan from Storyblocks starts at a very affordable £39 per month for all of the content you might want. In addition, everything you get here is unlimited, so you don’t have to worry about running out of credits. There’s also an enterprise option available if you want to share access to resources with your team.
9. Motion Array
Motion Array is an all-in-one video creation platform for those with an eye for visual content. This fantastic resource center is packed full of valuable tools, from Da Vinci Resolve templates to Adobe Premier Pro Content. As part of your subscription payment, you’ll get endless presets, audio effects, plugins, video footage, tutorials, and more.
Though a little more expensive than some of the other premier subscription services on the market, Motion Array does offer a lot of content that you can’t get anywhere else. There’s an unlimited marketplace constantly updating with access to royalty-free footage, stock photos, music, and sound effects. You also get plugins built for Premiere Pro. Features include:
- Adobe Exchange elements
- Final Cut Pro and DaVinci resolve templates
- Royalty-free music and sound effects
- Stock footage and video
- Photos and images
- Time-saving integrations with your favorite apps
- Portfolio site builder
- Stock media requests
There’s a free subscription option for Motion Array, which you won’t find from most alternatives. This only gives you access to some basic stock photos and assets, but it’s a nice way to start. When you are ready to upgrade, you can pay $29.99 per month for the full stock media library, as well as requests for custom media assets and exclusive plugins.
Start Stocking Up on Designer Resources
As a designer or creative professional, keeping a constant stack of resources available is crucial to your ongoing productivity. Fortunately, there are tons of premium marketplaces out there today, making it easier to access everything you need.
Whether you’re looking for full UI kits and templates, or you want some free-to-use images and videos for the website content you’re creating, there’s something for everyone. With most monthly subscription services available at a highly affordable price, you could even sign up for multiple sites at once.
The post 9 Amazing Design-Resource Package Sites first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
A l’occasion de sa mise à jour mensuelle de juin 2021, Microsoft a publié des correctifs, entre autres, pour six vulnérabilités qui sont activement exploitées dans le cadre d’attaques ciblées.
Quatre de ces vulnérabilités (CVE-2021-31199, CVE-2021-31201, CVE-2021-31956 et …
Source de l’article sur CERT-FR
PGBouncer is a lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL. CockroachDB is a cloud-native SQL database for building global, scalable cloud services that survive disasters.
CockroachDB is a PostgreSQL wire compatible database, which means it aims to have tight compatibility with the PG ecosystem. Today, we’re going to wire PGBouncer to work with CockroachDB. This article is meant to scratch the surface of possibilities unblocked by PGBouncer with CockroachDB and not meant to be an in-depth overview. We’re currently researching this topic and will follow up with official docs on the proper architecture and sizing of PGBouncer and CockroachDB.
Introduction
I left Microsoft after 19 years, where I led teams that built system software for highly scalable cloud applications. This included leading development of the Microsoft Orleans framework from its inception at Microsoft Research until it became one of the most successful open-source projects within the .NET ecosystem. Orleans powers a number of large-scale Microsoft systems such as Xbox Game Services, Skype, Azure IoT, Azure ML, Azure Active Directory, and many more cloud services outside Microsoft. So if you’ve ever played online multiplayer games like Halo or Call of Duty, our team built much of the underlying infrastructure that supports it.
When I originally joined Orleans, cloud computing was still in its infancy. We had a 10,000-foot vision and not a single line of actual code. We needed to reimagine how cloud-scale applications should be coded because, at the time, available and high-performance scalable systems were only achievable by experts. And while everyone knew the cloud was coming, we had no idea how to build applications in a way that ensured they would be accessible and productive for millions of software engineers.
Le 25 mai 2021, VMware a publié un correctif pour la vulnérabilité CVE-2021-21985 affectant le greffon Virtual SAN Health Check qui est installé par défaut dans vCenter Server.
L’exploitation de cette vulnérabilité permet à un attaquant non authentifié d’exécuter du code arbitraire à …
Source de l’article sur CERT-FR
If you are feeling like me right now, you have mixed emotions about the world in general. And this is translating into a pretty distinct design trend that’s happening almost across the board: Websites aren’t using many images of people right now.
There are just too many questions about what is appropriate (mask, no mask? groups?), so the default answer seems to be using more “artless” options focusing on typography, graphical elements, and small animations.
Here’s what’s trending in design this month.…
1. No Photos Above the Scroll
As the world works to pull itself out of the pandemic, designers struggle with post-pandemic design elements, mainly photography.
Many brands and companies started to refresh their libraries with new imagery that included smaller groups and masked people. Now some parts of the world are pushing to reopen, making some of these images seem immediately dated.
What is a designer to do? First, you have to weigh keeping a fresh-looking design with a world that’s changing quickly right now.
That’s likely the big reason why so many website designs are launching without photos above the scroll. Instead, the hero areas are dominated by oversized typography, graphical elements, and small animations to grab attention.
There aren’t many images that contain people or real-life scenes.
This middle ground allows designers to create something interesting within some pretty distinct constraints while preventing a design from looking dated if local pandemic health guidelines change. (It’s a fine line to walk that may continue for some time to come.)
Each of these three sites does it differently, but with similar themes.
Michael Sumner uses bright color and subtle text animations to keep you look at the design. Clean lines and flowing graphical elements almost seem to counter the in-your-face color choice.
Gus uses a grid background – also with a nontraditional color palette – to draw attention. You keep looking at the design thanks to the animated “gus” on the screen. This small element is just enough to help users click deeper into the design.
Radian takes a different approach while also embracing the no photos design trend. With a lot of white space and clean fonts, the design uses simple scrolling logo boxes to help tell the company’s story.
2. Left Align Headline Dominates the Hero
This website design trend is a twofer of sorts: There are no photos above the scroll, and the main headlines are aligned left with dominance in the header area.
A left-aligned stack headline can be a striking and dominant element. It can have even more impact with the right words in the headline that entice and engage users to learn more. (If you use this design trend, it is imperative to spend time on the words to ensure that the design says something meaningful.)
Here’s where it gets tricky. To push the eye across the screen, you want the stacked headline not to extend all the way across. Most of the designs using this trend are going half to two-thirds across the screen.
Then the text size needs to be large enough so that the words don’t break awkwardly. (Sizing depends on how many words and letters you have to deal with.)
Finally, you want to stack lines of text to fall nicely into the main, first scroll of the design. If the headline sits too low, it might be distracting. The same is true of a headline that’s too close to the navigation or breaks funny on the scroll.
The lesson here is that stacking text in this manner is a fine art, takes just the right (and highly readable) typeface to pull off, and requires meaningful messaging.
Steadfast Collective does it with a simple headline and “pieces” of images that encourage scrolling.
Nebulab uses some imagery, but what you really see is the giant, two-deck headline. Note the clever use of “next big thing” in an oversized typeface.
#Yallbikeforkids uses an all-caps configuration with intentional underlines to bring attention to keywords. The stark black and white color palette with yellow accents is a bonus for this design and style.
3. Fun with Fonts
When you don’t have many images to work with and no faces to show, it leaves more room for typographic creativity.
From experimental typefaces to line styles to interesting weight combinations to completely artistic font treatments, designers are having a lot of fun in this area.
Here are three examples to crush on.
Mantic uses a fun dot-style experimental typeface for an AI tool with a futuristic feel. Using a type style that matches the tone and content of the design is key for making a technique like this really work wonders.
Ballistic Moon also uses a funky, experimental typeface for the intro to the online storybook adventure. What’s really nice about the use of the trend here is that the fun font has a distinct purpose and is used for only that use and is not scattered all over the design.
Kazuki Noda has fun with the letters of his name so that the same cool and majestic feel as the rest of the design. Look closely at the uber-blurred video background and phrases that pop into the hero area to describe the portfolio and art direction therein. It’s artful and fun.
Conclusion
There aren’t a lot of pictures to look at with website design projects this month. And that theme is at the heart of what’s trending right now. It will be interesting to see how long this continues in an uncertain world landscape.
What’s nice about these projects that aren’t so photo-heavy is that it forces designers to develop creative solutions and use other tools to help draw attention to the projects.
Designing within these types of constraints can seem a little overwhelming at first, but the best designers can run with this challenge to create something amazing. (And it can even feel freeing in some ways.) Good luck if you are working on one of these projects, and we hope these trends serve as a source of inspiration.
The post 3 Essential Design Trends, June 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
