wierdstuff

I donated recently to various charities via PayPal's Giving Fund. Despite their disclaimer, I was surprised to see that it consistently takes over three weeks to pay my chosen charity.

Is this your experience too? Why would PayPal need to keep the funds for so long before passing them along?

I work for a very large organization and we have many systems that live in a single region in AWS, us-east-1. While we use multi-AZ RDS instances and EC2 instances across multiple AZ's we don't have regular backups to another AWS region. If us-east-1 was obliterated, we would lose a significant number of mission-critical systems. My questions:

1. Is it safe to rely on AWS for DR across multiple AZs or must we plan for a whole region being obliterated? 2. Do you recommend any tools or practices that we can adopt to help us adopt a good-enough DR strategy? It would be acceptable if getting back online business took a week or a few.

In a recent thread, I noticed a sub-thread about SAFe (https://www.scaledagileframework.com). I work at a large organization and my division recently adopted SAFe. I find that it offers nothing original, costs our teams a lot of time on process overhead, neglects improving our engineering practices, and feels like Agile-on-steroids, which seems to me to be the antithesis of the Agile Manifesto.

Should I give SAFe a chance? Do any successful technology or other companies benefit from SAFe?

My organization runs a large Kubernetes deployment with many teams building microservices using Spring Boot. We don't have a standard base Java image so teams generally build their own. A quick survey of images shows that many of them range in size from 600-900MB, even though their built Spring app is only 500-100MB. (Many teams start with CentOS, run yum update, hardening, yum install Java, more yum update, etc.) To streamline our processes and make efficient use of our resources, we'd like to create a single image for Java 11 applications and would like to keep the base as small as possible.

So far, I have found a few popular Docker images for Java 11 including gcr.io/distroless/java:11 (195MB), adoptopenjdk/openjdk11:jre-11.0.4_11-alpine (141MB), and openjdk:11.0-jre-slim (204MB). I've also looked into using jlink but don't want to troubleshoot issues when we missed a module that some team uses.

What base Docker image do you use for running Java 11 microservices? Do you build your own? Any reasons we shouldn't just go with adoptopenjdk since it is the smallest?

Capital One Bank is ranked 10th on the list of largest banks in the United States by assets and has its name on the Capital One Arena in Washington D.C. So, as 2019 begins, why don't they use 2FA for user authentication? What other large banks still rely on username and password for authentication?