Photos from a cold adventure with Ray Mears. — This April I spent ten days away in Finland, on a course run by Woodlore that taught us the skills needed to travel Earth’s Taiga biome. The Taiga, also known as the Boreal Forest, spans the Northern Hemisphere and is the second largest biome on Earth. …

Our road to enabling HSTS, inspired by the Yelp story. — Since October 2016, when we launched the new site, FT.com has only been available over https://. However, we still have many insecure links pointing to our site, leaving users at risk from session hijacking and protocol downgrade attacks. Over the past few months we’ve implemented the HTTP Strict Transport Security…

Making a request to the Financial Times. — This is an overview of how the Financial Times serves requests to www.ft.com. Starting with our domains, going all the way down to our Heroku applications, and through everything in between. Table of Contents Domain Name System Content Delivery Network Preflight Router Service Registry Applications Elasticsearch The End Result Domain Name System (DNS)

What is Brotli, and why should I care? — Brotli is a new-ish lossless compression algorithm developed by Google. Brotli was initially developed to decrease the size of transmissions of WOFF2 web fonts, and in that context was a continuation of the development of zopfli, which is a zlib-compatible implementation of the standard gzip and deflate specifications. So it’s…

Serverless redirects for legacy domains using Fastly, Terraform, and CircleCI. — Previously at the Financial Times we’ve made use of the Dyn HTTP redirect service to send traffic from domains and subdomains to www.ft.com, which has been working just fine for our legacy domains that never used TLS. However, there has been a number of recent tasks to redirect subdomains with…

Serverless log file analysis with web scale. — What is Fastly? Fastly is a content delivery network, powered by the Varnish HTTP Cache. It enables the Financial Times to deliver www.ft.com globally in under a second. What is Amazon Athena? Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Which means, for a practical…