Category: Testing

Enhance the security of your website with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Web Application Firewall

Oracle recently introduced a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to further enhance and secure Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offerings. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure WAF is based on Oracle Zenedge and Oracle Dyn technologies. It inspects all traffic destined to your web application origin and identifies and blocks all malicious traffic. The WAF offers the following tools, which can be used on any website, regardless of where it is being hosted:

  • Origin management
  • Bot management
  • Access control
  • Over 250 robust protection rules that include the OWASP rulesets to protect against SQL injection, cross-site scripting, HTML injection, and more

In this post, I configure a set of access control WAF policies to a website. Access control defines explicit actions for requests that meet conditions based on URI, request headers, client IP address, or countries and regions.

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API Design Governance – Style Guides in Apiary

Much has been written on the design of ideal REST APIs, from Roy Fielding’s original description of HATEOAS interfaces, to much more practical approaches mirroring APIs rolled out by large technology companies. When working alone, I have a lot of freedom in how I design and build my APIs, and I always strive to design APIs which I would love to consume, based upon a number of undocumented, but strongly-held design intuitions. Collections are plurals; sub-objects are used sparingly, and mostly for practical considerations like payload size; HTTP status codes are used appropriately for particular types of errors and responses; etc.

When I work as part of a larger team, I often find that we end up building interfaces with slight inconsistencies, even if the design of them was based upon some documented high-level design principles. These inconsistencies impact the productivity of both internal and external developers which have to use these APIs, as they have to carefully parse the documentation to develop around the ‘quirks’ of the individual APIs.

Ironing out these inconsistencies can be achieved in a couple of ways, adopting a waterfall-style development model, in which each team is required to submit their detailed design specifications to an architecture council for review and sign-off; or putting a system in place which checks new API designs for consistency, and provides real-time feedback to API designers as they sketch out the interface. Oddly enough, the approach that I am going to discuss in this blog post is not the former; instead we are going to explore the Style Guide capabilities offered by Apiary.io, which allows us to develop rules governing API styles, which are assessed in real-time during API design.

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Apiary designed APIs tested using Dredd

APIs are becoming the window to the digital assets of the modern business. Well documented, well governed and easy to use APIs are key to their successful uptake, longevity and associated business success. Yes, I did say well documented. In this instance I am talking about the documentation required to describe the APIs capabilities in a manner that is meaningful for your ultimate audience, the “API Consumers”, however it will also provide the template for the API Developer to develop their code from. In the modern business climate, we probably don’t want to produce War and Peace, we simply want to take a minimum viable approach to our API documentation. But where would I find a capability that will simplify our task as API Designers, capture the design documentation for our APIs, allow us to do some initialise testing to validate the usefulness of our design before any code is cut, and also have the documentation ready for consumption by team members and interested parties using a standards based approach. Where indeed ! Look no further than Apiary.io. Continue reading “Apiary designed APIs tested using Dredd”