January 2016 Summaries

Netlify is now offering free SSL certificates to all its users, thanks to a partnership with Let's Encrypt. This move promotes security as a default and aims to make HTTPS more accessible to the web development community. To achieve this, Netlify has overcome technical challenges such as managing large volumes of certificates on a global network. With one click install, users can instantly get an SSL certificate, and Netlify will handle renewals automatically. The integration with Let's Encrypt is a significant step towards encrypting the majority of the web's traffic, making it easier for developers to secure their sites.

Netlify experienced a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against its infrastructure, starting on January 12, and causing regional downtime for sites hosted on the platform. The attacks were significant enough to cause several switches in data centers to become unresponsive, but Netlify's automated traffic director was able to route around the affected nodes. However, this highlighted an edge case in failover rules, which caused DNS servers to return empty records, leading to site downtime for up to 30 minutes. The platform experienced a second wave of attacks on January 12, with improved automatic rerouting but still regional downtime due to "flapping" edge nodes. Despite the outages, Netlify's system remained fast and responsive during the attacks, thanks to its capacity, and improvements made to failover systems as a result of the attack have reduced the risk of similar failures in the future.

A major DDoS attack hit Netlify's main load balancer in Chicago, but most sites remained unaffected due to their DNS setup. The issue was caused by using the root domain (e.g., `example.com`) instead of prefixing with `www`. This can lead to severe consequences, including breaking email and validation records. To mitigate this, Netlify recommends using a CNAME record pointing at `<yoursite>.netlify.com`, which allows for traffic direction around outages. However, using the root domain alone can cause issues, as it prevents DNS hosts from setting other records, such as A or AAAA records, on the apex domain. Some DNS hosts offer workarounds, like ALIAS records, to solve these limitations, but may impact precision in geographic lookups. The ideal setup is to use a canonical domain with a subdomain (e.g., `www.example.com`) and a DNS host that supports CNAME on the apex domain.

You can host a project built with Assemble on Netlify by installing Node.js, Grunt, and Assemble, then setting up a GitHub repository and connecting it to Netlify. This allows for continuous deployment of updates and changes, without manual deploying. To set up this process, you need to initialize the local directory as a Git repository, add files, commit, and push them to GitHub. Then, link your GitHub repository to Netlify, authorize access, select your repository, configure settings, build your site, and finally, wait for Netlify to do the rest.