August 2021 Summaries

Vespa has enhanced its security measures by extending support for mutually authenticated Transport Layer Security (mTLS) to include all cluster-internal communications, in addition to securing container endpoints. This is now fully available in Open Source Vespa, although Vespa Cloud customers already have it automatically configured. The implementation of mTLS ensures that only authenticated clients can access the endpoints, thereby improving overall application security by preventing unauthorized access. Vespa's mTLS setup involves two separate planes of TLS connectivity for HTTP(S) application container endpoints and Vespa-internal communication, encouraging the use of separate Certificate Authority (CA) signing entities for each. The blog post provides a sample application to demonstrate the configuration process, highlighting that mTLS requires version 7.441.3 or newer for Vespa installations. The sample application showcases how to configure mTLS, with Vespa's environment variable VESPA_TLS_CONFIG_FILE controlling internal communication and services.xml managing application container TLS for HTTPS, alongside verifying TLS configurations using curl commands.

During their summer internship at Vespa, Mathias Chunnoo and Ole-Magnus Vian Norum explored the Vespa search engine and developed two main projects: a "search-as-you-type" application and a "search-suggestion" application. The "search-as-you-type" app dynamically displays search results as users type, using n-grams and Vespa's nativeRank for efficient searching, while the "search-suggestion" app offers potential search terms based on document texts and previous user queries, leveraging AWS Lambda for processing query logs. The interns faced challenges such as decompressing logs with zstd-compression and ensuring scalability, which they overcame by implementing efficient search methods and using tools like AWS and Docker. They also worked on side projects, including a visualization of memory usage in Vespa Console, gaining experience in software development practices, information retrieval, and various technologies. The internship provided valuable insights into the workings of a software company and enhanced their collaborative and technical skills, leaving them with a desire to further explore Vespa's capabilities.