Open Source Miracles : Semgrep

Semgrep is a lightweight static analysis for many languages. Find bug variants with patterns that look like source code. This Open Source tool can be used for SAST (Static Application Security Testing) by the Developers and Security Engineers.

Semgrep is a fast, open-source, static analysis tool that excels at expressing code standards — without complicated queries — and surfacing bugs early at editor, commit, and CI time. Precise rules look like the code you’re searching; no more traversing abstract syntax trees or wrestling with regexes.

Refer: https://github.com/returntocorp/semgrep

Top 10 must-know Kubernetes design patterns

 Top 10 must-know Kubernetes design patterns

Here are the must-know top 10 design patterns for beginners synthesized from the Kubernetes Patterns book. Getting familiar with these patterns will help you understand foundational Kubernetes concepts, which in turn will help you in discussions and when designing Kubernetes-based applications.

There are many important concepts in Kubernetes, but these are the most important ones to start with:

Source: Kubernetes Patterns

To help you understand, the patterns are organized into a few categories below, inspired by the Gang of Four’s design patterns.

Foundational patterns

These patterns represent the principles and best practices that containerized applications must comply with in order to become good cloud-native citizens. Regardless of the application’s nature, you should aim to follow these guidelines. Adhering to these principles will help ensure that your applications are suitable for automation on Kubernetes.

Health Probe pattern

Health Probe dictates that every container should implement specific APIs to help the platform observe and manage the application in the healthiest way possible. To be fully automatable, a cloud-native application must be highly observable by allowing its state to be inferred so that Kubernetes can detect whether the application is up and ready to serve requests. These observations influence the life-cycle management of Pods and the way traffic is routed to the application.

Predictable Demands pattern

Predictable Demands explains why every container should declare its resource profile and stay confined to the indicated resource requirements. The foundation of successful application deployment, management, and coexistence on a shared cloud environment is dependent on identifying and declaring the application’s resource requirements and runtime dependencies. This pattern describes how you should declare application requirements, whether they are hard runtime dependencies or resource requirements. Declaring your requirements is essential for Kubernetes to find the right place for your application within the cluster.

Automated Placement patterns

Automated Placement explains how to influence workload distribution in a multi-node cluster. Placement is the core function of the Kubernetes scheduler for assigning new Pods to nodes satisfying container resource requests and honoring scheduling policies. This pattern describes the principles of Kubernetes’ scheduling algorithm and the way to influence the placement decisions from the outside.

Structural patterns

Having good cloud-native containers is the first step, but not enough. Reusing containers and combining them into Pods to achieve the desired outcome is the next step. The patterns in this category are focused on structuring and organizing containers in a Pod to satisfy different use cases. The forces that affect containers in Pods result in these patterns.

Init Container pattern

Init Container introduces a separate life cycle for initialization-related tasks and the main application containers. Init Containers enable separation of concerns by providing a separate life cycle for initialization-related tasks distinct from the main application containers. This pattern introduces a fundamental Kubernetes concept that is used in many other patterns when initialization logic is required.

Sidecar patterns

Sidecar describes how to extend and enhance the functionality of a pre-existing container without changing it. This pattern is one of the fundamental container patterns that allows single-purpose containers to cooperate closely together.

Behavioral patterns

These patterns describe the life-cycle guarantees of the Pods ensured by the managing platform. Depending on the type of workload, a Pod might run until completion as a batch job or be scheduled to run periodically. It might run as a daemon service or singleton. Picking the right life-cycle management primitive will help you run a Pod with the desired guarantees.

Batch Job patterns

Batch Job describes how to run an isolated, atomic unit of work until completion. This pattern is suited for managing isolated atomic units of work in a distributed environment.

Stateful Service patterns

Stateful Service describes how to create and manage distributed stateful applications with Kubernetes. Such applications require features such as persistent identity, networking, storage, and ordinality. The StatefulSet primitive provides these building blocks with strong guarantees ideal for the management of stateful applications.

Service Discovery pattern

Service Discovery explains how clients can access and discover the instances that are providing application services. For this purpose, Kubernetes provides multiple mechanisms, depending on whether the service consumers and producers are located on or off the cluster.

Higher-level patterns

The patterns in this category are more complex and represent higher-level application management patterns. Some of the patterns here (such as Controller) are timeless, and Kubernetes itself is built on top of them.

Controller pattern

Controller is a pattern that actively monitors and maintains a set of Kubernetes resources in a desired state. The heart of Kubernetes itself consists of a fleet of controllers that regularly watch and reconcile the current state of applications with the declared target state. This pattern describes how to leverage this core concept for extending the platform for our own applications.

Operator pattern

An Operator is a Controller that uses a CustomResourceDefinitions to encapsulate operational knowledge for a specific application in an algorithmic and automated form. The Operator pattern allows us to extend the Controller pattern for more flexibility and greater expressiveness. There are an increasing number of Operators for Kubernetes, and this pattern is turning into the major form of operating complex distributed systems.

Summary

Today, Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration platform. It is jointly developed and supported by all major software companies and offered as a service by all of the major cloud providers. Kubernetes supports both Linux and Windows systems, plus all major programming languages. This platform can also orchestrate and automate stateless and stateful applications, batch jobs, periodic tasks, and serverless workloads. The patterns described here are the most commonly used ones from a broader set of patterns that come with Kubernetes as shown below.

Kubernetes Patters organized in different categories

Kubernetes is the new application portability layer and the common denominator among everybody on the cloud. If you are a software developer or architect, the odds are that Kubernetes will become part of your life in one form or another. Learning about the Kubernetes patterns described here will change the way you think about this platform. I believe that Kubernetes and the concepts originating from it will become as fundamental as object-oriented programming concepts.

The patterns here are an attempt to create the Gang of Four design patterns, but for container orchestration. Reading this article must not be the end, but the beginning of your Kubernetes journey. Happy kubectl-ing!

Reference: 

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/05/11/top-10-must-know-kubernetes-design-patterns/

https://k8spatterns.io/

https://github.com/k8spatterns/examples

Book Summaries: Scaling the Revenue Engine

Book Summaries: Scaling the Revenue Engine

Only 0.14 percent of the 60,000 software companies that received funding in the past decade have become unicorns (companies worth $1 billion or more).¹ Thirty percent of these lost their entire invested capital, and 70 percent failed to achieve projected ROI (in other words, they had an unsuccessful exit).² An article published in the Harvard Business Review noted that that 62 out of 100 venture capital (VC) funds the Kauffman Foundation invested in over 20 years failed to beat a small cap public index.³

For the founding tech company CEO or senior executive, whose common shares sit under the VC’s preferred shares, these statistics are crushing. Over the years, too many founders and senior execs have poured their sweat and struggle into companies that yielded little or no equity outcome.

If you are a VC-backed tech company CEO, you are highly motivated to beat the odds.

But how?

Valuation is tied to revenue growth. In most companies, the only path to a financially successful exit for CEOs and their teams is through rapid revenue acceleration. It is on behalf of tech startup CEOs — and to aid in their pursuit of rapid revenue acceleration — that I wrote this book.

The prevailing framework for revenue generation treats marketing, sales, customer success, and finance as separate domains with separate accountabilities and arm’s length handoffs. Success in this model hinges on hiring experienced domain experts at the top of each function and expecting cross-functional executive cooperation in driving revenue generation activity.

But, after two years of in-depth research into the revenue generation practices of a diverse array of early and mid-stage tech companies, along with a review of the secondary research and the inputs of world-class marketing and sales practitioners, a different framework emerges.

Revenue generation is achieved through coordinated activity across the enterprise. This begins with a clearly defined strategy and results in finely tuned acts of daily customer engagement along the entire prospect and customer journey.

Coordination must occur not just with top executives, but with managers and front line employees too — particularly at the cross-functional hand off points. The sum of all the strategies, plans, people, tools, workflows, and metrics that create this coordinated revenue generation activity is what I call the “revenue engine.”

Best practice revenue engines are built as whole systems, bounded by unit economics, with end-to-end workflows and data flows that support and orchestrate customer engagement. These metrics are tracked at every step and optimized via continuous improvement projects.

The revenue engine’s purpose is to maximize repeatable, scalable, ROI-positive revenue and profit growth. You drive ROI by maximizing your customer lifetime value (LTV) and minimizing customer acquisition cost (CAC). You drive growth by optimizing your pursuit of prospects and expansion spending from current customers, working within CAC boundaries.

Before we go further, it’s worth examining what we mean by “business model.” We tend to think of business models in terms of “media,” or “marketplace,” or “e-commerce,” or “B2C SaaS,” or “B2B SaaS (SMB / mid-market / enterprise).” But such descriptions leave opaque the key variable that differentiates them. At least for revenue engine purposes, a clearer way to describe business model is in reference to LTV:

• Very Low Customer LTV (<$500)
• Low Customer LTV ($501 — $10,000)
• Mid Customer LTV ($10,001 — $100,000)
• High Customer LTV ($100,001 — $500,000)
• Very High Customer LTV ($500,001+)

Using this approach, most media, marketplace, e-commerce and B2C SaaS businesses fit into the Very Low Customer LTV business model. Here, the scaling path is via online demand generation (e.g., SEO, SEM, digital marketing, viral social effects). A B2B SaaS company serving SMB customers, on the other hand, would likely fit into the Low Customer LTV business model, and may combine online demand generation with a high-velocity call center for fulfillment.

With the Very Large Customer LTV business model, a complex sales process, high-priced sales executives and multi-dimensional account based marketing initiatives prevail. As LTV grows, an expanding array of customer acquisition and expansion levers becomes viable.

The point is that revenue engine strategy must start with the math of the business. Customer LTV is the grand arbiter. In order to scale, it is generally recognized that the ratio of LTV / CAC should be 3 or greater, with CAC payback less than 18 months. This boundary condition establishes the revenue generation options available, given your business model:

The path to scaling revenue, then, is to move from highest-ROI customer acquisition tactics, to the next highest-ROI tactics, to the next, always exhausting the potential of each tactic before moving on. You keep adding tactics until the ROI pushes up against the LTV / CAC boundary. As you add these new tactics, you simultaneously work to further optimize the performance of existing ones.

Each component of the revenue engine must deliver peak performance for the other components to function properly. They all work together to efficiently and effectively carry the right buyers and users through the prospect and customer journey, from initial awareness through initial sale, launch and expansion.

The performance of your revenue engine depends on two factors: its design and its implementation. What engine have you designed? A Porsche or a Yugo? Even if it’s a Porsche — thoughtfully and carefully designed — have you kept it oiled, fit, and trim? Are you using the highest-performing fuel?

The Revenue Engine Framework

The revenue engine starts with what we call the “Bow Tie” — the graphic part of the revenue engine framework shown above that looks like a traditional bow tie. The customer engagement journey starts at Top of Funnel, then continues through Mid Funnel, and then to Bottom Funnel, leading to Closed Won, the “knot” on the Bow Tie. Subsequently, the journey continues on to Launch, Stabilize and Expand domains.

Sitting beneath the Bow Tie are four foundational layers. The base layer is Mission / Strategy, comprised of:

• Mission, vision, and values
• Customer segmentation
• Value proposition
• Competitive positioning
• Brand identity
• Product
• Pricing and packaging
• Prospect and customer journey
• Channel architecture

Sitting above Mission / Strategy are three more foundational layers: “Unit Economics / Financial Plan,” “Tools / Information Architecture,” and “Messaging Schema.”

These four foundational layers are the building blocks that support all the customer engagement activity that occurs along the Bow Tie. The Bow Tie customer engagement activity is performed by functions (product marketing, growth marketing, sales, and customer success) that coordinate people, tools, workflows, and metrics to accomplish the job.

Regardless of your business model, the revenue engine’s core components are consistent. The B2C E-commerce site’s customer traverses the Bow Tie in the same sequence as does the B2B SaaS enterprise customer. No matter the business model, the imperative is to design and implement an engine that is fit, trim, constantly measured, and continuously improving.

The Foundational Layers

To make your revenue engine perform like a Porsche, you first need to attend to the engine’s foundational layers. Let’s go through each, working from the bottom up.

Mission / Strategy Layer

Mission, Vision, and Values:

These comprise your essential canon, your “north star,” which guides purpose, end in mind, and norms. Without clarity here, you don’t even know if you’re cutting a path through the right forest.

Customer Segmentation:

Segmentation is vital. It’s the starting point for the entire revenue engine. Done well, you will have a tight definition of the specific attributes of your target market and ideal customer profile (ICP).

For each top priority segment, you will know the buyer and user personas, the specific needs and pain points addressed, and the pricing demand curve. These, of course, will evolve over time, so it makes sense for you to regularly reassess your segmentation research.

Value Proposition:

Your value proposition defines the core functional value attributes that strongly resonate to your top priority segments, and that you can claim as unique.

Competitive Positioning:

Competitive positioning accentuates the value drivers that resonate for your top priority segments. You call out those attributes for which you have a strong competitive advantage. You express these attributes in a way that elevates your brand while boxing in your competitors.

Brand Identity:

With clear segmentation, strong value proposition, and compelling competitive positioning, you are ready to express your brand identity in four dimensions:

• Brand as company
• Brand as product
• Brand as person (the human-like traits of your brand)
• Brand as symbol (logo, other iconography, typography, etc.)

Product:

Your product road map is strategy in motion. The mission of product development is to drive revenue growth. So it’s important to first understand the “true problem” you must solve in development. True problems include value problems, velocity problems, retention problems, chasm crossing problems, segment expansion problems, or customer expansion problems.

An outward-in approach works best, leading you to the new features that will successfully address your true problem and meet the needs of your top priority segments.

Pricing and Packaging:

Smart pricing is transformational. It starts with understanding the segment-specific pricing demand curve. Key success factors include de-risking the entry point (initial pricing), pricing to penetrate, building an expansion of customer spend into the price structure, and capturing cash up front where possible.

Prospect and Customer Journey:

It’s critical to map the prospect and customer journey. Each step in that journey is a “moment of truth,” where the presence and quality of your messaging will influence the decision to proceed. As such, this journey map becomes the foundation for smart step-specific messaging and sales workflows.

Channel Architecture:

Channel strategy can transform a business. The first step is to identify all possible paths (partner based or internal) to the customer. Some common paths include ISV, system integrator, reseller, distributor, co-marketer, field sales team, inside sales team, or online channels. Next, you must choose your paths of preference and the specific partners you seek to secure.

After that, you need to engage potential partners effectively, building steadily towards a partnership deal. This requires knowing partner deal best practices and the traps to avoid. Finally, once you have secured the right partnerships and have defined your own direct sales channels, you must manage these pathways to the customer with high fidelity.

Unit Economics / Financial Plan Layer

Unit economics:

Unit economics establish the boundaries of your business. To chase revenue without regard to the LTV / CAC viability parameters is both irrational and reckless. On the contrary, you must instrument your business end to end so that you have constant visibility into the LTV / CAC impacts of all activities and workflows.

Pricing, variable costs, channel choices, customer acquisition practices, retention and expansion practices, and retention performance all impact unit economics. Metrics dashboards from all workflows should be structured to roll up to summary LTV / CAC calculations.

Financial Plan:

Metrics dashboards should start at the lowest level workflows and build up, like a pyramid, to overview metrics for the business. At the top of the pyramid is the financial plan. Here, one should find GAAP financials, headcount schedules, and all key strategic and operational metrics, with trending. All should show both Plan and Actual.

In a perfect world, “actuals” are populated via automatic links to source repositories of data (accounting, contracting, billing, the CRM, and product systems).

Tools / Information Architecture Layer

To optimize revenue engine performance, you have assembled vendor tools. This marketing and sales tools stack must be set up such that data flows seamlessly across the system in support of your end-to-end workflows, always yielding one source of truth. The architecture of your data should:

• Define your customer hierarchy (parent/child/grandchild relationships)
• Define stages of the prospect and customer lifecycle
• Define other key factors (billing arrangements, sales territory rules, etc.)

Messaging Schema Layer

Your messaging schema is your detailed blueprint (and the corresponding messaging assets) to guide day-to-day messaging execution at every stage of the prospect and customer journey.

Inside your messaging schema are the statements that achieve:

• Vision lock (“I understand what you refer to and why it’s relevant to me”)
• Conviction lock (“I’m convinced”)
• Advocacy lock (“I’m a raving fan”)

If your business model includes sales development reps, account executives, and customer success managers, then the messaging schema includes six playbooks (otherwise, just the first the first three):

• Brand playbook (the style guide)
• Product marketing playbook (the key focus areas, themes, and positioning objectives; the collateral assets and publishing calendar)
• Growth marketing playbook (the campaign objectives, campaign plan and testing plan)
• Sales development playbook (personas, programs, use cases and plays)
• Account executives playbook (from “opportunity” to “closed won” plan, pitch deck, plays)
• Customer success playbook (programs and plays).

The Bow Tie

With these foundational layers in place, you can now execute workflows more effectively along the Bow Tie.

The Bow Tie tracks the prospect and customer journey, which is defined by the prospect’s and customer’s steps all the way from “disengaged” to “raving fan.” Each step is a moment of truth in which you seek maximum positive influence.

The following functional requirements are typical at different stages of the Bow Tie:

The Bow Tie is where the “rubber hits the road.” As you execute influence at every step along the prospect and customer journey in a highly disciplined way — time after time across all prospects and customers — small positive increments build up until they accumulate into a mountain of momentum.

Like the design, development, and production of a Porsche engine, it’s not easy. It takes a blueprint, and lots of hard, iterative work. But it’s worth it.

Grab the tools, and get going.

Why Listen to Me?

In 2007 I founded and built a tech company, which became, after a couple of name changes, Digital Air Strike. Over six hard-fought years, we took it from zero to $20M revenue and cash flow positive. It was way harder than anything I’d previously done. It was certainly harder than my previous job as president of Knight Ridder Digital, where we took revenue from $100M to $200M.

My experience taught me great respect for tech startup CEOs. Moreover, it was the impetus to start the company I now run: CEO Quest. At CEO Quest, we deliver tech CEOs the thing that I lacked — a roadmap for scaling. Today I’m privileged to work with a diverse group of CEOs, all outstanding individuals running rapidly scaling companies.

We obsessively seek to help our members make a steady drumbeat of sharper decisions, resulting in company acceleration. I’ve been able to bring my experiences to bear in a way that helps these great CEOs, which is a privilege. But, the learning path has been a two-way street. In the midst of my advice to them, I constantly find I learn much in return.

My desire to provide CEOs with the very best answers and ideas for company building at every stage of the journey led me to become a keen student of revenue engine best practices. Which, in turn, galvanized this research project, begun over 3 years ago.

I conducted deep research into the revenue generation practices of high-performing CEO Quest member companies — FiveStars, ClearCare, Healthline, Qubole, Lightbend, DispatchTrack, AcademixDirect and more.

Additionally, I completed in-depth research with non-members such as EventBrite (whose revenue engine is finely tuned and highly impressive). My thanks go out to these companies for giving me the access and visibility I needed into their structures, tools, workflows and daily practices.

Practitioners such as Matt Curl, VP Sales and Chris Luo, VP Marketing at FiveStars; Chris Aker, VP Sales at EventBrite; Bruce Cleveland, founding partner at Wildcat Ventures and executive director of the Traction Gap Institute; Tom Grubb, Chief Strategy Officer at Digital Pi; Scott Albro, CEO of the sales and marketing consultancy Topo; Andrea Tucker, a leading messaging expert and CEO of StrategyApplied; David Puglia, CMO of Jive Software; Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio; Evan Liang, CEO of LeanData; Paul Albright, CEO of Captora; Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend; and many others critically evaluated the framework and provided further insights. Bill Portelli, my partner at CEO Quest and the former founding CEO of CollabNet, has read every word and has made major contributions. Finally, I extend thanks to my trusted editor, Trish Heald — a ceaseless advocate for fit and trim writing.

These are just a few of the folks who’ve significantly contributed to this book. I am deeply indebted to them.

If you liked this article, please show your appreciation by “clapping” — click rapidly on the hands’ icon below — so that other people can find it. Thank you.

To view all chapters go here.

___________

1. Aileen Lee.“Welcome to the Unicorn Club, 2015: Learning from Billion Dollar Companies.” TechCrunch Web. 18 July 2015.
2. Carmen Nobel. “Why Companies Fail — and How Their Founders Bounce Back.” Working Knowledge Web. Harvard Business School, 7 March 2011.
3. Diane Mulcahy. “Six Myths about Venture Capitalists.” Harvard Business Review. May 2013.

Here are the eight best takeaways from Scaling the Revenue Engine:

1. Your average Lifetime Customer Value (LTV) should be 3x greater than your Average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• LTV Definition — LTV is the total net revenue (revenue minus cost of goods sold) from a set of customers over a set time period
• CAC Definition — CAC is all the marketing and sales costs divided by the number of new active customers in a set time period.

2. Rank your sales and marketing activities from highest ROI to lowest — start by optimizing and scaling the highest ROI activity before working on and optimizing the next highest ROI activity

3. Up-selling and retaining existing customers is always more efficient than winning new customers

4. You need to have management alignment on your priority customers: Key products, key verticals, size (SMB, MM, LE), buyer and user personas

5. A good SaaS value proposition can follow the outline below:

For (your target customers) who are dissatisfied with (current market alternative), our product is a (description of product category), that provides (compelling reason to buy), unlike (current alternatives)

6. Brand marketing’s goal is to improve “vision lock” whereby your customers are saying “I get what you do and why it’s relevant for me” — when done well this instantly communicates your value proposition while boxing in you competitors

7. SaaS marketing is organized into four groups and roles:

• Growth marketing: demand generation and acount based marketing, marketing reporting, SEM, events and tradeshows
• Product marketing: value proposition and messaging, website, SEO, content, sales enablement
• Marketing operations and technology: email operations, marketing integration with business tools and platforms, evaluating and integrating new MarTech
• Brand: Brand identity and design, media campaigns,

8. Switching SaaS providers is expensive and hard — if you can get users to experience business value from the “first mile” of your product, then you will beat competitors at the top of the funnel

• Ask yourself: Does a first time user instantly encounter a value creating service?
• To win the “first mile” product and marketing must be aligned and keep working on this until you can get a 50% close rate in 30 days

Links/References:

https://medium.com/ceoquest/chapter-1-revenue-engine-overview-bd7047a57b3

https://medium.com/@MarcUible/the-best-summary-of-scaling-the-revenue-engine-eb3028c40d59