Blocking Bots Considered Harmful

lbi published on 2025-03-11

To Serve and Protect One of the key responsibilities of infrastructure teams is protecting services from unwanted traffic. We implement various mechanisms to counter synthetic HTTP requests: rate-limiting, geo-blocking, Web Application Firewalls, challenges, CAPTCHAs. We routinely analyze logs, respond to traffic spikes, and prevent scraping. We ensure our services are primarily accessed by humans and a limited group of trusted bots. The principle has always been simple: the web should be built for humans.

Why do we wait for search results?

lbi published on 2024-02-29

Searching digital data is a daily task in our lives, allowing us to navigate vast amounts of information.

It is both common and complex, involving a wide range of search engines, indexing methods, search algorithms, and implementations.

Typically, searches are performed remotely - on some server, database or a cloud service. We are accustomed to waiting for search results.

What if we could get search results instantly?

Thousands of AWS ECS applications stopped working due to a bug in RexRay-AWS interoperability

Author published on 2023-06-22

A silent change to the AWS infrastructure caused thousands of ECS applications to become unusable. Applications that relied on EBS-backed volumes suddenly lost access to their storage. Read how we dealt with this issue and how you can prevent similar problems in your infrastructure.

Expected changes in S3 ACL behavior with Terraform

Author published on 2023-05-07

At the end of April, AWS made changes to the default settings for S3 buckets. Newly created buckets have the ACL mechanism deactivated by default. This may cause errors for Terraform users who have not explicitly enabled ACLs on their buckets, or are configuring the buckets in the “old way”.

How to effectively process millions of vaccination registrations

lbi published on 2021-01-05

Soon, mass enrollment for vaccinations in Poland are supposed to start. They will be handled - among other channels - through the internet. How to effectively handle such influx of data?