AWS

Managing firewalls, VLANs, and access control lists might be second nature in a traditional IT setting. But when it comes to AWS, the terminology and tools can seem foreign. This beginner’s guide aims to bridge that gap, translating AWS security concepts into the world of on-premise security you already know. Why AWS Security Matters AWS is a leading cloud provider, and its popularity, unfortunately, makes it an attractive target for cyberattacks. It’s essential to grasp the principles of AWS security to protect your valuable data and applications. Remember, AWS operates on a Shared Responsibility Model – they secure the cloud itself, while you’re responsible for securing your workloads within it. ...

In my current job, I’m one of the local resident Active Directory experts. Granted my knowledge is a little dated on the subject but I can still get around enough as needed. In order to perform testing, we need to spin up test environments for Active Directory and don’t want to maintain a long lived infrastructure for it. I was having to constantly spin these up by hand and thought there had to be a way to create a test active directory with Terraform. I was right! In addition to the active directory, I needed to be able to add member servers and I found this was all possible with Terraform. ...

As I’ve been working with Terraform more and more these days, I felt that it would be a good idea to move away from some of my other hacked together solutions in favor of Terraform. My next logical step was to focus on kubernetes management with terraform and github actions. This idea builds upon my previous Using Github to Manage Kubernetes article. As I started down this path, I realized that I needed a way to manage my state file. This is why I thought it was important to tackle the configuration I posted in Managing Your Terraform State File. ...

I started messing with GitHub Actions a little more in my Using GitHub to Manage Kubernetes post. I also did some tinkering around with Terraform in my How to Use Terraform to Deploy a Python Script to AWS Lambda post. As I started messing with Terraform even more, I realized how cool it would be to merge Terraform and GitHub Actions. As I started to do this, I ran into the problem of how to manage Terraform state files. This appears to be a rather common problem too. ...

I recently decided to deploy a Python script to AWS Lambda with Terraform. I had to create this Python code so that I could expose a simple API to the Internet. So that I didn’t have to maintain infrastructure, I figured the best approach was to deploy it as a Lambda function and API Gateway. Deploying as a Lambda and API Gateway sounded like a great way to go. While not maintaining infrastructure, I figured it was also a good idea to make the deployment easy. Me using Terraform to bundle everything was how I would make deployment easier. ...