A reasonably common scenario for a data-focussed consultancy is that a client may want to ship sensitive data from their on-premise or cloud environment to your AWS environment. There are a number of reasons that they may want to copy the data into your environment: it may be difficult for you to work with it in-situ, the tools you need may not be inside their environment, their may be no ingress to their data stores from outside, or they may want to provide an extract of data rather than the raw sources. These are all valid scenarios under which the simplest scenario is to be able to dump the sensitive data into an S3 bucket under your control.
Author: Robert Hook
More Swarm Adventures
I recently went back to refresh my understanding of the state of Docker networking (there’s been some changes over the last few years I wanted to be sure of), and so have been working through the excellent tutorial materials they have built, and spinning off some tutorial materials of my own demonstrating automation of the setups.
For your interest, here’s a Terraform project on AWS that sets up a Docker Swarm to play with – of course in reality we’d use ECS and EKS, but this is a fun exercise in infrastructure-as-code: https://github.com/TheBellman/terraform-aws-swarm
Adventures with Docker Swarm
It’s been around 3 years since I last worked with Docker in any seriousness. At that time, the state of networking and deployment was quite rudimentary, and there was still reliance on deploying load balancers and similar infrastructure. I was very impressed then, when revisiting the “getting started” tutorials, at how straight-forward and powerful Docker Swarm now is.
I’ve built a small implementation of those tutorials to illustrate the ease with which a full stack can be deployed.
Four Questions For Engineers
One way of looking at the art and science of software engineering is that it is a process of mapping human desires and wishes – the insides of peoples’ heads – onto a computer system. This is not a particularly novel idea, and it’s one that you are probably familiar with, but it’s an important one. Engagement with a client can be boiled down to a conversation wherein we discover the client’s needs and wishes, and then present an instantiation of our interpretation of what they have expressed. There is an awful lot of chance for error in this. Mapping the contents of their heads to vibrations in the air and symbols on paper or a screen is a lossy process. Our interpretation of what we hear or read is a lossy process. Implementing the ideas, dreams and wishes into an information system is a lossy process. It’s a wonder software ever gets built at all.
Cross-Account use of AWS CLI
The documentation around using the AWS CLI from an AWS EC2 instance on one account to access resources in another account are not great. The information is all there, somewhere, but it’s scattered across many places and to derive what you need from those sources you have to pretty well read all the sources. Two useful places to begin, but you will need to spiral out from, are:
However, I’ll try to give a summary and simple example here. This won’t include code or detailed instructions to set this up, although I hope to follow this up with a code demonstration expressed in Terraform.
Continue reading “Cross-Account use of AWS CLI”Oh no! The certificate has expired!
Hey kids! You know those SSL certificates you obtained and installed today?
Yeah, put a reminder in your calendar right now for a week before the expiry date, so you don’t get caught out.
Future you will thank you.
OpenSSL on HighSierra
Recently I finally got around to reading the excellent OpenSSL Cookbook from Ivan Risti? – you can grab a free copy via https://www.openssl.org/docs/ – and the first question in my mind was “what version of OpenSSL is already installed on my Mac”. A quick check showed it’s there pre-built in HighSierra in /usr/bin:
[code lang=text] $ /usr/bin/openssl version LibreSSL 2.2.7 [/code]
TLS 1.3 – It’s like Christmas
Via The Register I see that TLS 1.3 has finally rolled off the standards and committee draft assembly line. This is pretty big news, not least because we’ve been working with the current TLS 1.2 standard for almost a decade, and the defects in it have well and truly been discovered and exploited.
Bootstrapping AWS with Terraform and CodeCommit
A rough model that I’ve been working on and thinking about recently is for the AWS account (or accounts) be put together so that there’s a “bastion” or “bootstrap” instance that can be used to build out the rest of the environment. There is a certain chicken-and-egg around this, particularly if you want to use AWS resources and services to bootstrap this up.
I’m going to talk (at length) about a solution I’ve recently gotten sorted out. This has a certain number of pre-requisites that I’ll outline before getting into how it all hangs together. The key thing around this is to limit as far as possible any manual tinkering about, and script up as much as possible so that it is both repeatable and able to be exposed to standard sorts of code cutting practices.
One caveat around what I’m presenting – the Terraform state is stored locally to where we are running Terraform, which is not best practice. Ideally we’d be tucking it away in something like S3, which I will probably cover at a later point.
Continue reading “Bootstrapping AWS with Terraform and CodeCommit”Workshop, Mark II
I’ve moved my workshop to a new location, which has the advantage of security, lower cost, and a far more pleasant location. Also, apparently it’s a studio now, if only I could either monetise it or adopt the life of a penniless bohemian starving artist.
Continue reading “Workshop, Mark II”