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.

Continue reading “TLS 1.3 – It’s like Christmas”

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”