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Category Archives: DevOps

No more AWS Access Keys?

It’s too common these days that I struggle to find solid stretches of time to think about things, so I tend to make progress on tech chores while I’m on holiday. This is an example… One of the things that has been on my mind is to follow AWS best practices, and try to eliminate […]

AWS MSK + Glue – Part One

Over December 2022 I got it into my head that I wanted my teams to skill up on the combination of Kafka and a Schema Register. There’s a ton of resources on introducing the use of Kafka, and some resources on using a Schema Registry, but I was not satisfied that there were any consolidated […]

Give me a shell and a place to stand…

I was thinking yesterday “hmm, I seem to have more AWS KMS keys than I’m actually using”. But how to find them when they are scattered across regions? AWS Cli to the rescue. A trivial bash script, and voila a list of KMS Key ARNs across my entire account: The only complicated part was remembering how to use jq to […]

Zookeeper on Raspberry Pi

Ok, yeah, I probably don’t really need a Zookeeper cluster running in the house, but there are a few Raspberry Pi’s around that are mostly idle — we use them for streaming music from our various devices to the speakers in some of the rooms.

AWS EC2 Instance Connect – A very neat trick

One of the problems with cloud security compared to on-premise is that there is more risk that someone unauthorised will be able to gain access to your EC2 linux instances via SSH. That’s one of the reasons I’m keen on server less solutions, various X-As-A-Service services, and on not opening up a server for access […]

SFTP on AWS

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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.