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Category Archives: Technology

Things Technological

No more AWS Access Keys?

Saturday, December 30, 2023

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 […]

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AWS MSK + Glue – Part One

Monday, January 2, 2023

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 […]

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Give me a shell and a place to stand…

Monday, January 2, 2023

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 […]

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Zookeeper on Raspberry Pi

Sunday, November 20, 2022

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.

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Wasabi and AWS S3 – A comparison

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Wasabi is a very interesting and compelling competitor for AWS S3, but also potentially a superb collaborator. What are Wasabi and S3 though? Stripping these services down to their barest bones, they are cloud-based, highly available and resilient object stores with effectively unlimited storage capacity. Digging a bit further, they are both key/value stores, which […]

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Lies, Damned Lies and Graphs

Saturday, April 11, 2020

It appears from discussion at Wikipedia that the catchphrase “lies, damned lies and statistics” is in fact unattributed. That’s a shame, because it’s a pretty important idea – statistics are very slippery, and in this time of COVID-19 I’m seeing how easily they can be misunderstood, and misused.

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AWS EC2 Instance Connect – A very neat trick

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

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 […]

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SFTP on AWS

Sunday, August 4, 2019

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 […]

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More Swarm Adventures

Thursday, March 7, 2019

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 […]

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Adventures with Docker Swarm

Saturday, February 16, 2019

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 […]

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